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Fix Common Internet Explorer Problems With SF IE Restorator

Simon Mackie — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:00:23 +0000

Over time, an install of Internet Explorer can develop problems, which is when having a copy the SF IE Restorator tool from Seven Forums may come in handy. It’s a troubleshooting utility that you can use to try to automatically fix some of the most common IE issues.

Here’s a list of the fixes that you can apply using the tool:

Flush / Review DNS IP: If a bad DNS entry is cached, you can try flushing the cache to get rid of it.
Re-register IE: There are collections of routines that are stored until a program uses them. If these files are corrupt or out of date, they can cause problems with your computer. To fix this problem, re-register the files.
Reset IE: If the problem is caused by damaged or incompatible Internet Explorer settings or add-ons, you can resolve the problem by resetting Internet Explorer settings.
Reset Winsock: Most Internet connectivity problems arise out of corrupt Winsock settings. You will be able connect to the Internet, but the packets won’t transfer back and forth. Resetting Winsock can fix the issue.

SF IE Restorator can be downloaded from Seven Forums. It’s designed to work with IE8 on Windows 7. Other versions of Windows will only be supported if the .NET Framework 3.5 is installed.

Found a useful troubleshooting app? Share it in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Internet Explorer 9: A More Beautiful Web?

Simon Mackie — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:25:06 +0000

Microsoft today launched the beta of Internet Explorer 9, the latest version of its venerable browser. Over the years, IE has fallen behind its competitors in terms of raw speed and standards compliance. So has the new version done anything to make up that lost ground? I ran it through some benchmarking tools to find out.

The Tests

In order to test the browsers’ standards compliance, I used Acid3, which checks a browser’s ability with certain aspects of the web standards. The Acid3 test returns a score out of 100.

As you can see, while the IE9 beta is not quite as good as its main competitors in terms of standards compliance, its score of 95 is streets ahead of the old IE8, which only scored a lowly 20.

To test the speed of the browsers I used Kraken, Mozilla’s new JavaScript benchmarking tool, which attempts to test JavaScript performance using a series of tests that attempt to replicate realistic workloads. While benchmark tests results should always be taken with a pinch of salt as they can never exactly match real world conditions, they do at least provide an indicator of browser performance. The score returned by Kraken is the time it takes the browser to complete the tests, with a lower figure being better.

As you can see, IE9 is still lagging behind its competitors a little. However, it’s a vast improvement on the previous version. I haven’t included IE8 on this chart as when I tried to benchmark it, it wouldn’t make it through the Kraken tests without crashing. I did manage to get it to run through on an older Windows XP machine, and it scored an incredibly slow 348,056 ms. Even though the XP machine is slower than my test machine, that’s an order of magnitude worse than the new version, and shows just how much better IE9 is at handling complex JavaScript.

For a More Beautiful Web?

Microsoft’s tagline for the release of this new browser is, “Unleash a more beautiful web.” That might sound a bit overblown, but when you consider that IE’s market share is still hovering somewhere around 50 percent, the fact that the new release has much greater support for the newer web standards like HTML5 is significant.

Microsoft has obviously invested a lot of effort in getting IE up to scratch, and assuming it can get a reasonable proportion of the users of older versions of the browser to upgrade, IE9 should greatly accelerate the development of more powerful, feature-packed web apps. That’s because developers will be much more likely to develop sites that rely on complex JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3 if they know those features are broadly supported in the browser market. I’d hope that Microsoft would consider releasing IE9 for older versions of Windows, too, as that will help to ensure that a greater percentage of users upgrade.

While it would be very hard to argue that IE9 is superior to any of its competitors, it’s now in the same ballpark, at least. Microsoft has now joined the new browser wars: wars that are being fought on speed and capability with the newer web standards. That’s good news for everyone.

You can download the beta of IE9 from microsoft.com; it’s currently only available for Windows 7 and Vista.

Let us know what you think of IE9 in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps

The Future of Browsers

Simon Mackie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:35:09 +0000

Last week, Mozilla celebrated Firefox’s fifth birthday. While it may seem hard to believe that it’s really been that long since Firefox first burst onto the browser scene, it’s equally hard to understate just how important it has been for the development of the web. While IE is still the most popular browser, according to Net Applications, the browser market is much healthier than it was five years ago. Several major desktop and mobile browsers are in active development, notably IE, Firefox, the WebKit-based Apple Safari and Google Chrome, and Opera. The intense competition among these vendors is causing a climate of innovation, and the start of a new browser war.

So what might the future hold for browsers? In my latest Long View over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, “What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?“, with comments from Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) and Bruce Lawson (Opera), I look at where this new browser war might lead, and the battlefields that it will be fought on: innovative new technologies, browser performance, security and privacy, and the ability to browse from multiple, diverse devices.

How do you think browsers will change over the next five years?

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RoboForm Comes to Chrome — Sort of

Scott Blitstein — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:00:53 +0000

It’s an exciting time to be a web worker, what with all of the great browser choices we now have available to us. Firefox may be the preferred browser for many of us, but Chrome, Safari and Opera are also compelling options.

Despite these choices, I’ve pretty much been locked into either Firefox or Internet Explorer because of my reliance on the RoboForm password manager, which is only compatible with those browsers. The lack of Google Chrome support has been particularly frustrating to me. I’m impressed with the speed and resource management of Chrome, but without the easy access to my passwords that I’ve grown accustomed to, it hasn’t been an option for serious consideration. But a couple of recent announcments by Siber, the maker of Roboform, are changing that.

If you’re an adventurous soul, you may want to take a look at a public release of a Chromium build with an adapter that makes it compatible with the latest versions of RoboForm. Chromium is the open-source project that is the basis for the Google Chrome browser.

It’s an alpha build, and my browser is too important to me to risk using it for my day-to-day work quite yet — but it’s a terribly exciting development and shows the first real movement I’ve seen towards a port.

A more feasible option for most folks is to use the new RoboForm Bookmarklet which, in conjunction with the RoboForm Online service, provides access to your passwords from alternative browsers or on computers without a RoboForm installation. Drag the bookmarklet up to your toolbar and after logging in to your online account you’ll have access to all of your stored passwords.

The functionality of the bookmarklet is good, but isn’t yet a replacement for the full installed product. I find that the login expires quickly, requiring me to log in to my account frequently throughout the day, even after requesting it to remain active. I also miss the ability to create new logins on the fly, an option not available from within the bookmarklet.

On the plus side, one of the things I’ve always appreciated about RoboForm is the ability to maintain multiple password sets for a site and am glad to see that this feature is retained with bookmarklet access.

Both of these projects are still in their early stages, but really represent big steps toward cross-browser, cross-platform availability of a single password set.

How do you manage your passwords?

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Microsoft and IE: Getting Desperate?

Simon Mackie — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:00:40 +0000

Microsoft’s latest attempt to get people to use Internet Explorer is a competition, being run by Microsoft Australia, that promises $10,000AUD ($8,000) to the winner. In order to win, you need to “upgrade” your browser from the “old” Firefox and follow clues to find a page that’s only viewable for IE users, ironically harking back to the bad old days when web sites were “optimized” for either IE or Netscape and not accessible to users of the other browser. Is this competition — which is highly unlikely to make anyone switch to IE long-term — a sign of desperation in the face of diminishing market share for the once-dominant browser vendor?

This Microsoft browser comparison chart made me chuckle. Apparently, IE is superior to both Chrome and Firefox in terms of ease of use, privacy and security, and matches them on speed and standards compliance.

The truth is that even though IE8 is a vastly improved browser over IE7, it’s still lagging behind its competitors in terms of speed, customizability and standards compliance (see my post on Opera 10 for tests on all the major browsers for JavaScript perfomance and standards compliance), and so users continue to switch to the alternatives. In visits to this blog, for example, IE has slipped from 34 percent of visitors to 28 percent over the past year, and that’s despite the release of IE8 in the meantime. Unless Microsoft can release an improved browser, gimmicks like this competition will not get savvy users to switch to an inferior product and its market share will continue to slide.

If you prefer IE, let us know why in the comments.

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Surf Canyon: Targeted Search Extension for Firefox Gets an Update

Samuel Dean — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:00:37 +0000

As Simon noted in his review of the Search Site Firefox extension, some browser extensions can really help streamline online searching. One of the best extensions for this is Surf Canyon, which has just come out in a new version, 2.0.4. It’s only a tiny 33K extension, but it can be a great help in steering you quickly to the most relevant information on any search topic. Here’s how it works.

Surf Canyon is available as both a Firefox and Internet Explorer extension. You can use it to get more relevant results when searching on Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Lexis Web and MSN Live Search.

In the screenshot above, note that there are small bullseyes to the right of the Google search results shown. With Surf Canyon, you click on these bullseyes to get recommendations for more relevant search results for you. Surf Canyon have written a good post that describes the process for drilling down its relevancy recommendations. The example focuses on a classic search engine context problem, which is, in this case, whether a searcher looking for “dolphins” means actual dolphins or the football team.

If you are searching on “dolphins” in Surf Canyon, and you subsequently click on a bullseye for the Dolphins football team, the extension then knows what your original intent was. The Surf Canyon client-side application communicates with a centralized server where relevancy algorithms are hosted and maintained, so as you continue to click on bullseyes for dolphin-related results, it gets better and better at knowing what types of results you want. The best way to understand how good the extension is at this is to try it.

The new version of Surf Canyon includes several useful features that I’ve been trying out today. The most useful of these is a new top-of-page collection of search refinement suggestions, as seen below for a search on “dolphins.” The extension is smart enough to know that dolphins are intelligent, and that I may be interested in this aspect of them, and it also draws a relationship between dolphins and whales, in addition to other connections it makes. Across a whole lot of searches, I think I’ll find this useful, especially if I’m searching for something that I don’t know a lot about.

In addition to the suggestions, the new version adds the features summarized here. One handy addition (for Firefox users only) is that a bullseye status bar icon in the browser allows you to instantly turn Surf Canyon’s recommendations on and off.

Most of us spend a lot of time searching online. If you do, I recommend this extension.

What browser extensions do you use?

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Foxmarks Adds Cross Browser Sync for IE and Safari

Judi Sohn — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:07:03 +0000

We’re living in a cross-platform and cross-browser world. Most web workers aren’t one-browser-fits-all.

I have two computers: a MacBook Pro and an iMac. Even though Firefox 3 is my default browser on both computers, I regularly have at least three different browsers open to do what I need to do in my work day. Certain sites only work in Internet Explorer, while others simply behave better in Chrome or Safari. Other sites are bookmarked in Safari solely for the iPhone.

Foxmarks has long been the free go-to utility for syncing bookmarks between multiple instances of Firefox. I’ve long preferred Foxmarks to Mozilla Weave which, while it syncs more information between Firefox browsers, I’ve found to be less reliable. For non-Firefox browsers, I’ve had to use my.foxmarks.com to access sites using IE or Safari that are bookmarked in Firefox.

No more. Last week, Foxmarks introduced syncing for both IE and Safari (I can’t wait for a Chrome version).

How does it sync browsers that don’t support plug-ins the way Firefox does?

On the Mac, it installs a new system preference:

On the PC, it’s a little application that can also sit in the system tray:

This solution is not quite as elegant as it is for Firefox, where it can work entirely in the browser without requiring any additional system resources. On the other hand, you don’t have to wait for IE or Safari to launch to sync bookmarks, like you do with Firefox.

After a few hours of testing, I’m quite satisfied. Make a change to bookmarks in one browser, and within seconds the files are synced in all other browsers, regardless of the platform. I did notice that the Firefox “Bookmarks Toolbar” is renamed to “Links” during the sync and is accessible through a drop-down menu in the upper right corner.

Limitations:

It does not appear that Foxmark’s new password syncing is available outside of Firefox. For site password syncing that is available cross-browser, I would highly recommend 1Password on the Mac (works in both Firefox and Safari) and RoboForm on the PC (works in IE and Firefox, among others, not including Chrome).
On the Mac, it only works in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
On the PC, it only works in IE 6 & 7 and it’s a bit buggier than the Mac/Firefox syncing. It did crash IE once for me. Of all the browsers I use, I’m in IE the least so this is not an issue for me. But if IE is your mainstay browser, perhaps because a work-related application requires it, you should probably hold off on Foxmarks.

Have you tried Foxmarks? What tools do you use for browser bookmark syncing?

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Which Browsers Matter?

Mike Gunderloy — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:04:05 +0000

Now that Internet Explorer 8 is in serious beta, web workers who develop or design web pages are faced, once again, with a knotty question: which browsers (and which versions) do you design for? The basic problem is understanding your market: browser usage statistics are unreliable, but they all seem to agree that the market belongs to Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smidge of Safari thrown in (Opera advocates, I know you’re out there, but with a usage number rarely cracking 1% in any survey, it’s tough to justify spending time on Opera-specific testing).

Even within those broad categories, though, the market is more fragmented than ever before: Firefox 2 and 3 are both in substantial use, as are IE6 and IE7. It’s worse in some markets; I have one customer who requires IE5.5 compatibility due to restrictions on browser version at a government agency. Some people want to address this by campaigning against IE6, but that still seems quixotic to me. With no end in sight to new versions, and intense competition in the browser market, it seems like this problem will only keep getting worse.

If you create web pages, what’s your testing strategy? What browsers do you consider important enough to check?

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