Browser news

Regardless of where you are right now, if you do business with “the rest of the world” then you need to know what time it is everywhere. I do a lot of business with people in the UK, California and New York, and since my internal clock can only (just) deal with one time zone, I wanted a clean and elegant way to display several city times at once. The answer is Andy McDonald’s brilliant FoxClocks addon for Firefox. You can put it just about anywhere in any of your Firefox toolbars, and it can be easily customized to suit whatever time zones you need to keep an eye on.

Just when I was getting used to the horrible way that Windows 7 renders fonts, Firefox 4 has gone and made my life even more miserable. The default font rendering settings on Firefox 4 are jaggy and washed out, but luckily can easily be fixed by turning off hardware acceleration. To turn if off, untick the box in Options > Advanced > General > Use hardware acceleration when available, then restart Firefox. Here’s a before and after screenshot:

Unlike some browsers (yes, I’m talking about Firefox 3.5.x), Opera is actually getting better with every release. Opera’s new and improved features include:

• Opera Turbo – uses Opera proxy servers to compress traffic before it reaches the client computer
• Inline spell checker – spelling errors are now indicated as you type via a dotted red underline
• Tab Bar – can be used to show all open tabs as thumbnails
• Acid3 test – Opera 10 scores 100/100, pixel perfect on the Acid3 compliance test
• Auto updates
• Crashlogging tool

Download Opera 10 here.

Marc Gueury’s HTML Validator addon for Firefox is an incredibly useful tool for anyone wanting to write valid HTML (and that should be all of us!). The HTML Validator addon displays the number of errors on an HTML page in the status bar of your Firefox window, you can then simply click the HTML Validator icon to see detailed information about each error – including which line the error is on, and a basic suggestion on how to fix it.

Get it here.

I’ve just started using Firefox Personas – they’re a quick and simple way to customize the look of Firefox, and because they’re just a header image and a footer image, they’re incredibly easy to make. Get the Firefox addon here, and read a quick tutorial on how to create your own Personas here.

I’ve been using Safari 4 for Windows as my main browser for the last week, and the more I use it, the more I like it. Although it’s actually kinda useless, I really like the Cover Flow feature for viewing my top sites and history – it serves no purpose, and is slower and less intuitive than using a regular text list, but it sure it purdy.

If you’ve installed Safari, but never really explored its capabilities, then Apple’s “150 Features” page is an eye opener – check it out here.