PicLens is seriously one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a fullscreen 3D image browsing plugin for Firefox (and its derivative, Flock), Internet Explorer, and Safari that finds pictures on certain websites and displays them in a Windows Media Center looking interface, where you can select pictures, start a slideshow, and generally bask in the 3D goodness of scrolling through hundreds of pictures at top speed. All the pictures are displayed in a huge wall, and you can control the zoom level with the mouse wheel. Hold down one of the arrow keys and watch the wall fly by, unless there’s only a few pictures, in which case it doesn’t do much of anything.
A good place to try it out is Flickr or Google Image Search. With those, it’s not even limited to the pictures on a given page. It’ll automagically grab pictures from the next pages (in other words, I was able to view my entire Flickr archive simply by going to the first page in it). Serious awesomeness, but I suppose it’s really only good if you have a decent Internet connection. With dial-up, you’ll probably be waiting forever for the pictures to load.
Anyways, here are a few screenshots for you to chew on, all using pictures from my Flickr account.
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The Firefox web browser is well-known for its memory leak problems. If you leave it open for a long enough time, it can take up as much as 200 MB of memory, even if you’re not actively using it. As an experiment, I opened up both Firefox and Internet Explorer and looked at the memory consumption of both when they had been open for a very short amount of time. The results are fairly interesting. Firefox was taking up almost five times as much RAM as Internet Explorer. And considering that Firefox was taking up more than 100 MB during my browsing session a short while earlier, it’s not inconceivable that the ratio would have gone up over time. Here’s the screenshot:
Granted, I may have a few extensions enabled on Firefox that IE doesn’t have, but that doesn’t help the memory leak problem. Or the incredibly slow startup time. Get working on this, Mozilla! Or I may be forced to switch to Opera.
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There are quite a few browsers out there, but they are, for the most part, pretty much the same. The only major differences are in their rendering engines, that is, the code that allows them to display web pages. The most popular one is Gecko, which is used by Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape. Another is Presto, used by Opera. Finally, there is Trident, the layout engine used by Internet Explorer. Of course there are others, but this isn’t a post about layout engines. You’ve got Wikipedia for that.
Anyways, the rendering (or layout) engine of a browser determines how HTML and CSS are displayed. Most browsers display things similarly, but not Internet Explorer. IE has always been the black sheep of the browser family, preferring proprietary functions (such as ActiveX) to standards. Of course, no browser is completely standards-compliant, but IE is as far off as it can get. The most recent version, IE7, has solved quite a few problems, especially with CSS, but it can still be a hassle to code a website that will work perfectly in all browsers. The problem is that IE is still the most used browser. If your site doesn’t work in IE, you’re going to have a lot of people who will steer clear of it.
The answer? Well, you could just eliminate anything in your site that’s causing problems with IE. Or, you could let web surfers know about Firefox. Chances are that the only reason most people are still using IE is that they don’t know about any alternatives. Read on to see an easy way to let IE users know they should switch to Firefox while allowing non-IE users to continue on with no trouble.
Continue reading ‘Browser sniffing’
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My computer seriously hates me. First off, my video card died (crappy Chaintech support is partially to blame), so I’m being forced to use an ancient NVIDIA TNT2 card (it’s almost seven years old, people) just so I can use the computer. On the plus side, it’s a better card than the piece-of-crap ATI Rage Pro card that I could have used. On the down side, I can’t use Photoshop because my video card is too slow, meaning I’m going to fall way behind on the logo project for Digital Imaging, which should have been finished Wednesday. On the Internet side of things, Firefox won’t show half my bookmarks and it’s having problems following links when I click on them, Internet Explorer just plain sucks, and the fresh copy of the Opera browser I just downloaded doesn’t like MySpace.
Anyways, I found an old Texas pal on MySpace, Stephen Reilly. He moved up to New Jersey right after 8th grade and I thought I’d never see him again. So, a few days ago, I was searching for junior high friends on MySpace and, lo and behold, his name popped up. It was pretty cool.
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