Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser that is popular for its security, third-party add-ons called extensions, and it’s speed relative to the current dominant browser Internet Explorer. Today we embark on a three-part series about making Mozilla Firefox usable.

Stock Firefox uses too much space at the top

Our biggest beef with web browsers today is the amount of space used by the browser. For every pixel the browser uses for title bar, menus and other components, one fewer pixel can be used for the browser’s primary function of displaying web pages. This need for thin browsers is especially apparent on netbooks, where vertical pixels are at a premium. As shown above, a stock installation of Firefox uses a ton of unnecessary space from the top of the title bar to the start of the web page. Fortunately, Firefox can be made to take up the least real estate of any browser, and all it takes is a few simple steps.

1. Rearrange the buttons
2. Turn off the Navigation and Bookmarks toolbars
3. Turn of unnecessary tabs
4. Install Classic Compact extension

1. Rearrange the buttons
Let’s begin. Step one is to rearrange the buttons. As you can see in our starting screenshot, there is a bunch of extra space in the menu bar – space enough to include the complete contents of the navigation bar, especially when you consider that most of us use Firefox on wide monitors. To make the change, click View > Toolbars > Customize. Once the customize dialog box is open, you can simply drag and drop the buttons and the address and search boxes from one location to another.

2. Turn off the Navigation and Bookmarks toolbars
Once everything is moved out of the Navigation toolbar, you can turn it off. We like to turn off the bookmarks bar as well, as we’d much rather have the extra space than the training wheels that are browser bookmarks. If you like the bookmarks, you might consider installing the Tiny Menu add-on which replaces the menu items with a single drop-down menu, allowing you the space to merge your bookmarks to the menu bar just like the navigational elements.

Here is a screencast showing steps 1 and 2 in action.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Turn off unnecessary tabs in Firefox

3. Turn off unnecessary tabs
Older versions of Firefox didn’t show the tabs bar unless there were more than one tab open. Recent releases of the browser now show the bar, even if you’re only using one tab. This annoyance is easy to fix. Click Tools > Options and then select the Tabs section. Uncheck “Always show the tab bar” as shown here.

4. Install Classic Compact
The last part of the screencast shows the checking of the ‘Use Small Icons’ box, but for our tastes that option doesn’t go far enough. Fortunately there is a third-party add-on called Classic Compact that does a great job of making the buttons use enough space to be useful and no more. Installation is very simple. Click Tools > Add-ons and search for “Classic Compact” in the Add-ons search box that comes up. Once you install it, you’ll be prompted to restart Firefox.

After completing these four steps, you’re leave with a very lean browser that properly devotes as much space as possible to the content you’re viewing. Here’s our finished product.

Have you figured out how to optimize other browsers? Let us know in the comments.

Last October, we shot out a heads-up regarding an out-of-band update from Microsoft. An out-of-band update is one that is released outside of the patch Tuesday update schedule, the well-known pattern Microsoft has established for releasing updates to its products on the second Tuesday of each month.

Today, Microsoft has released another out-of-band update. This update fixes a critical security hole in Internet Explorer that could allow an attacker to compromise a system and gain control over it. Microsoft doesn’t release out-of-band updates often, so when they do you can know that they’re fairly critical.

Read more about today’s critical update from Microsoft’s website.

Just because you’ve switched to Opera or Safari or Chrome or Firefox and don’t use Internet Explorer regularly doesn’t mean you should ignore this update. It’s our belief that IE is so integrated into so many parts of Windows that it’s much better to be safe than sorry. Updates are easy and you should check for them frequently and install them immediately. Here are a few tips.

• If you’re still using XP, go to update.microsoft.com and install all available updates.
• If you’re running Vista, congratulations. Windows Update is a start menu item and can be accessed from there.
• If you’re running IE7, upgrade to IE8 even if you don’t regularly use Internet Explorer.

Microsoft isn’t the only company that releases updates. Last September, we wrote about a great service called Secunia that you can run to tell you what other programs on your computer have updates that are available. It would probably be a good idea to run their free web scan to check if you’re using an outdated version of Flash, Java, iTunes or any other program that has recently patched security holes.

Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday.The first Internet Explorer to pass the Acid 2 test, a test to verify that a browser renders web pages correctly, it boasts improved speed, better security and a few new features.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, pre-release versions of Opera and Safari are already bragging a perfect score on the Acid 3 test, IE8 ranks dead last among the most recent generation of browsers when speed is concerned, and a hacker going by the name Nils hacked IE8 on the day it was released (yesterday – though, to be fair, Firefox and Safari were also hacked yesterday).

Microsoft has an uphill battle for adoption. While greater than 70% of Internet users use Internet Explorer, there is still a significant amount of users of Internet Explorer 6. AuctioneerTech has under 6% of its traffic from Internet Explorer 6, but auctioneer Purple Wave has nearly 20% of its traffic viewed with Internet Explorer 6. While most technology sites have much higher numbers for newer and alternative browsers, the rest of the web still has to contend with legacy versions. Now, developers have three versions of Internet Explorer against which to test their websites. This issue is made even more difficult now that IE8 defaults to a web-standards mode that will actually render websites differently, albeit more correctly, than either IE7 or IE6. Users at least have the option of hitting the panic button when pages appear broken in IE8, causing it to fall back to the broken way IE7 rendered pages that most designers accounted for when building the pages in the first place.

New features included in Internet Explorer 8 are accelerators, web slices and developer tools. Accelerators are mashups of sorts that allow direct integration with services like email and mapping. Web slices allow you to monitor updates to a portion of a website without actually going to it. The developer tools, our favorite new feature, are similar to the ever-so-popular Firebug extension for Firefox that allow you to view the HTML, CSS and scripts behind the page and see how they interact by watching changes effect the page in real time.

It’s true that IE8 may be more standards-compliant, faster and more secure than IE7, and that web slices and accelerators are neat new features, but without the plugin community of Firefox or the raw speed of Chrome or Safari or the all-in-one nature of Opera, it’s both something for everyone and everything for noone.

Even if you’re a user of alternative broswsers, it’s important to upgrade your version of Internet Explorer. Get IE8 from the download links on the Microsoft Internet Explorer website before its released as an automatic update in the next month or two.

Windows 7 desktop, image from Wikipedia

We got our hands on a copy of the public beta of Microsoft Windows 7, the planned successor to Windows Vista. From what we can see so far, it’s very fast on our test system, though we haven’t tested it with graphics drivers since our old video card isn’t supported.

Hardware support is an issue for Windows 7, at least as it was an issue with Vista. Windows 7 is based on Vista, so the odds are if a product wasn’t supported by Vista, it won’t be supported by Windows 7. For modern hardware made in the last few years, that limitation shouldn’t be a problem. Indeed, Windows 7 actually includes much better support for touch interfaces and multiple core processors than did Vista.

The interface is a further departure from XP than was Vista. An enhancement to Aero, the visual effects that made Vista beautiful, called Peek now allows a user to quickly make all the windows transparent to see the desktop. The widgets that were for the resource-hogging and now-gone sidebar can now be used directly on the desktop, so Peek could be used to quickly see news and IM widgets while not having to minimize the spreadsheet. The task bar at the bottom has been merged with the Quick Launch toolbar, so now each of the shortcuts becomes a menu for the like-kind windows and programs that you have open. We never liked the Quick Launch bar, nor the grouping of windows, so it will be interesting to see if this change is actually an improvement.

We’re certainly glad there will be no more Sidebar. Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Movie Maker will also be gone, replaced with Windows Live Essentials, which will pretty much do the same things but with an emphasis on the cloud.

The new version of Windows Media Center has a few more options and ways to view items, but doesn’t seem like a large update. The final version of Internet Explorer 8, a beta of which is available for download and testing for XP and Vista now, will be shipping with Windows 7 and features better web standards compliance by default. The compliance isn’t perfect like that of Opera 10, but it’s better and the only side effect is that it will not display most websites properly.

Homegroups will make setting up a network easier, though we’re looking forward to seeing if they make it more secure. From what we saw of the randomly generated password we were shown on installation, it seems this may be the case.

Windows 7 does allegedly support faster startup and shutdown times, as well as longer battery life. There is a planned version for netbooks, which means Microsoft will finally be able to retire [read: bury] the aged XP.

Windows Vista is currently the exiled ruler of Microsoft’s operating systems. Sure, it’s smarter and more experienced and would bring world peace were it in office, but some pretty powerful rabble-rousers have kicked it out of the kingdom and replaced it with the old leader, XP. While the silent majority of computer users are happy with Vista, the vocal minority of either XP-lovers or change-haters has caused Microsoft to push out a new operating system sooner than it should have. Microsoft was working on a new file system called WinFS for Windows Vista that never made it, and now it looks like it won’t be included in Windows 7 either. Right now, Linux’s Compiz-Fusion is king of slick-looking, fast-acting and productivity-enhancing desktop visual effects, and while Microsoft could have made some serious headway to catch up, they were forced to plan a release of a half-baked operating system update rather than a full-fledged upgrade that could have solidified their dominance on the desktop.

The verdict? We’re going to continue to use Ubuntu Linux, while we recommend Vista and Windows 7 to our families and coworkers who are used to Microsoft operating systems and don’t want to learn new tricks. We’re going to continue to ridicule those who claim Vista is bad and XP is better, though we’ll continue to use XP on systems that came with it since neither Vista nor Windows 7 is or will be better enough to justify spending money to upgrade the operating system.

Want to try Windows 7 for yourself? The download restrictions for the public beta have been lifted so anyone can try it. All you have to do is download it from the Microsoft Windows 7 website. If you disagree with our review, let us know in the comments.

Bad things lurk on the interwebs. Viruses are marginalized by Antivirus software, but most Antivirus software doesn’t protect against malicious websites. Websites can phish and clickjack. They can display an invisible button that infects your computer on top of another button that says “download this antivirus software”. There are actions that can be triggered simply by your mouse moving over an element on a page.

Firefox is a web browser that is constantly gaining market share against Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer. While it’s true that Firefox is a secure browser, as is a fully-patched copy of IE, any browser that properly executes JavaScript and other web standards is vulnerable to scripts that are written to do malicious things. The only way to ensure safety on the modern web is by only allowing scripts that you authorize. Later we’ll examine how this safe practice works with Opera, my new favorite web browser, by today we’re going to look at NoScript.

NoScript is a browser addon for Firefox. I first tried it over a year ago and gave up after a matter of minutes. The default settings for NoScript call for it to present a security warning whenever a website attempts to execute JavaScript, Java, Flash and other scripting technologies on sites you haven’t authorized. Because pretty much every website uses one of these scripting languages for something, and because when you first install NoScript none of the websites are listed as trusted, every single page will present the user with a security warning. The sheer annoyance caused by this behavior resulted in a quick removal from my browsing environment.

NoScript integration with Firefox right-click menu

I was recently listening to Security Now, my favorite Internet security podcast. NoScript was mentioned as a must for Internet security, along with the secret to maintaining sanity while using it. The secret is to turn off notifications. With notifications turned off, the popups are gone but the security remains. Only if you realize that a site isn’t functioning properly do you need to specifically grant that site permissions to run the scripts. It’s as easy as right-clicking on the website and telling NoScript to allow the site to run scripts. To the right you can see how NoScript shows the scripts that AuctioneerTech attempted to run that were blocked successfully with NoScript.

True, AuctioneerTech doesn’t look as cool without scripts. The pull-quotes – sections of text that are larger and served like pictures showing important passages – don’t work, and neither do the CrunchBase widgets. You won’t see the Google Adsense links to the right or the Google Shared Stuff list at the bottom right, nor will my Google Analytics function. For this reason, I encourage you to select the “Allow all on this page” option if you’re viewing AuctioneerTech with NoScript. However, if this were a malicious website, you would already be infected. This is the reason you should install NoScript on Firefox. You’ll still be able to get at the content you want, without having content you don’t want forced upon you and your computer.

Here’s how to do it. Assuming that you already have Firefox installed, launch it.

1. Click the Tools menu at the top of the browser and select Add-ons
2. Click the Get Add-ons button at the top left of the box that appears
3. In the search box, type noscript and hit enter
4. Click on the first return that has the icon that looks like the picture at the top right of this article
5. Click the button that reads Add to Firefox…
6. You’ll be prompted to confirm your decision. Click Install now on the pop-up.
7. Restart Firefox

That’s it. NoScript is installed and you’re safer now than ever before. Here’s how to disable the notifications so you can browse in peace.

1. There is now a small NoScript icon at the bottom right of your browser. Click it and select Options.
2. Select the Notifications tab at the top
3. Un-check the option listed as Show message about blocked scripts

Now you won’t get any popups telling you scripts were disabled. Browse the web with peace and security. If something doesn’t look right, simply enable the scripting on the page.

Image via Wikipedia

The example RFP for website construction posted last week mentioned a little about web standards and user agents, but after further reflection it seems we need to examine further the importance of an accessible and usable website and add a few more requirements to the proposal.

An accessible website is one that can be viewed on any browser and any platform by any person or script. A user agent is the combination of the browser and platform. For example, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows are two different user agents. Firefox 3 on a Mac and Firefox 3 on Linux are two different user agents. on A website that can only be viewed on 90% of user agents is one that is not accessible. A website that looks differently on Linux than it does on Windows means that the designer did a poor job testing.

Flash is a great tool for delivering video on the Internet. It’s a bad tool for building websites. When used for websites, it’s most often a way to create animations or navigation. Animation should be avoided because motion that the user didn’t initiate usually annoys or confuses the user. Flash navigation is usually a drop-down or animated system, the down-sides to which we’ll cover shortly. A website built with Flash also requires the user have installed Flash. Many devices can’t install Flash. If Flash is used, the content must have an alternate delivery method in order to support devices that don’t support Flash. Building two versions of the site, one in Flash and one to support non-Flash user agents, is a waste of development time.

With the increased use of mobile devices comes an increased importance for websites to be viewable on those devices. As a Windows Mobile user, it’s very frustrating to visit a website and have to wait for a huge amount of data to load, only to realize that I have to scroll horizontally back and forth only to find that there is a JavaScript drop-down menu that I can’t use anyway because it’s not supported on Windows Mobile. While I acknowledge that great strides are being made on mobile devices to better display the real web, the sheer number of legacy devices as well as the ease that a standards compliant and accessible site can be created dictates that it simply doesn’t make sense to build a site that can’t be viewed on a mobile device.

How should this alternate display be accomplished? Mobile style sheets provide a quick and standards-compliant way to render content in an alternative manner on smaller screens. Since a standards-compliant site is built using style-neutral markup as the content source, a mobile style sheet can be written in addition to the normal style sheet. Where the normal style sheet might display a header that is 750 pixels wide, the mobile style sheet might specify that the header be only 240 pixels wide so as to fit on a mobile browser without horizontal scrolling. Mobile style sheets allow for a completely different arrangement of elements – the components of the page like images and blocks. Elements can be set to display or hide depending on which style sheet is used. With this approach, a single file can be used to completely change the layout to fit on a small browser without making changes to any of the content.

Also of importance is usability. A website with drop-down menus, or their cousin the menus that are hidden until the user clicks the little plus sign to expand a set of links, fails in the usability category. Drop-down menus are for applications to perform actions, like how the file menu in a word processor has the actions to open, save and exit. Drop-down menus don’t work well as natural navigational elements because a user should never have to perform an action to expose navigation. Instead, a site should use a well-defined, hierarchical arrangement of pages with links on each page to the parent and children pages.

Now that we’ve defined the need, here are the additional items for our example RFP.

Website must display properly without Flash or JavaScript. Any use of Flash must be solely to deliver video content if applicable.

Website must use a logical, hierarchical navigational system and must not use drop-down or fly-out menus.

All pages must use mobile style sheets to render properly on Windows Mobile and other handheld browsers so that horizontal scrolling is not required on those devices.

Want to learn more about web standards? The best book on the subject is Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.

Want to learn more about CSS or get a basic understanding of how to use them? Head on over to previously-mentioned W3 Schools for their section on cascading style sheets.

Image via Wikipedia

One of the reasons AuctioneerTech exists is to make life easier for everyone, including auctioneers. One of the ways this goal is accomplished is by reviewing software that performs a novel or important function. Most of the software covered is open source, and in this episode, we’re going to discuss open source software, explain why it doesn’t necessarily mean free software, and argue why there is an imporant difference.

What is open source?
At the heart of all software lies a programming language. For web programs like phpList, WordPress or Gallery, this language could be a scripting language like PHP or Perl. For programs on your computer, like Notepad++, OpenOffice or the GIMP this language could be Java, C, Visual Basic or .NET. There are many, many more. For programs on your computer, for the most part, they have to be compiled before they are executed. That simply means that a program reads the source code and produces an executable program that your computer can understand.

The concept of open source derives from the user having direct access to the goods and knowledge of a product. What this concept means for software is that you, as a user, can acquire the source code and read it to see exactly how a piece of software works. What this concept means for hardware like routers is both that you can install your own software or firmware on the device to chance its functionality as well as access the design schematics and plans to make changes to produce different devices.

Now, before you start with your email client or the feedback form on the website to tell me how this is another netcast that is too technical, let me say that we’re pretty much done with the complicated part. I think it’s safe to assume that noone listening to this podcast, nor I would argue the vast majority of users of open source software, has any interest in changing or modifying in any way the source code for any software. What we’re interested in is the other aspect generally found with open source software, the price.

Open source is free, but some of it costs money to buy or use. To understand this concept, we look at the difference between the latin words gratis and libre. In English, we use free for both of these terms, but there really isn’t a word to distinguish between free as it relates to liberty and free as it relates to not costing anything. Because of this, the open source movement has adopted the two phrases free as in speech and free as in beer as way to concisely describe the concepts behind the two uses of free.

Free, as in beer, software serves a purpose. It lets us perform tasks that would otherwise be significantly expensive. Most of us initially turn to open source software because we’re looking to get away from paying for Microsoft Office or Photoshop, for example, and we turn to OpenOffice and the GIMP, respectively. Neither OpenOffice nor the GIMP costs any money, but neither is very easy to modify as ameteur programmers.

Free, as in speech, software also is important. Commercial open source products, such as KnowledgeTree document management and SugarCRM customer relationship management, allow access to the source code but have a fairly high monetary cost. Most of these commercial open source products offer a free, community-supported edition that works for non-commercial applications and offer a premium business product to companies who can pay for support and advanced features. The advantage is that you can purchase a piece of software and hire someone to make customized changes to that software so that it works better for you. You can’t make changes to proprietary software like Microsoft Office because the source code simply isn’t available.

The one other distinction that’s important to make is that there is proprietary software that is free as in beer. Products such as Google Picasa and the Opera web browser fall under this category. The advantage of this approach is if you can monetize your product through alternative means to outright purchase price such as advertising, and an increase in product adoption caused by offering it for free means an increase in revenue.

How can open source software improve your business?
It is possible to be 100% effective as a computer user and use completely open source software. You can use Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. Use the GIMP instead of Photoshop, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, Scribus and Inkscape instead of Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator, Evolution or Thunderbird instead of Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, Notepad++ or Nvu or BlueGriffon when it’s released instead of Microsoft Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver. Many of these open source products are arguably superior in functionality than their proprietary counterparts. Most have release cycles much faster than their counterparts, so they’re improving more rapidly. They all have price tags that are superior to their counterparts.

There are a couple of places you can go to find open source software that performs a specific task or serves as an alternative to your current proprietary solution. Two sites I frequent are sourceforge.net and osalt.com. SourceForge serves as a repository, or central storage and meeting place, for a large open source development community. There are thousands of products there that can be downloaded or  discussed. osalt.com, which is short for open source as alternative, provides simple comparisons of software by function. For example, when I look up the commercial package Steinberg Cubase, a popular multi-track music editing package, I see that the open source Cubase alternatives are Rosegarden and Ardour. When I look up the open source finance application GnuCash, I see its commercial equivalents listed as Microsoft Money and Quicken.

That’s it for episode eleven. I’m sorry I’m running a little behind with this episode; things are a little hectic in my world. I’m going to try to have another episode ready to release next week while I’m in Baltimore for the Auction Technology Specialist course.

One change I’d like to note is that the podcasts and their transcripts will now be included on the main page of the website. They will still be available on the auction podcast page, but I think the content is also appropriate for inclusion in the main feed.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening. Now go sell something.

Picture by Aaron Traffas

As I was browsing my daily news feeds this morning, I came across an article about Skyfire.

I got my Treo 700wx based on Windows Mobile 5 in November of 2006. Its coolness lasted for several months, but I started wanting for more when the iPhone and Windows Mobile 6 came out. The biggest missing pieces from my phone’s browsing experience were Javascript and Flash. Skyfire is a browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems that just rewrote the rules.

Flash support
It supports true Flash and AJAX. I just watched my Auctioneer Tech YouTube video on my Treo in the Skyfire browser.

Search
It has a single address bar at the top that functions like the bar in Chrome that allows you to enter a website or a search query. The searches are displayed in a custom-skinned results page that, by default, lists results from Google. At the top is a tab that lets you quickly switch to results from Yahoo! without re-keying your query. It also offers to add this search bar on your home page, allowing for quick searches without loading Skyfire first.

Interface
One of the biggest secrets of effective use of the Treo is leaving the stylus in the holder. Using the stylus slows you down. The problem with browsing with Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile is that using the four-way navigational selector on the Treo left you at the mercy of the tab-stops built into web pages. It was clumsy, but still better than navigating with the stylus. Skyfire gives you a mouse. Or at least a pointer that is controlled by the four-way selector. It lets you browse the web as you would on your PC, allowing zoom similar to Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Speed
What Google Chrome is to a PC, Skyfire is to a PocketPC. The speed gain is amazing. This gain is accomplished by the rendering being performed on the server side. Skyfire’s servers take the page you’re trying to view, render the content, compress it and send the rendered information to your phone. This process means that the phone is simply displaying content, not deciding based on the code how that content should be displayed on the page. The user agent reported to the web server is Firefox 2 on Windows XP, so it looks like they’re using Gecko to render. Want to be blown away by numbers? Look at the speed chart posted by MacRumors.

I’m fewer than 20 minutes into being a Skyfire user. I’m bound to eventually find something I dislike about it, but right now I can’t imagine what that something may be. If you want to turn your Windows Mobile browsing capabilities into something much closer to the iPhone – arguably better since the iPhone doesn’t support Flash – then I definitely recommend installing Skyfire. If you find something you don’t like about this browser, let me know in the comments.