After wrestling for some years with one of the worst browsers ever made, I’m no longer prepared to support IE6 in any way, shape or form. The time has come to say goodbye to the long hours, stylesheet hacks and workarounds so that websites look and work as intended. More »
Windows XP has a tendency to sprinkle lots of hidden “thumbs.db” files all over your hard drive, specifically in folders that have images of any kind. More »
With the release of Microsoft Vista a couple of years ago, Microsoft introduced six new cleartype typefaces. More »
Looking at the latest browser stats shows us that Firefox has recently overtaken Internet Explorer as the preferred browser for the majority of web users. The last four years indicate a steady decline in market share for Microsoft’s once-dominant but mediocre “gift” to the world: IE 2005: 72.5% Firefox 2005: 18. More »
I’ve recently had to convert a Word 2007 document, sent to me by someone who wasn’t savvy enough to realise that “docx” documents are incompatible with earlier versions of Microsoft products. While Microsoft offer a downloadable 28MB file converter, there’s a much better way of getting around their backward compatibility issues. More »
A clever bloke by the name of Yousif Al Saif has come up with a way of having multiple versions of IE running on your windows workstation. Handy for us poor sods who still have to support what is probably the worst standards-compliant browser ever made. More »
I got spammed by the giant of Redmond a couple of weeks ago, offering me “cool prizes”, just to search the web using their struggling search engine. From: <microsoftlive@sendemedia.com> To: <xxx@lutrov. More »
Microsoft recently announced that it’s willing to pay people money for using their crappy search engine, provided the people buy something, and provided the people live in America. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Microsoft aren’t after Google, they’re actually after Yahoo. More »
A fake band with its own fake groupie in an embarrassing internal video promo which aims to get a corporation to eat its own dog food: You’ll love the lyrics, I promise. Not to mention the enthusiastic jumps into the air, complete with freeze-frames. More »
I just noticed that Live now advertise on Google. How peculiar that a Google’s competitor would pay money to Google, just to have a user redirected back to its own search engine results page. More »
Good news for standards based developers. Microsoft have now decided that IE8 will comply with web standards by default. More »
I’d like you to hover your mouse pointer over the mugshot on the left. What does the tooltip text say? Ivan’s blog posts You are using a stupid browser If it’s the former, congratulations on using a smart browser. More »
Has any other Windows XP user had their file explorer stubbornly refuse to remember their custom folder settings and revert to pretty “icon” view instead? More »
The other day I was looking at our website’s stats to get an idea of search engine referral ratios. While I fully expected Google to win comprehensively, the actual figures based on the last 10,000 page views were certainly an eye-opener: ALLTHEWEB: 0.13% ALTAVISTA: 0.24% AOL: 0.12% GOOGLE: 95.05% LIVE/MSN: 3.5% YAHOO: 0.95% OTHERS: 0. More »
While the popularity race between the new major versions of Firefox and IE is on (and Firefox winning), we can honestly say from personal experience that while the IE team has done a very good job in bringing their browser into the current century, it has managed to do so More »
One of our readers commented on a negative side-effect of our disk cleaning tip we posted last week. It seems that if you use our batch file to clean your hard disk, your Microsoft Office applications may no longer work correctly. More »
Microsoft have done a number of counter-intuitive things over the years in the quest of “improved usability” and after the pesky “office assistant” and the distracting “auto spelling and grammar checker”, the “personalized menus” introduced in Office 2000 are often the very next thing many advanced users turn off before More »
It’s been over three months since the launch of Windows Live, Microsoft’s klutzy “Google killer” project. Like Google, Windows Live is offering “personalisation of your homepage”, with news, weather, mail, and (apparently) more. More »
Like most webmasters, we record website statistical information to help us determine who our regular readers are and what they’re reading. More »
I’ve admired the work of Danny Katz for quite a while now. Amongst other things, he writes some wonderfully quirky and humorous columns for “The Age”, here in Melbourne. More »