Web Development Insight

Here is the browser market share for Oct 2009:

Opera, around since 1996, has not made any headway. Neither has Chrome.

Many ISPs put their own branding in the Internet Explorer title bar. Here is how to get rid of it without reinstalling anything.

Microsoft makes it fairly easy for companies or individuals to put their own branding on the IE title bar, but getting rid of it isn’t too hard, either. As always, back up the registry before you make changes. Navigate in your registry editor to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Main

Now look in the right pane and you should see a value named Windows Title. In the Data column, you’ll see the branding text (such as the ISP’s name). You can delete this value to get rid of the branding entirely, or you can double click the value and change it to whatever you like (such as your own name). After you make the desired change, close the registry editor, close IE and then when you open it again, the change should take effect.

I have been waiting since Firefox 3.5 came out for Google to update Gears to be compatible. I had gears 0.5.21.0 installed and tried updating add-ons, which disabled gears, and going to the gear’s website, downloading and installing gears.

What I ended up doing was uninstalling gears, downloading the gears installer and running it. NOW the updated gears (0.5.29.0) installed and is compatible with Firefox 3.5. This was for Windows XP.

I tried this on Vista and gears installed fine through Firefox.

I am a power user of Firefox; it is not uncommon for me to have 30 tabs open. But with convenience comes problems. Memory problems. As the tabs are cycled through, closed, opened anew, the memory Firefox grabs grows (though it seems better in v3.5). One modification you can do is this:

1. In the url bar type in:  about:config

2. Accept the warning.

3. Right-click on the resulting page and add New > Boolean

4. As the preference name enter:  config.trim_on_minimize

5. Choose True as the value.

6. Restart Firefox.

Now when Firefox is minimized it frees up memory.

I have been fighting trying to upgrade from Flash Player 9.0.28.0 to 9.0.45.0 (Firefox and IE 7). First way was go to Adobe site and try to update the plug-ins. Neither one worked. I thought the browser cache was too small so I increased it to 150 MB (I normally keep it at 25 MB). No luck. Of course rebooting did not help. Nor clearing the browser cache.

Next was trying to download the entire player and install it. That scenario did not work, either. The install would start but say I have insufficient disk space. Free up 5000K more. There was plenty of disk space – well over 13 GB. Cleaning the temp directory was to no avail. Grrrr! Searching the Adobe site was a dead end as was the general Internet.

Finally I uninstalled the flash player from all browsers. Adobe has a tool to do this. Then I rebooted just to make sure , though it was not a requirement. Next I went to a site that uses a flash movie. I was prompted to install the latest version of flash player (I did this in IE7 and Firefox). Both browsers installed 9.0.45.0 and I was finished. Just to satisfy my curiosity I verified the flash player version.

Doug