le blog

IE7 CSS filters

I use the underscore filter to apply CSS styles to only IE browsers, but with the advent of IE7, that no longer works. Fun Fun. Thankfully with the help of the centricle CSS filters chart, I discovered a new asterisk hack that works for IE7-IE5. It doesn't work on IE5/Mac, which the underscore hack did, but i'm not really caring to support that browser anymore. Die IE5/Mac, die.

Unfortunately, I needed to use the asterisk hack for a Facebook app I am working on, but their parser doesn't allow the asterisk hack and filters it out. Ug.

My Firefox must-have plugins list

To follow-up on my previous post, here's some of my favorite Firefox extensions:

• Developer tools
  • Colorzilla
    • eye dropper to get the RGB color values of anything on your screen
  • CSSViewer
    • nifty CSS info for any element
  • Firebug
    • I couldn't live without it.
  • FirefoxView
    • This adds a "view in firefox" right-click menu option in IE
  • FoxyProxy
    • Flexible proxy rule generator
  • Header Monitor
    • Adds a field to the status bar that displays the value for any particular response header. I set it to the "Server:" field since I'm always curious what other sites are running
  • HTML Validator
    • Helpful in debugging back HTML
  • IE View
    • This adds a "view in IE" right-click menu option in Firefox
  • JSView
    • Allows you to easily see and view the .js/.css files on any particular page
  • Live HTTP Headers
    • Header sniffing galore
  • MeasureIt
    • Online ruler
  • Screen grab!
    • Allows for easy screen grabs.
  • ShowIP
    • Show the IP address of the current page in the status bar & allows querying services like DomainTools
  • User Agent Switcher
    • Need to spoof a browser/OS for testing? This will allow you to do it easily on the fly.
  • Web Developer
    • If I could only choose one extension to install, this would be it.
• User Interface enhancements
  • del.icio.us Firefox extension
  • DragNDrop Toolbars
  • FxIF
  • MR Tech Local Install
  • Opanda IExif
  • PopupSound

Reordering Firefox toolbars

The most annoying thing about Firefox is that you can't rearrange the toolbars. **beats head on desk** You can move individual bits and pieces of a toolbar, but not the entire toolbar.

For example, I have the Yahoo, Google and Web Developer toolbars installed. I like to have the Web Developer toolbar as the bottom-most toolbar, but there is no easy way to do it like in Internet Explorer. I stumbled upon this Firefox extension, DragNDrop Toolbars, yesterday who's sole purpose is to do just that. Hallelujah!

Disabling Firefox 2 image auto resize

Firefox 2 removed the image auto resize option from the options menu. If you're like me and don't like automatic resizing, here's how to get around it:

1. In the address bar, type "about:config" (without the quotes)
2. You'll see a whole list of preferences, and a "Filter:" field at the top. In the filter, type "browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing" (without the quotes)
3. You should only see that preference now. Double click on it and you will toggle to "value" column from true to false.
4. All done