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Flock
Fix Your Fonts, Fix Your Browser Problems
For a few weeks I’ve been having strange issues with browsers on my Mac. Firefox couldn’t render Arial properly, Flock had issues rendering fonts in search results, Opera was down right unusable and Camino had issues with Gmail fonts. Safari was just fine however.
Opera Browser Issues
I tried to Google the answer but got nothing. I thought it had to do with Snow Leopard, but it seemed I was the only one. I was pretty sure it had to do with fonts so I started digging.
yExplore 2.1 Now With More SEO and Web Developer Love
yExplore 2.1 has been released with loads of new shortcuts for SEOs and web developers!
yExplore 2.0 Screenshot
yExplore still offers quick and easy access to Yahoo Site Explorer, but now also offers:
- Google Backlinks, Inindex, Cache
- Archive.org
- So you can see how the site has progressed over the years. - Bing Inindex
- Delicious saves for a domain.
- How many bookmarks appear in Delicious for the domain you are on.
- How many times the current page you are on has been bookmarked - Highlighting of NoFollow links.
- In bright red so you can’t miss them.
Fastest Mac Browser Test: Firefox 2, 3 and Safari
Have you checked out Dromaeo.com? It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is. I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser. Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!
Granted, this is no professional test. Firefox 2 has the most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness. There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.
yExplore 1.6 Fixes Bug
If you use yExplore, you may have noticed that it’s stopped working properly lately. This is due to a change made by Yahoo Site Explorer. The good news is it’s been fixed!
yExplore 1.6.1 has been updated and released!
The new version updates the domain URL structure to work correctly with the updated Yahoo Site Explorer. It also adds in support for newer versions of Flock and adds Netscape 9.0 support.
Enjoy!
The Flavors of Gecko Technology
The number of different applications that use Gecko are ever increasing. What’s Gecko? It’s the rendering engine that powers such programs as Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.
I guess it all starts with Netscape back in 1998 and possibly even before that when Netscape decided to make a technology to power their browser. It’s come a long way and here are a few applications taking advantage of this open source technology.
- Firefox* – The most popular and most wildly used Gecko application. It’s the little web browser that’s trying to change the world. With hundreds of extensions and themes, customizing it to fit your needs is one thing that makes it so popular.
Protect Your Firefox With A Master Password.
Firefox has the ability to save usernames and passwords for easy access later. It’s a handy little feature but it does pose a possible problem. If someone else were to use your computer, or steal your profile folder, they’d be able to access all your accounts. That’s a bit scary. However, you can set a master password in Firefox and protect yourself.
A master password will allow anyone to use your browser, but, if they came across a page that had a saved username/password, Firefox will ask for the master password before auto populating the username and password fields. If the user doesn’t know it, they can hit cancel and continue to use the site without access to any of your accounts.
From Around The Web : Flock, Seamonkey, Outlook, Idol
I’ve never quite understood why people just leave a list of links to other sites, but now I do. Here is some news that I don’t have time to write about, but wanted to share.
A new preview version of Flock, based on Firefox 2, is out with many additional features. Note, it didn’t import all my previous bookmarks.
Seamonkey 1.1 is also out. It’s also based off Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 too. However, from the comments on Seamonkey 1.1, the real good stuff won’t appear until 1.5.
10 Flock Issues/Wishes
Flock wants to know what we, the users, think. In a post titled ‘Your Top 10 Issues/Concerns‘ they are asking people to voice their issues. Here are mine. 
- No Cocoa Widgets on a Mac. (This one is a wish.)
- MacUpdate listing description is awful.
- When a feed is loaded from the sidebar and I close the feed sidebar, I can’t visit a bookmark in the bookmark bar.
- No RSS synchronization with Google Reader (This one is a wish.)
- No way to submit extensions or themes to Flock.com
- No folders in the bookmark bar.
Now 14.7% More IE Friendly
Blog on a stick is now 14.7% friendlier to our IE visitors. I removed a script that allowed IE to actually render transparent PNG’s with transparent backgrounds. It seemed to be slowing down the blog for those users and I didn’t like that. So it’s gone. Instead, you get to see an ugly background on all transparent PNG files. It’s not my fault, blame Bill Gates.
Of course, if you are using Firefox, Opera, Flock, SeaMonkey, Safari or basically any non-IE browser, you have no idea what I’m talking about because your browser rocks. 
Google Reader Advances
I can’t say I was ever a big fan of Google Reader, it was just a little to weird for me. However, the new Google Reader seems to be more advanced and much nicer. I’m actually quite digging the simple interface, nice layout and the stared or shared items.The only thing missing is browser integration. I’d love to have it work with Firefox’s sidebar. I like my browser integration to much to navigate away from Sage (or Flock’s feed reader).
Another thing I’d like to see are feed fav icons. Flock has them and it’s really nice.
