The latest version of Flash keeps crashing on me in Google Chrome in many different web pages. Why? I have no idea. Surely Adobe has had many years to stabilize it.
Lots of the pop-up dialogs I'm getting ("The following plug-in is unresponsive: Shockwave Flash" "Would you like to stop it?") about it dying are for advertisements running on some page I'm reading. So it isn't like Flash is doing me any favors being there. Crashing for ads.
Occasionally I want to watch some video that is in Flash. So I need Flash for that. For Firefox at least there's the Flashblock plug-in that'll block flash until you want it to run. So you can avoid the crashes by avoiding Flash except when you need it.
Granted, Steve Jobs wants developers to write apps that only run on Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Sure, he's just trying to maximize his profits. But here's the thing: He's right about Flash. It really is a browser-destabilizing pain in the ass. It is more than annoying. If you have lots of web pages open then all those Flash instances are all eating CPU time. Plus, they can all just start crashing. Jobs has users who just want stuff to work. They do not have a techie's tolerance of flakey software that is cool. Less techie people get flummoxed by things that do not work. Failures throw them for a loop. They do not feel one with their device. They want their device to be totally trusthworthy. Running Flash is way less than totally trustworthy.
Flash was invented in the late 1990s. Here we are in 2010 and it is crashing on me on different versions of Windows and different browsers (I run about 3 different Windows versions and 3 browsers with many tabs open at times). The stuff should just work by now. Adobe has a big income stream and lots of developers. Their crap should just work and work extremely reliably. But it doesn't. Oh, and it shouldn't be a CPU sucker.
Bottom line: I want HTML 5 and better browsers to crush Flash with some help from Steve Jobs. Adobe has had enough time to make it work reliably. They've failed.
Update: I've just installed FlashBlock for Google Chrome. Will report back on whether it works well.
For years now I've wanted a browser to provide a way to search inside of list boxes. Why? When writing web log entries the ability to search in a list box can make it a lot faster to go fix typos I see on my web site posts. I just updated Mozilla SeaMonkey (which is patterned after the suite approach of classic Netscape with the email built into the browser) to v1.0.1. Well, by accident I wasn't paying attention and tried to search on a web page where I had a list box with lots of text in it and low and behold. The search took me to a line in the listbox. Great!
Anyway, check out the latest version of SeaMonkey. It keeps getting better. If you have been using classic Mozilla v1.7.x or earlier SeaMonkey is basically the upgrade to that.
The folks at Mozilla have released Mozilla v1.5, Firebird v0.7, and Thunderbird (an email client) v0.3. I'm using Thunderbird v0.2 for most of my email accounts and expect v0.3 will be pretty good. Also, Firebird is my favorite browser though I also use Mozilla, Opera, and occasionally MS IE on those rare occasions (maybe twice a year) when I hit a web page that is not compatible with the other browsers..
The ability of Mozilla and Firebird to block pop-ups makes them worth using for that reason alone. Also, the tabbed browsing feature is incredibly useful, especially the implementation in Firebird where any bookmark folder can have all its entries open at once in tabs. Unfortunately, the Mozilla implementation of tabbed browsing and bookmarks will only work with folders specifically created for opening in tabs.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is such an on-going target for hacker attacks that advice to use non-IE browsers on the public internet seems very prudent.
"But another idea is to use a non-vulnerable browser," such as Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, or Opera. The Internet Explorer vulnerability "will be a constant avenue of attack, so it's a good idea, and common sense, to have a multiple-browser setup, just in case," he said. "Enterprises could continue to use IE for trusted sites or internally, and another browser to reach external or questionable sites. It would be the best of both worlds."
My favorite browser is Mozilla Firebird. I go to hundreds of sites with it and rarely encounter incompatibilities. I fire up MS IE about two or three times a year to deal with site incompatibilities. Check out my Browser Downloads section in the right hand column of the main site page for other choices.
Are you using some prehistoric era browser? Time to upgrade! The open source Mozilla v1.4 is released on many operating systems. Also, Netscape browsers are built from the Mozilla browser source code with some added extras and you can now upgrade to the Netscape version 7.1 that is based on Moz v1.4. One of the nicest features of these browsers is control of pop-up advertisements.
Popup Controls help you stop popups from taking over your browsing experience. (Popups are small windows that are served by various web sites and are often unsolicited.) The feature can be turned on from the tools menu. Additional settings in Preferences give you personalized control so you can "allow" popups that may be needed by an individual web site.
Mozilla and Netscape have improvements on their junk mail filtering capabilities.
Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a "delete junk mail" menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
The Bayesian spam detection filter that was introduced into Mozilla v1.3 is now available on Netscape v7.1 as well. You will find more on Netscape v7.1 at Netscape DevEdge.
This release of Netscape represents a lot more than the v7.0 to v7.1 minor rev number change suggests. The underlying Mozilla source code has gone from v1.0 to v1.4 and that is a huge jump in terms of speed, bugginess, and features. Check out the discussion on Mozillazine on the Netscape v7.1 release. You web site developers please note the optional Developer Pack which includes the rather useful Venkman Javascript Debugger. See this list of advantages in v7.1 for web developers.
My favorite browser remains Mozilla Firebird (which was formerly known as Phoenix). With the latest Mozilla version now released we can shortly expect to see a new Mozilla Firebird release v0.7 that incorporates all of the v1.4 code. If you want to get the latest Firebird and don't mind living dangerously with nightly builds (and TechiePundit does live dangerously with nightly builds himself) then try the most recent Firebird nighly build.
Firebird does not come with an email program built in. If you want to get an email client to complement the Mozilla Firebird browser then try out Mozilla Thunderbird.
If you are still using an old Netscape version then it is time to move up. Any time I see a Netscape v4.x browser show up in my web logs I think "there's a person who needs my help if I only knew how to reach him". Your plight is heart wrenching. Please upgrade. If you have been using MS Internet Explorer then why not check out a browser that comes with many features that Microsoft doesn't deign to provide to its customers? The Mozilla project and the browsers that are built off it have made tremendous strides over the last few years. The results are worth a try.
The Opera browser is now available at version 7.11 for Linux and for Windows. If you are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer and have not used another browser for years then Opera is a good one to check out.
If you are still using Netscape v4.x then either move to the latest Netscape v7.x or try Opera or try one of the other newer browsers mentioned on this blog.
Mozilla Firebird (formerly known as Phoenix) version 0.6 has been released. Even though Firebird still has not had a version 1.0 release it is remarkably stable and not buggy. This is my favorite browser. Builds are available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2, Solaris, BeOS, and AIX.
Unfortunately there is not a Firebird build available for it for older Mac OS users. If you want to use a Mozilla-based browser on Mac 0S v9.x your best bet is the Mozilla v1.2.1 release for Mac OS. If you prefer to use the regular Netscape releases then you can also download the latest Netscape v7.0x for the Mac. Another browser that will work with Mac OS v9.x is the Opera v6.02 release.
The larger assortment of browser choices available for Mac OS X is a compelling reason for Mac OS v9.x and earlier Mac OS users to upgrade to Mac OS X.
Here is a list of advantages for alternatives to Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The v1.4b version of the Mozilla browser has been released. Also, the Phoenix browser (my own personal favorite browser) is being renamed to Mozilla Firebird. The latest Mozilla Firebird nightly builds are built using the Mozilla v1.4b source code. So download Firebird now and you will also get the latest Mozilla Gecko rendering engine fixes and improvements. Firebird's latest nightlies appear to be working quite well in my own experience. Firebird's ability to prevent advertisement pop-ups alone makes it worth switching to. But it also has great tabbed browsing support and other useful features.
For those unfamiliar with the Mozilla project: Netscape v6 and later versions are built using the Mozilla open source browser project as the base source code. By using the Mozilla browser you get what is basically a slightly stripped down version of Netscape. Netscape does not release browser versions as often as the Mozilla source code comes out in major revs. So if you download Mozilla you will usually get a much newer browser with more neat features.
Other browsers are also constructed using the Mozilla source code as the starting point. See, for example, K-Meleon and also Chimera for the Macintosh (and Chimera is changing its name to Camino). The latest Camino nightly build for Mac OS X is available here. You can find links to all the Mozilla-based browsers here.
If you are using an older browser then for security reasons you should move to a newer browser. If you are using Netscape v4.x or earlier you ought to try a more modern browser. If you are using MS Internet Explorer you ought to check out the features available in other browsers. The other browsers have advantages that make me prefer them very much over IE.
Mozilla has released a new version of their browser. Mozilla version 1.4a is released. I haven't run it long enough to comment on its stability. But its had a lot of stability fixes added since 1.3 was released. Therefore one can't take its Alpha status as necessarily meaning that it is less stable than v1.3. From the Release Notes:
What's New in Mozilla 1.4a
- Mozilla 1.4 contains about 1000 new bugfixes, including changes to improve performance, stability, web site compatability, standards support, and usability.
- Mozilla's bookmarks have been overhauled. Bookmarks now include a root level folder, the ability to have two differently named bookmarks pointing at the same location, site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels.
- Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
- Mozilla now has smooth scrolling. It is disabled by default. To enable it, use about:config to add the boolean preference general.smoothScroll with a value of true. To disable smooth scrolling, set the value of the pref to false.
- Mail now has junk-mail context menu items, a "delete junk mail" menu item and many other usability improvements for junk-mail controls.
- Pop-up blocking has been streamlined to improve usability.
- XPInstall and theme install for Mac OS X has been restored.
Mozilla has released a new version of their browser. Mozilla version 1.3 is downloadable for Windows, OS/2 (I know OS/2 users exist because I see them in my site logs), Linux, BeOS (if BeOS users exist they are extremely rare), Mac OS X, and Solaris. By the time you check it is possible that additional operating systems will have been added. If you have not yet tried Mozilla or Phoenix and still find yourself using Netscape v4.x or MS Internet Explorer then its time to try a new browser and see what you are missing.
I am also currently running a nightly build of the Phoenix browser. If you download a nightly it isn't guaranteed to work. But I find most do. Otherwise you can download a release build. But, hey, try living dangerously now and then.
What I especially like about Phoenix and Mozilla is the ability to turn off pop-up ads. Plus, their support for tabbed browsing is extremely great for those of us who visit large numbers of news site and blog web pages. Also, they are more threaded. Something happening while loading one page is less likely to prevent you from doing things on other pages. Similarly, operations on bookmark folders don't lock you out of doing other things. Moz and Phoenix feel more responsive than IE for this reason.
Opera Software has released the second beta of the web browser Opera 7 for Windows. Note that it appears to be called b1b instead of b2. With all of about 10 minutes using it with a couple dozen pages open it appears to work okay. If you are heavy browser user and all you know is MS IE it might be worth your while to give Opera a try. My favorite browser is Mozilla at this point but Opera is coming along quite nicely.
Update: Two things annoy me about v7 as compared to v5: First, it doesn't have a Go button to the right of the URL control. Second, if you right click in the URL control the pop-up does not have the Cut/Copy/Paste options. So one has to use the keyboard more when copying and pasting in and out of URL control. If you want to grab a URL out of a control to, say, put in a blog post its more work to move from mousing to keyboarding to to it.
I ought to go to their news server and complain about this.
Update II: The correct file to download is ow32enen700b2j.exe (thanks to DJ SkaM for pointing out the difference). The File I originally downloaded really was for beta 1b. My guess is that I downloaded it so soon after beta 2 was announced that b2 hadn't propagated out to the servers yet. Beta 2 does fix the ability to right click on the URL control to do Copy/Cut/Paste on it. Though it still does not have the Go button.
Mozillazine has links to various places to download it. You might be asking how could 1.3a come out so soon after 1.2. Well, 1.2 branched off the main trunk a couple of months ago (August? I forget) and lots of stuff has been getting added to the main trunk since it did. So when 1.3 comes out as an alpha it really has a lot more feature changes to it than you'd expect given the time interval between 1.2 and 1.3a. I haven't downloaded it yet. The release notes don't have anything particularly exciting in them (at least to me - though if you use Moz mail and news you might feel otherwise) and so I'll probably wait till 1.3b before trying out 1.3 builds.
The v0.5 Naples rev of the Phoenix browser is released. If you are upgrading pay very careful attention to the release notes:
PLEASE NOTE: You should create a new profile for Phoenix 0.5. To create a new profile, start Phoenix by running phoenix.exe -ProfileManager and click on the "Create Profile" button. If you don't want to delete your old profile and are willing to incur the risk of new bugs, you should at least delete your profile's downloads.rdf file. You must also delete your old Phoenix directory rather than just overwriting the files there. Not doing so WILL result in problems and you should not file any bugs on Phoenix unless you've first done a clean install and tested on a new profile. As Phoenix stabilizes more this will not be necessary but until then these steps are absolutely necessary.
The release notes page above has links to downloadable files for Windows and Linux. Also, Mozillazine points to another location to download them.
What I do right after installing and starting Phoenix for the first time: Choose View | Toolbars | Customize. Then drag the Go button up to the right of the URL control. This gives you the Go button that all browsers normally have. Then click Done.
The next thing to do is to get a better theme for the appearance of Phoenix. You can choose to directly install the theme. Once it has completed you need to go into Tools | Preferences | Themes and Extensions. Your new theme should show up on the list. Choose it and click Okay and Phoenix should change to that theme. Mozilla has to be restarted to make a new theme take effect but with Phoenix it happens instantly. If you download a theme as a Jar and the choice you use does not install it into your browser then you can use this form to automate the install process.
Note that you can import Mozilla bookmarks from the bookmarks.html file in the bookmarks manager. Or you can copy the Mozila (or Netscape) bookmarks.html file on top of the bookmarks.html for the Phoenix profile. Look for these files in your OS install drive on Windows.
Note that the Phoenix name is going to be changed. It is surprising to me that they released v0.5 without first changing the name.
Update: Anyone know any OS/2 users? I know they exist because I see them occasionally in my Parapundit.com site web logs. Haven't seen an OS/2 entry on TechiePundit for a while though. But get this: There is now an OS/2 Phoenix build downloadable from the release notes page at the top of this post (it wasn't on that page originally). If anyone knows any rare endangered species OS/2 users please tell them to go download the build for Phoenix v0.5. It would be nice if whoever is taking the time to make OS/2 builds would get to have his builds used by real OS/2 users.
Go here to get the Mozilla 1.2 release.
Also, Phoenix 0.5 is going to be released using Moz 1.2 source code and will be out next week. The name is being changed to some other name for legal reasons. New name has not yet been announced.
Update: You might want to wait a day and get the Mozilla 1.2.1 rev that fixes a few last minute regression problems. Though I'm using 1.2 without any problems myself.
UPDATE: Mozilla 1.2.1 is now released. Get 1.2.1 rather than 1.2.
If you want to get out close to the cutting edge in Mozilla browsing the run-up to the v1.2 release means that daily builds are being done on a branch that is very stable. Try out a build from here.
If you have ever wanted to put a different skin or appearance on a browser you might want to try the theme that I've just installed on the latest Mozilla nightly build: Orbit 3+1 1.2.0.0.6.5-dev. You can find it here. I used the second choice that is compatible with Mozilla v1.2 and v1.3 and also with Phoenix 0.3/0.4.
You can find more themes on Mozdev and on Deskmod.
Update: If you want the icons to be really small and to make as much room as possible for the viewed page then try the Little Phoenix theme. I have it installed right now on the Phoenix v0.4 and while the text on the menu bar and pop-down lists is small its readable. The Wood theme also makes the browser's menu bar text and tab text smaller. I think its grainy word background makes the text a bit harder to read though.
I like the way the MozDev site organizes themes. If you want to see all the themes that are compatible with a particular browser then note the little set of icons right above the Themes text in the right hand column. You can click to see only themes that are compatible with your particular Mozilla family browser. For instance, click here for the Phoenix browser themes.
If you are using Macintosh check out the Chimera browser. Its written on top of the Mozilla Gecko source code but with a different user interface.
Its finally here! Go download and give it a whirl. I'm downloading from the US web site and its coming down at 9 kb/sec which is a good order of magnitude slower than my web connection. So a lot of people are going after it at the moment.
From the Opera News page here are a few of the improvements:
The standards support in Opera 7 for Windows Beta 1 has been improved with added support for DOM level 2 and CSS2; improved ECMAScript and HTML 4.01 support; and complete WML 1.3 and 2.0 support. Opera 7 also handles non-standard pages using DHTML, giving Opera's millions of old and new users a hassle-free Internet experience.
Also, Opera has released a version of their browser for FreeBSD.
I'll come back and update this post once I have some experience using it.
Update: Its fast, small, and pretty. I've taken it to perhaps 100 pages so far with no crashes or rendering problems. It has a new email client that sounds interesting. All email from all accounts are accessible via a single database structure that can sort and search on any number of characteristics (eg like who it is from). One problem I see with it is that while it has a spam filter there is just 3 levels of filtering and so far I haven't found anything about user-programmable spam filters.
On the XUL Planet site Neil Deakin has listed 101 advantages of Mozilla over Microsoft Internet Explorer. I've excerpted the first 10 here. Go to this link for the full list.
- Tabbed browsing
Lets you display more than one site in a window using multiple tabs. - Popup blocking
Block all those popup ads. - Prevent scripts from doing various things
such as moving windows, closing them and setting cookies. - Link toolbar
Displays content from the <link> tags provided by a document, allowing one to navigate to various parts of a site. - Sidebar
The sidebar provides a number of tabs by default, and others can be added by the user. - Can add custom panels to sidebar
Custom sidebars can be implemented in HTML or XUL and can be installed from a remote site without much hassle. - More control over text zooming
Can zoom text to any size. IE only supports five sizes and has no shortcut keys that I could determine. - Can zoom any text, even that with fixed pixel sizes
Can zoom text no matter what units were specified. - Can select from multiple stylesheets provided by page
When a page provides multiple (or alternate) stylesheets, one can select between them by choosing from the View menu. - Page info dialog
Provides additional information about encoding, MIME type, referrer and meta tags.
There are Mozilla features on this list that I was unaware of. So even if you are a Mozilla user you may find that the list is worth a perusal. For instance, the ability to select between different style sheets for a site is a cool feature. Now that I know about it I'm going to try to develop multiple stylesheets for my 4 web logs. Also, the feature for searching thru bookmarks was one I was unaware of. I just tried it and it is quite handy. Plus, he says there is a way to bookmark a group of tabs and then open them as a group. I want to figure out how that is done.
Update On how to use Bookmark Tab Groups: Open a Mozilla window. Open a bunch of tabs on different pages. Then click on Bookmarks on the menu bar and choose "Bookmark this group of tabs" from the pop-down list. Then in the dialog box that pops up type in a name for the group and select a folder to put it in. Then when you click on that group all those pages will open up in a set of tabs. That is very cool. Just be aware that there doesn't appear to be a way to select a subset of tabs from all the open tabs for a given Moz window. So think about what you want to have in the group and get only those pages open.
Phoenix is a browser built on top of a large chunk of the Mozilla source code. Mozilla is the open source browser development project that Netscape v6.x and later (now at some v7.x rev) is made from. Mozilla without the Netcape/AOL "enhancements" is available for download. Mozilla is my own favorite browser and at the moment I'm using the 2002110610 nightly build.
If you want to download and install the newest release version of Mozilla then go here for Mozilla Release builds and choose the highest version number directory. Then choose what looks like it is for your operating system (win32 is for all of Win98, WinME, NT, Win2k, Win XP). At the moment as I type this the newest Mozilla is v1.2b. But v1.2 will be out any week now.
If you want to be more cutting edge and install the latest Mozilla nightly build then go here for Mozilla nightly builds and again choose what looks like it is for your operating system.
But this post is really about Phoenix. Phoenix is a project to build a better front-end on the Mozilla page rendering source code. To find out where to download it and how to install it read the Phoenix release notes at this page. It seems pretty stable to me after a couple of hours of beating on it with lots of page visits.
Phoenix has a nice facility for blocking pop-up ads. It lets you control by URL site which sites can do pop-ups.
For another browser built on top of the Mozilla source code you can also try K-Meleon which is also built using a lot of the Mozilla source code but with yet another different UI. I haven't tried K-Meleon yet but they just released their v0.7 rev and it is built on top of the Mozilla v1.2b source code base.
For Mac users there is a different project to use the Mozilla Gecko source code to build a better browser. You can download Chimera here.
Update: I've been running Phoenix v0.4 continuously for two days now with many pages visited without any crashes, It seems pretty solid. My complaints about it: It doesn't have the left side panel view of bookmarks (at least not that I can find) that IE, Mozilla, and Opera have. It just has the old Netscape v4.x pop-down style. Also, filing a bookmark when the whole bookmark folder tree becomes visible on the pop-down combo list is not easy. It does have a nice feature for controlling pop-up ads though.
In the year 2002 in a review comparing AOL 8 with MSN 8 we see what AOL brings out as a technological advance. I didn't realize that AOL customers had been suffering that much from using AOL:
Another long overdue fix addresses interrupted Internet connections. In the past, users whose connections were cut -- either because of an overloaded network or to make a telephone call -- lost the Web page they were visiting.
It was a big time waster. Users had to log back on and retrace their steps to their original location online.
Now, I'm pleased to see that Web pages remain onscreen after the telephone connection is cut. All I had to do was log back on before carrying on as if I had never left.
Tens of millions of AOL users have been putting up with this problem in previous versions. The mind boggles.
Mozilla is the open source browser development project that produces the source code that Netscape v6 and later are based upon. I personally use the Mozilla browser rather than the Netscape one. There are a couple of reasons for that choice:
- Netscape installs a bunch of annoying AOL stuff that I don't want to have popping up in my face.
- Mozilla is rev'ved more often and I like to stay up with the latest versions.
Mozilla has been my primary browser since about its v0.97 release. The latest release v1.2b is available here.
George Roettger of nthelp.com recommended that I try Crazy Browser. Well, I did and its not bad. It has the tabbed window support that Mozilla and Netcape 7.0 has but Crazy Browser uses the MS IE browser engine DLLs.
I've only been using it for an afternoon and so my impressions of Crazy represent a limited amount of use so far. Here's what I don't like about it:
- Right click on a link gives an "Open in New Window" that really opens in a new tab. One can't choose between opening in a new tab vs opening in a new window. With Mozilla that choice is available.
- Running on top of IE5.5 sp2 its threading does not feel as finely granular as Mozilla does. It gets into modes where for several seconds its not responsive while it does some operation. For instance in Mozilla if one page is loading slowly one can click quickly to switch to a different tab and read the page already loaded in the second tab while waiting for the first tab's new page to finish loading. Well, Crazy Browser will delay many seconds before making the switch. This poor ability to switch to view something else while an operation is happening is similar straight IE5.5. I haven't spent enough time yet with IE6 to say whether its ability to switch btw threads while doing tasks in one thread is any more finely grained.
- The "Close Current" button which closes the current tab is small and right next two buttons that close more than just the current tab. Its too easy to click the wrong button and lose a lot of tab windows. On the other hand its "Undo" functions will let you undo the close of tabbed window and even larger sets of undos of closed windows.
Its tabbed window behavior has some differences with Mozilla but nothing hard to adjust to. If you are currently using IE the Crazy Browser downoad is less than 700k and is worth a try. Its not going to replace Mozilla as my chief browser but I will use Crazy Browser whereever I currently use IE.
I don't mind ads that are images. Its the flashing that I can't stand. The flashing makes it hard to concentrate. What I really want is to be able to right click over an ad and be able to choose an option called "Stop Animation". Mozilla 1.1 doesn't have this option but it does have another: Right click over a flashing ad and choose the option "Block images from this server". Then reload the page. This just worked to make a flashing ad disappear for me the first time I tried it.
Of course some sites constantly change the ad URLs and have many different servers with different URLs serving ads. So this method is not perfect. But it looks like it can at least reduce the amount of flashing one has to experience.
You can download Mozilla v1.1 here.
I've been looking at visitor logs and am amazed to see MSIE 4.0 and 5.0 showing up. If you are running a fairly old IE version and want to upgrade to a newer version (and there are good security reasons for doing so) then an easy way to do that is to go to the Windows Update page on the MS site and go thru the fairly automated update process. It also will analyze your machine and tell you what security updates they have for it that you can have installed automatically. Its a wise thing to do. You shouldn't be out cruising the net with all sorts of old security holes unpatched.
Note as well that IE6 has sp1 out and IE5.5 sp2 has security patches that go beyond the sp2 level.
One other thing: I do not test my sites against anything older than IE5.5 and have no idea what IE 5.0 or 4.0 does with the style sheets that are used on the site. One person gave me a rather sketchy report of my blogs looking really bad on Mac IE 5.0. I have no way to test that and would suggest that anyone at IE5.0 or earlier upgrade (or install Opera or Moz).
I do most of my work on this site using Mozilla 1.1. I also check it against Opera 5 and IE 5.5. If you want to find Moz or Opera then check out my earlier link about Mozilla and other browsers.
I've been making changes to administration form templates for MovableType blogging software. Well, in order to make a change you first have to figure out the existing form and which fields in the HTML show up where in the rendered page. It would be nice to be able to right click over a control and see that control's NAME and other tag fields. Basically, make it easier to find the underlying location in the HTML that is responsible for a given location on the rendered form. Mozilla has a Properties option. But it doesn't tell the control name and it doesn't for instance say that it is a TEXTAREA control. Instead it gives a DOM element name of HTMLInputElement. Not so helpful.
Another thing that would be nice would be traceability back from the HTML to whatever CSS tags are being used to set attributes of the given control or screen area.
There are existing software systems that are HTML based. For instance, the MovableType that I (along with many others) use for blogging is written in Perl and generates HTML forms for its admin interface. The admin forms have a lot of functionality and I think MovableType is fairly good overall. But there are controls on some forms that I wish were a lot richer in functionality.
For instance, I'm typing this post into an HTML TEXTAREA control. If I right click on the control there is no Search option to search for a piece of text in the control. So if I saw a typo in the posted version of this while looking at my blog main page I'd still have to visually scan for it in the editing form. Well, it would be nice to able to override the TEXTAREA control and tell Mozilla (which is the browser I'm using) to use some other functionally richer control for any control on any page that calls out TEXTAREA. Then I'd be able to use a control that had a spell checker, a search facility, and even some macro defineable keys to make it easier to insert common text strings into my posts (eg the skeleton of an A HREF open and close tag pair). One could even add a TEXTAREA control that was a full HTML editor.
One advantage of being able to tell the browser to use some richer version of TEXTAREA is that one doesn't have to have access to the source code of the server app that generates the pages in order to enhance the functionality of the pages.
Of course browsers would need a plug-in facility that allowed users to add replacement versions of common controls. One way to do that which would be portable would be to allow replacement HTML controls to be coded in Java.
You can download Mozilla v1.1 here.
Mozilla is currently my favorite browser. Once it gained the tabbed browsing feature its greater standards compliance as compared to Opera caused me to switch to Moz for most of my browsing. If you haven't tried Mozilla at all or haven't tried it recently I would suggest taking it out for a spin. Its only a 10 meg download for Windows. Builds are available for most other operating systems as well.
Opera v7's release is getting close and it will usher in full DOM support and other improvements in standards support. I believe its a major rewrite of their rendering engine. So if Opera v7 maintains Opera's its advantage in lower memory usage it will be worth a try.
While I haven't tried it BroadPage looks interesting. Its a free browser built on top of IE that supports tabbed browsing. You will find a link to download BroadPage here too.
Also, for tabbed browsing you can check out (and I have not tried) IE plugins that give IE that capability. Surftabs is free and its even open source. Netcaptor costs $29.95 and works only with IE 4 and 5. Surftabs is worth a try IMO.