Stupid browser, V7

I’d like you to hover your mouse pointer over the mugshot on the left. What does the tooltip text say?

1. Ivan’s blog posts
2. You are using a stupid browser

If it’s the former, congratulations on using a smart browser. If it’s the latter, then I know you’re using Internet Explorer, even though you might be on the latest version.

From the HTML 4.01 Specification, Objects, Images, and Applets:

“The alt attribute specifies alternate text that is rendered when the image cannot be displayed (see below for information on how to specify alternate text ). User agents must render alternate text when they cannot support images, they cannot support a certain image type or when they are configured not to display images.”

So, is anyone else other than Microsoft confused by this? It seems pretty simple to me: Your browser will either show the image or the alt text, but never both.

Windows explorer view settings

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? One thing which has bugged me was that even when I change my current folder view to “details” and then click on the “apply to all folders” button, Windows XP still continues to open some folders in “icons” view.

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Search engine referrals

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:

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Is IE ready to take on Firefox?

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 mainly at the expense of performance.

While IE7 manages to address a lot of its problems with standards compliance, it’s as sluggish as a garden snail. It seems that there are plenty of other folks who have had a similar experience too.

So, is IE7 finally ready to take on Firefox? According to the folks at ZDNet, the answer is a definite “no”. And we’d have to agree. We see no reasons to switch from Firefox, unless you need access to an intranet system which was designed before the start of the millennium.

Office and backup files

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.

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