Multiple IE Versions on One Box!!

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs has discovered a method of running multiple versions of IE on one box! He made the discovery when he noticed that a developer’ edition of IE was able to run concurrently with his installed version.

Working backwards, he discovered which files the developer’s edition used and applied that knowledge towards older IE versions — he downloaded their respective CAB files and extracted bits as needed. A few tweaks later, and he had stand-alone versions (screenshot). (The tweaks, involving IEXPLORE.exe.local, are further explained in the article.)

Of course, Joe outlines the steps he used to create the stand-alone versions and you could follow along with those. Or — even easier — QuicksMode.org has links to the ready-to-run stand-alone versions of IE download.

I’ve tested this on my XP machine here at work, and it works great! When running multiple versions of IE, it can be easy to confuse which version is which; so, QuicksMode wrote a small script to dynamically prepend the IE version number to the page’s title (so that it’s easily visible in the taskbar).

Joe also includes a link for PayPal donations at the bottom of his page to cover bandwidth costs and the like. And, considering how much time this discovery will save me, I was happy to contribute.

PS As you may have noticed, I’m not one to use exclamation points gratuitously. It could have been two years or more since I last typed two consecutive exclamation points. But, I was so excited about this discovery that I included two in the title of this blog entry ;).

Mozilla Firebird — Now with DOM Inspector!

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

The DOM Inspector was checked in to the Mozilla Firebird trunk today and it should appear in tomorrow’s nightly builds. For those not aware, the DOM Inspector is the ultra-useful browser extension for — among other things — analyzing CSS within a webpage. For instance, you can select an element on a page and the DOM Inspector can tell you how the document’s CSS rules cascaded to produce that element’s styling.

I’m really stoked about this check-in since the missing DOM Inspector was one of the few things holding me back from Mozilla Firebird. Now if I can just get URLs from Thunderbird to open in a new Firebird tab, I’ll be all set :). And, some say that there’s a solution to the open-new-tabs issue as well.

I don't doubt that switching to Firebird/Thunderbird is a Good Idea(tm), but I'm still unsure when the development team will officially make the switch. Reading over the roadmap, they say that “[it’s] clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone” — but they don't elaborate on when they expect that switch might be :-/.

Update 11-13: I’ve discovered that Firebird still doesn’t have inline autocomplete in the location bar (URL bar). Bummer.

Microsoft Jargon

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

In the comments for this Slashdot review of the book “Microsoft in the Mirror”, Prostoalex linked to his lexicon of Microsoft Jaron. It’s similar (but unrelated) to the Jargon File, but it’s specific to Jargon within Microsoft.

Some of the entries have since crept into widespread corporate use, such as bandwidth (as in “time”), but most of them were new to me. And, one of my favorites is probably “ask” as a noun:

Ask: Used as a noun, preceded by “the,” as in “What’s the ask?”, which basically means “What are you asking?”, or “What’s the bottom line?”, or, more simply, “What’s the question?” Essentially, then, a gratuitous verb-to-noun transmogrification, creating a useless synonym for question.

I can almost understand its purpose, but I still find it amusing — I almost feel like adopting it as my exclamation-of-choice (as in “What the ask?!”). Of course, that usage wouldn’t make sense in real life or even in the context of Microsoft jargon ;).

Going to Palo Alto — Ride to the Airport?

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

This year, my family is spending Thanksgiving in Palo Alto with my brother — he’s attending Stanford for his graduate degree there. At the time I booked the flights, I wasn’t sure how much time I’d be able to get off from work, so I booked Wednesday through Saturday.

To San Francisco:

  • Flight: American Airlines flight 1471
  • Depart: Dallas/Ft Worth, TX (DFW) - Terminal Information Unavailable
  • - Wed, Nov 26 at 11:57am
  • Arrive: San Francisco, CA (SFO)
  • - Wed, Nov 26 at 1:49pm

Back to Dallas:

  • Flight: American Airlines flight 1366
  • Depart: San Francisco, CA (SFO) - Terminal 3
  • - Sat, Nov 29 at 2:37pm
  • Arrive: Dallas/Ft Worth, TX (DFW) - Terminal Information Unavailable
  • - Sat, Nov 29 at 8:06pm

Anyhow, would anyone be able to give a ride to or from the airport? I’d probably need to get to the airport around 10:30am that Wednesday, which would mean leaving my apartment around 9:45am.

New CSS Support in IE6

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

One of my recent projects has the luxury of only requiring support for IE6 (and Mozilla, natch). This is a rare occurrence, since most clients require support for least a version or two back (and justifiably so). However, in this case, a web application in another portion of the website (contracted to another vendor) already required IE6, so that support cascaded to the rest of the site.

Coding for such recent browsers is a bit surreal, in a way — all of a sudden, I can write standards compliant code and there’s a good chance it could work work without fiddling ;). Along those lines, I decided to check on new CSS support that may have been introduced into IE6. Generally, I wouldn’t give much thought to the workings of such a recent browser, but such knowledge could be useful to me this time.

So, after briefly searching Google, I found this MSDN Library article on CSS Enhancements in IE6. I was already aware of several of the features, such as IE6’s support for the CSS box model (in short, the CSS spec states that padding is added to an element’s width, and IE versions before 6 ignored this).

I was also pleased to see that IE6 includes some useful bits such as support for min-height (you can specify the minimum height on an element). Interestingly enough, the article didn’t mention min-width, which I would think they could have implemented at the same time (or, should have been). Perhaps most amusing to me, though, is that IE6 only now supports padding on images. How is it that image-padding slipped under their radar for so long?