iantomkins.com » microsoft

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.

Windows Live Messenger 2009 on XP 64

Ian — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:01:09 +0000

On my laptop I have been running XP 64 bit edition for some time, by and large this presents no problem and allows me to successfully use all of the 4G of memory installed. However every now and then I come up against the odd road block because it is something of a second class citizen in terms of the support it receives from Microsoft and other vendors.

A good example of this is that when trying to install the latest release of Windows Live Messenger (because it supports multiple sign-ins, at last) I discovered that the installer and web site say it is only supported on XP 32bit. However it turns out that the only bit that is really not supported is the Windows Live Essentials installer that tries to ram all the other Windows Live / MSN features down your throat.

In short you can download the various cab files required for each component and install them by hand, instructions and links to the components are here. Hurrah!

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