Ie | Technology Blog

Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: RoboForm

December 17th, 2008

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Day 17 of the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. The giveaway is slowly reaching the end with another week to go before it closes its door for this year on December 24. Today’s application is the popular password manager, note taking and form filler RoboForm.

RoboForm is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems and can be installed directly, on a USB device or on mobile devices such as Windows Mobile, Symbian or Blackberry. The software integrates nicely with web browsers like Firefox, IE or AOL / MSN and displays a toolbar that provides access to all the application’s functions and there is also a System Tray icon providing the same.

The password manager will automatically catch data that is entered in password forms and provides the means to store those passwords in the application so that it can be used to automatically log into the website or service.

Internet Explorer Runonce Loop

December 15th, 2008

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IE’s Runonce page can cause some of the most annoying problems for Internet users. It was designed to give users the chance to configure some of the settings after the first start of IE. It is basically a form that has to be completed so that the Runonce page will not be displayed on consecutive runs of IE.

Many users fail to notice this and wonder why the Runonce page instead of their homepage is always showing up when they start Microsoft IE. The reason for this is simply. IE keeps a record if the form on the runonce page has been filled by the user. If that is not the case it will be displayed again which can be very annoying especially if you do not realize that you have to fill the form.

The Runonce page will also be displayed after resetting IE settings. Some users encountered an even bigger problem as the Runonce page was not displayed correctly on their systems. This made it impossible to fill out the form so that the page would not be displayed the next time they would start IE.

Web Browser Benchmark Comparison

December 14th, 2008

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Several new web browser versions have been released in the last days which made it important to benchmark the latest official versions and the latest development versions of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, IE and Opera to see how the browsers compare to each other. All browsers were installed on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 test system.

The browsers were tested running the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, Kane’s Web Browser Javascript Benchmark and the Acid 3 test. Feel free to run the tests with your web browsers but note that results will vary as the computer’s hardware influences the test on different systems.

The only way to compare results is by running the tests on the same computer system using the same environment. The first two tests are testing the JavaScript engine of the web browser while the Acid3 test is a web standards test.

Effective Secure Cookie Management

December 10th, 2008

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How would an effective and secure cookie management look like? Most users would probably answer that it would make use of whitelists, blacklists and temporary cookies. The whitelist would contain trusted sites that require cookies to function properly. Trust would mean that you would keep the cookies on your system even after closing the session to make it comfortable working with the website.

The blacklist would contain websites that should not be allowed to place cookies on the user’s system. A die hard approach would be to start every new site in the blacklist and move it to either the temporarily allowed sites or the whitelist when needed.

The temporary list would contain sites that would require cookies to work properly but that are not trusted enough - or where it is not necessary - to be placed in the whitelist.

Copy Selected Links Internet Explorer

December 9th, 2008

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One of the main areas that Microsoft is lacking behind with IE in comparison to browsers like Opera or Firefox is the extensibility. Yes, there are plugins for IE but the community is not thriving like those of the other browsers. The main reason might be that it is more difficulty to create plugins for IE.

The lack of plugins can be problematic if you have to use IE due to work policies. The Copy Selected Links plugin for IE makes it a little bit easier to copy multiple links (via Shellcity) of a page.

The plugin installs itself automatically to the right-click context menu of IE and becomes automatically active whenever at least one link is selected. Links can be selected with the left mouse button easily. Every link that has been selected will be copied to the Windows Clipboard when the option is selected from the right-click menu.

Internet Explorer Sessions

December 2nd, 2008

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Working on multiple computers or on several days on one computer makes the use of sessions useful. The IE Sessions extensions IE Sessions (via IESessions: save and retrieve your sessions on IE ) adds that capability to Microsoft IE. It is always up to the software developer what a session truly consists of, in this case it means that all open urls and windows will be saved with the ability to open them again at a later time.

Not included are the browsing history or session cookies which is a bit unfortunate as it could mean to log into several of the websites again if they require that. The extension becomes available in the Tools menu of IE after installation where the sessions can be stored or loaded.

The IE sessions are stored in the program directory by default. The extension provides the option to store them at the Amazon S3 Service instead which costs $0.150 per GB but has the advantage that the sessions are available online and can therefor be loaded from any computer with Internet connection.

Another option would be to send the session per email or upload it manually to the Internet to access it from a second computer.