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I‘m shocked to find out the latest Hi-Tech in webdevelopment: apparently it’s possible to take some site’s RSS and convert it back to plain HTML so that it can be read on Windows Mobile Devices!

This is such an achievement that we all can get our old Internet Explorers (3.0, right?) out of the ‘diskette-box’ so we can read Techcrunch without the markup. That’s evil of me, you say? Hey: Pocket Internet Explorer was developed out of Internet Explorer 3.

That said: I downloaded FireFox 2.0 (Beta!), just to see the ‘shiny buttons’ Alfons was talking about in one of the postings below. I’m not sure what Mozilla’s contingency plan is regarding installing newer versions of Firefox on top of older ones. If you feel obliged, you can download FireFox from Mozilla’s BonEcho pages. However, what is impressive about this FireFox release is that it is able to restore sessions, which comes in handy if your browser crashed (Reminder to self to make a screenshot of Firefox restoring the original state).

Talking about browsers, there are people who managed to port KHTML to Windows, which is called ‘Webkit’ in Apple terms. There’s even a working Webkit-based browser for Windows, which can be used for browsing but that’s about it. It will be interesting to see where the developer wants to go with his Swift browser.

Update: Firefox restoring a crashed session

I‘ve been sporadically following the discussion about IE 7 and the issues around compliance and that. Paul “Master Programmer” Thurrott weighs in, once again (Besides using CTRL F in Firefox, you can also use the vi command ‘/’ to start searching inline). Chris Wilson (Program manager IE) did an interesting interview at ZDNet.

The rendering itself, and the layout itself, is something that we’ll continue to iterate on. And it’s possible that we’ll replace it with a different engine even, at that level, although that’s not replacing the entire dynamic HTML engine – it’s replacing just a piece of it. The hard part is that the baseline for what you need to support for that rendering engine is actually quite large. It’s clear just from how long it took the Mozilla guys to build up their Gecko engine – that wasn’t something that they did in a year or two years. I think it took them 5 years before they actually did a first release of the Gecko engine in the key Web browsers

So, don’t expect major changes in IE 7. Stick with Opera and Firefox/Mozilla and only use IE 7 to launch your Windows Update sessions (after all, Windows Update requires ActiveX).

Update: I was reinstalling Windows 98 on an older computer and I thought it was hilarious seeing those Win 98 banners claiming things like ‘more secure’, ‘safer’ and ‘easier to use’. I mean, these are the same things people have been claiming after each new Windows version was released. And this is called progress?

Update 2: As mentioned in the comments, Firefox 2 now carries ‘shiny’ movable tabs. You can download (beta!) it right from here. Oh. And Micro Summary thingies. I wonder which version will break this new feature.

I downloaded Internet Explorer 7 (Beta 3) today, just to see what the buzz is all about. Comparing it with Opera and Firefox, the only difference I see is that (out of the box) IE uses ‘ClearType’ to render the fonts. The other thing I noticed is that the specific copyrights portions to Spyglass have been removed. Maybe they’ll be added after the final release. Maybe not. However, IE 7 (besides the ‘gadgery’ new features) clearly behaves as regular Internet Explorers, which tells me that in fact changes to the renderer aren’t too spectacular. If you install IE 7.0, I’d like to remind you that it will replace your existing Internet Explorer. If you develop on older IE versions, you may want to skip the ‘upgrade’.

That said, when opening the WP dashboard in IE I noticed the ‘BrowseHappy’ button. This button naturally doesn’t appear in other browsers (Opera/FF). A grep confirmed this: the code is in one of the admin-functions php files (see image).

Is this evil? You know: I honestly don’t care.