User Agent Settings

admin — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:03:43 +0000

Ever wondered what the purpose of User Agent settings were for? Well it has changed over the years, and was used to determine what type of browser or service was accessing your website. Mainly it is used by people to determine what browser their main subscription base is using in order to tailor their website to that viewing. One thing that I have seen is that some people use a spoofed user agent setting are trying to see things that they only want a website crawler such as Google’s GoogleBot to view. This may be taking advantage of if they are showing the crawler special files that they may try to SEO optimize in order to get better ranking.

If you are looking to see whether or not the GoogleBot that has visited your site is legit, visit this list to check and see. Also, if you are looking to tweak your user agent settings (that I mentioned in my “Top Firefox Pluggins (Addons)”) through your Mozilla Firefox, download it here.

Make sure that you use the correctly formatted user agent information, which you can get a huge list here. For more information, please feel free to contact me with questions or tips.

Firefox vs IE

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:52:28 +0000

Who is better Firefox or Internet Explorer (IE)? Is it Internet Explorer or Firefox? Well a lot of people would like to think that Internet Explorer is/has caught up, but are wrong. Firefox is the more versatile browser and the reason is simple. Firefox is OPEN SOURCE! The amount of time it takes for things to be “fixed” in Internet Explorer or implement new ideas and deployed is much longer than Firefox. First let’s take a look at a few noticeable things, then get down to the some solid evidence.

Let’s go ahead and use Internet Explorer 7 as our comparison. The implementation of Tabs is GREAT! but it is in response to Firefox already having tabs implemented. Use both to visit a webpage and you will see both block a popup. But visit a few hundred webpages that have popups, and you will notice that Firefox will block more, if not all of them, compared to Internet Explorer. A lot of people may not be used to keyboard shortcuts to create a new tab for Firefox, but if they did a little tinkering with it, they would realize click right next to an open tab will open up another tab, the same as Internet Explorer. But even more important is how Firefox implements addins, etc. allowing greater versatility with neat plugins that developers from ANYWHERE can develop and release, unlike Internet Explorer which is a closed source application, so developing plugins, etc. is a virtual pain in the ass. Firefox also allows you to change the look of your UI with different themes, does IE?

Let’s get into some hard evidence now. From the Associated Press I bring you two snippets of articles. Author ANICK JESDANUN wrote the article, “A leading printer maker wants to help you do less printing.“. Two excerpts from the article are:

The Web software also extends the “printer-friendly” features many sites offer. Often those printer-friendly versions still carry logos and other graphics; the Lexmark tools let you eliminate those as well.
…
Lexmark has versions available for both Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers.

The Firefox version offers more functions. Lexmark says Firefox users tend to be more technically advanced, and thus open to more customization. While the Internet Explorer tool lets you eliminate images, for instance, the Firefox version lets you remove forms, links and other elements, too.

Read the last paragraph? Need I say more? Probably not, but here is another example from author JORDAN ROBERTSON who wrote the article,”Researchers offer new way to avoid bogus Web sites“. Here is a snippet from their article:

Intercepting Internet traffic, and spying on the communication between two computers, is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they’ve built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot.
The software, a free download for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they’re trying to visit is authentic.

Simply put, the researchers are Carnegie Mellon were able to implement a solution to their findings quickly through Firefox because it is open source. No mention of Internet Explorer is stated in the article.

The new version of IE8 beta is released, and looks to be some competition to Firefox. But by the time the stable version is released, my guess is that whatever security features and extra functions are to win back market share for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox will have already included it in a release or tweaked it so it works a little better.

Optimize Your Web » internet explorer

User Agent Settings

Firefox vs IE