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Firefox Tab Previews on Windows 7

Ian — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:55:53 +0000

Users of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 will likely have noticed that the new Taskbar enables users to see previews of all the browser tabs currently open. Whilst this is not a feature that everyone will appreciate some may find it useful because it enable finding a particular tab very quick, of course if you have a lot of tabs this may just be more clutter.

Version 3.6 of Mozilla Firefox has just shipped with some great new tab preview features, however most of these are turned off by default. To find and enable the new features you need to get to the advanced configuration page by typing about:config into the address bar. This will produce a warning page notifying you that you should only continue if you are sure of what you are doing, once you have promised to be careful type the word previews into the filter box to find the relevant settings.

Firefox tab preview options

There are three options available to be turned on:

browser.allTabs.previews
This option adds an extra button to the right hand end of the tab bar which pops up a list of tabs with previews and a search box.
browser.ctrlTab.previews
The ctrlTab option changes + behaviour to use a style new tab preview screen when you have 3 or more tabs open.
browser.taskbar.previews.enable
The taskbar option enables Windows 7 taskbar tab previews.

To enable any of the options simply double click on it and the value will change to true. Additionally the line will be made bold to indicate that the value has been changed from it’s default setting.

Video for every browser

Ian — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:01:08 +0000

The latest browser releases from most major players (except Microsoft of course) now support the new HTML 5 video tag, including Firefox 3.5 and Safari 3&4 which means that video just works without requiring a plugin. Of course not everyone is running these browsers (yet) so what is required is a neat way of using these new features where possible and yet gracefully fall back to using Flash, Quicktime or Windows Media in the event the features are not available.

Ideally of course you want all this to happen without browser sniffing or other such nastiness that will just store up problems for the future. Well the good news is that all this is possible using HTML without any Javascript. How? Check out Kroc Camen’s Video For Everybody page for all the gory details.

Here is an example using the source code from camendesign.

Download Video: High Quality “MP4” | Low Quality “OGG”

Windows 2008 Terminal Server Web Interface, how not to.

Ian — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:56:42 +0000

In response to a question from my boss, I just wrote this email which summarises my opinion of the new Web Interface that Microsoft have included with Terminal Server on Windows 2008:

Err, it won’t work on a Mac, or Linux, or Solaris, or xxBSD, or Windows with Opera, or Chrome, or Firefox, or Safari, or anything except Internet Explorer.

I also experienced a problem using it from my home machine which is just running regular Windows XP Pro/SP3 which meant that I couldn’t enable the required ActiveX object without arsing around with the registry. The ActiveX object was there but disabled and hidden.

So my summary would be that if you happen to run IE on Vista SP1 then it will probably all be OK, otherwise there is a moderate chance that it will not work.

If you get the impression I don’t like the web interface you would be right