Improving Firefox usability

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Firefox is a good browser, but there are some small parts that have always bothered me when I use it. Keyboard shortcuts – they don’t really work Lack of mouse gestures out of the box Weird tab behavior These mostly come from the fact that I’m used to Opera, which does these things a little differently – and in my …

Accessible and effective CAPTCHA

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I’ve visited the topic of different CAPTCHA methods for checking that the user sending data is a human being in a couple of occasions in the past. There’s usually a slight problem with accessibility and ease of use in some methods – take the typical image-based CAPTCHA as an example: How would you use it with a text-only browser, or …

The art of finding information

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For a programmer, finding information is important. Not just finding information about code, such as while debugging, but finding information in general. Suppose you need to write a client which talks to a server with sockets, but you don’t know how sockets work in your programming language of choice. This is something quite typical, and even if you’ve been programming …

I like pie… menus

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Pie, just like pie menus, is great. What is a “pie menu”? If you don’t play games, you might not be very familiar with this great type of menu, as it isn’t really used anywhere outside games as far as I know. Pie menu is a menu, which opens around your cursor, or crosshair in games, and shows menu items …

The future of browser widgets

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My definition of a widget: a small web application inside your browser. Opera has had widgets for a while now, and I’m sure Firefox has a plugin which provides similar features. But what is the future of widgets? I’m a widget developer – I have made quite many widgets and even made money with them – yet I don’t even …

Are spammers masking themselves with innocent posts?

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I had recently been getting increased amounts of spam comments and I was wondering why. You probably hadn’t noticed this, though, thanks to WordPress’ excellent spam detection which has so far made a very good job in detecting suspicious comments. Up until today. Today, a single spam comment got through the detection. I had received comments exactly like this one …

Is targeting a single browser okay?

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When I encounter a website which is broken in Opera, my browser of choice, I hate it. I know that Opera is perfectly capable of displaying any site Firefox or Internet Explorer can. It makes me feel like lecturing whoever made the site about cross-browser compatibility, valid XHTML, valid CSS, you name it. But if you think about it, is …

Localize your site in 3 easy steps

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Internationalization and localization means making your site usable in more than one languages. Well, to be honest, you could call a site that’s only in english localized to english visitors too, but in any case… These two are also known as I18N and L10N. Can you guess where these acronyms come from? The first and last letter from each word …

The mythical HTTP protocol

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The HTTP protocol is what powers todays web. While not useful for most people, knowing how HTTP works is important for those who work with dynamic web sites. Still, it seems that the protocol is mostly a mystery to a lot of developers and some features of the protocol, such as the accept-language header, aren’t really used.

More problems related to tagging things

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Originally posted in my old blog at My Opera Tagging. Everyone's doing it. It's great for categorizing things like blogposts or photos into related groups. Here's even more tagging issues! :whistle: Tagging in general, tag clouds and social problems. Whoa.