I’m one of those people who likes to surf the web by opening up multiple windows when I find something of potential interest. That way, I can keep the current page open if the content in the new window turns out to be a false lead and I can click on a whole bunch of links and get to them when I’ve finished reading the page I’m on.
I’ve always hated the fact that IE doesn’t support tabbed browsing and have grown extremely tired of ALT+TABbing through multiple browser windows. Of course, I love Mozilla and Firebird, but I think it helps to be using the same browser as 90%+ of web users.
Well now, thanks to the excellent Avant Browser, I can. Avant is based on IE and so it operates in exactly the same way. However, it has practically all the functionality of Mozilla, in particular, tabbed browsing. If you’ve never surfed the web in this way before, try it. You’ll thank yourself (and improve your productivity to boot).
I’d love to get Avant deployed as our default browser at work (we’re a Microsoft shop so Mozilla would never fly). I’ve been using it for a while at work and haven’t found an internal app yet that it fails on. I’m sure that with a little education employees could make more efficient use of their time on our intranet or on the web.
Author: Christian Watson
The Worst Web Site of All Time?
I give you the Offical Page of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
RSS Contest
Contentious is running a contest to come up with a catchier name for RSS that isn’t a three letter acronym. I haven’t got any great ideas of my own, but I thought I’d spread the word.
Outlook RSS Newsreader
Update: Although it’s not free ($20 per year subscription), “Attensa for Outlook”:http://www.attensa.com/products/outlook/ looks like a nice alternative to IntraVnews, which I’ve reviewed below. They certainly seem to like it at “Performancing”:http://performancing.com/node/1105.
Bloated Home Pages Increase Travel Site Load Times
Optimizationweek.com has a great speed comparison of three leading travel sites and comes up with some interesting findings. Plus it has a catchy title–Overweight Travel Sites Delay Holiday Travelers–although from an SEO standpoint it would benefit from being a little less cute and a bit more obvious as to what it’s about.
Anway, the fact that the sites’ home pages average about 150kb is pretty scary–don’t they care about dial-up users? I’d never heard of the term “HTTP Compression” before reading this article either–there’s a useful technology that more sites should be using. Maybe they are and I’m just late to the table?
Usability Testing Shopping.com
So I finally decided to buy a portable MP3 jukebox and settled on the Rio Karma. Off I go to Shopping.com to compare prices. Little did I know that I would be running an impromptu usability test in the process.
Asterisk Redesigned
Keith has done a nice redesign of Asterisk, making it more readable while still maintaining a nice design aesthetic. (more…)