Nothing is more annoying than creating that extra style sheet and pieces of code to make your site “viewable” in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. If you still happen to use IE6 you will see a small notice on the top of this page inviting you to visit savethedevelopers.org and upgrade your browser.

The Campaign
Say no to IE 6! Our current campaign focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful and complicated environment for web developers by hastening the retirement of an outdated browser.

I do hope you will give this a try if you’re still surfing with IE6 and it’s in no way meant to be offending, merely a friendly advice. Besides making the job easier on designers and programmers you will also benefit from the following:

• Increased security (phishing filter, family filter etc. )
• Better and faster page rendering (page loading time)
• Better 3rd party plugin support
• Generally a much improved browser experience

Feel free to share your thoughts on this one, I would especially like to hear from all of you (former) IE6 users…

Just a quick post to let you all know that Mozilla has released a security update for Firefox earlier today. The latest version 2.0.0.13 fixes several critical security vulnerabilities. More information can be found on their website.

Thunderbird is also affected, but an update has not yet been released.

The latest release can be downloaded here.

Juan Pablo Lopez Yacubian has discovered two vulnerabilities in Safari, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct spoofing attacks or potentially compromise a user’s system.

1) An error when downloading e.g. a .ZIP file with an overly long filename can be exploited to cause a memory corruption.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code.

2) An error in the handling of windows can be exploited to display arbitrary content while showing the URL of a trusted web site in the address bar.

The vulnerabilities are confirmed in version 3.1 for Windows. Other versions may also be affected.

Solution:

Do not browse untrusted web sites.

Source: Secunia

After a somewhat disappointing beta release Apple released Safari version 3.1 earlier today. There’s no mention of any beta or RC so I assume it’s the first official release in the 3 series.

Nothing much has happened design wise, and to be honest it looks a bit dull and the font rendering isn’t among the best on my Windows machine. However, according to their press release Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers (tested on a VeriTests iBench Version 5.0 on a modern iMac running Windows XP). On my Windows machine it seamed quite the opposite though…

What’s new?

Safari 3.1 is the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and the first to support CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts, giving designers limitless choices of fonts to create stunning new web sites.

Safari 3.1 is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/safari for both Mac OS X and Windows users. Safari software updates are delivered seamlessly through Apple’s Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.

Safari 3.1 scores well on the new Acid 3 test and passed 75 of 100 browser tests. It does use its time, but eventually it comes out rather well. If you run it with the latest WebKit (Safari’s rendering engine) I’ve been told it scores above 90.

So which browser do you think will pass the Acid 3 test first? I’m pulling for FF3 myself, but it sure looks like it’s going to be a close race.

While I’m normally writing about free software I feel I should mention Adobe Flashpaper anyway. FlashPaper 2 allows anyone to convert printable files into Macromedia Flash documents or PDF files with one click. A single-user license is only $79 which I think is fairly reasonable.

Overview

What better way of showing how it works by reading about the capabilities in a Flashpaper presentation.

[ Launch intro ]

I personally think the Flash approach could come in handy several times as it comes with an intuitive navigation panel for printing, zoom and pagination. Also Flash is included with most modern browsers and makes it even more available than PDF (even though I think most people have that as well installed). What’s your take on this? I’d like to hear.