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Keyboard shortcuts when internet browsing

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

When using Firefox, I've found it to be great timesaver to use keyboard shortcuts e.g. ctrl-t to open a new tab, ctrl-tab to hop to the next tab and ctrl-shift-tab to hop back a tab.

However, until today I didn't know how to get to the address (location) bar, or the search engines in the top right (ctrl-l and ctrl-k respectively).

Onto Google I went and found the helpful people at the Mozilla Foundation have put together a very comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts for FireFox, Internet Explorer and Opera. See their 'Keyboard Shortcuts' page for the full list and give your mouse (and wrist) a rest!

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Signed by Emma

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Internet Search Engine Safety

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

McAfee - famous for their antivirus software - compared the safety of five leading search engines earlier this year using their SiteAdvisor to generate website ratings:

"We again find that most leading search engines are similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though AOL replaces MSN as the safest engine and Yahoo! replaces Ask as the engine with the most risky results. Across search engines, we find sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines' organic results. Unsavory e-mail conduct is the dominant security risk although search engine users are also heavily exposed to risky downloads, browser exploits, and scams."
They recently revisited these results to see what had changed - the updated report states that search results from Google, AOL, and Ask.com are less likely to lead to dangerous sites than they did six months ago whilst MSN's and Yahoo's results however, send users to more risky sites than in May.

So should we worry? I don't think so, it's more about being aware - overall less than 5% of sites were considered unsafe and most of these were from sponsored results. It also depends on how well protected your computer is as to how much notice you feel you can take of the results.

See the report summary for more details.

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Signed by Emma

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How to make FireFox work for you

Sunday, October 01, 2006

You might have noticed the 'Get Firefox' button in the toolbar to your left but you may not have a clue what it is.

Firefox is an alternative web browser to Internet Explorer, and like Internet Explorer, it's free. Unlike Internet Explorer however, it is open source and that means there is much more potential for extensions and add-ons. Some of it's features have proved so popular that Microsoft have incorporated them into the new version of Internet Explorer e.g. live RSS bookmarks and tabbed browsing. The tabbed browsing in particular means that instead of having to have three different browser windows open, using up three times as much computer memory, you can have one browser window open, and have each site you are looking at open in a new tab. FireFox also adheres to web standards more than Internet Explorer, which is one less browser to have to 'hack' bits of code for. On the downside, there are a few websites that do not function properly in FireFox but in about two years of use, I've only come across three or four.

So what about the add-ons? There's a myriad of them, mostly listed at Mozilla's extensions website, accessed through Tools > Extensions. Other ones can be found on the Internet. They can alter almost any aspect of your browsers behaviour and provide much more functionality.

Extensions I've got loaded include:

And yes, of course they are web design orientated. If you haven't already done so, download FireFox and see what you think - I run FireFox and Internet Explorer side by side, so you can have the best of both worlds!

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Signed by Emma

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