Calyx Labs Blog

Turn Firefox 3's Location Bar Yellow at https://

One noticeable change between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 is the yellow address bar background, which turned on in Firefox 2 when you visited encrypted web sites-the ones that start with https://. After much debate among the developers, Firefox 3 dropped that visual cue, but on Windows, with a little


						userChrome.css

tweak, you can have that yellow background back. Here's how.

If you've got the Stylish extension installed, you can simply add a new style that contains:

#urlbar[level] .autocomplete-textbox-container {
background-color: #FFFFB7 !important;
}

Calyx Labs Search

Saturday June 14, 2008 | Calyx Labs

Here is our newly added feature to our website all new Search Page which search the overall site and displays the result Calyx Labs Search

PHP Speedy: Boosting Web Site Faster

PHP Speedy is a PHP script by aciddrop.com that can increase your web site loading time by as much as 500%.

The key to this decrease in loading time is "making fewer HTTP requests, adding a far-future expires header, gzipping your page's components, and minifying your JavaScript, CSS and HTML". PHP Speedy accomplishes all of these techniques.

Now, there is also a PHP Speedy Wordpress plugin available. It would be interesting to see a comparison between PHP Speedy and WP Super Cache.

Personally, I haven't tested PHP Speedy, but it looks promising. Let me know if you have tried PHP Speedy and what your results are.

Creating Different CSS Style Selector

Microsoft is slowly moving towards compliance. The fact that they are not doing so quickly presents an unnecessary challenge to content creators and CSS authors because previously created hacks will not work, and new bugs may arise from the changes that are being made in the new version of the widely used browser that is not standards compliant.

In the past, we have all user the * html, or _ or # and other techniques to serve specific Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) information to Microsoft Browsers to cater for their proprietary implementation CSS units and the box model. Some of the popular methods of isolating IE when styling and doing page layout will not work as some sections of the Microsoft implementation of CSS become Standards Compliant. In a particular case at hand, I discovered that IE 7.0 does not interpret form field heights and padding in the same way as IE 6 in CSS and thus using the # hack to send a different dimensions/units to IE and Firefox leaves either IE6 or IE7 badly aligned.

In this case, I found out that much as both IE6 and IE7 still work with the # hack that prefixes settings, IE7 ignores the underscore '_' hack. This makes it possible to create separate settings for Firefox, IE 6 and IE 7 as shown in the below example:

context_bar_form_field
{
height: 15px;
#height: 15px;
_height: 21px;
}

The first setting will apply to all browsers,
The second setting will only apply to Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers
The third setting will only apply to IE browsers 6.0 and older

IE 8 Beta 2 Coming In August

Bill Gates gave his last talk, appropriately, to developers at TechEd. No matter what you think of the guy, he is an icon that helped create the software industry. Without him and Steve Jobs, who do we have? :)

In his speach he talked about Internet Explorer, and how IE 8 will have an update in a couple of months:

Gates also highlighted Microsoft's flagship Web technology, the Internet Explorer (IE) browser, which has been an asset and a curse for the company over the years. While it allowed Microsoft to secure its dominant position in Web-browsing technology, it also triggered Microsoft's U.S. antitrust woes, something that haunts the company to this day. IE also has taken a hit in the past several years as Mozilla Firefox, an open-source browser, has gained a loyal following, forcing Microsoft to step up development and make its own product more innovative.

Gates revealed that beta 2 of the next version of IE, IE 8, will be available in August. He also stumped for what has been his pet interest during his years at Microsoft -- natural human-interface technology that allows people to interact with computers in ways similar to how they interact with each other. Last week, Microsoft revealed that the next version of Windows, Windows 7, will include touchscreen technology, a fact he mentioned in his talked.

Virtual Tour With jQuery

This virtual tour plugin has the particularity to be accessible and can run even if javascript has not been activated] : navigation uses the standard html tags and in accordance with w3c

No need for Flash, Quicktime or Java. Your visitors will not have to install any software to experiment your virtual tour.

In the section, insert CSS ans javascript calls :

5 Great Tools to Save Links for Later

Unfortunately, there just aren't enough hours in the day. This seems to be especially true when you take on a lot of projects. Between blogging, researching, emailing, and real life, reading all of your feeds isn't something we can do all the time. Sometimes, we see something that we'd love to save it for later without cluttering up our bookmarks. Here are 5 tools to get the job done

ReadBag

ReadBag is a quick and easy bookmarklet to save links for later. ReadBag requires a Google Account to use the service, though OpenID might have been a better choice. The UI is simple and clean with all the features available from the homepage. You can archive bookmarks after you're done reading them, star them, add a note, or simply delete them. ReadBag includes a host of goodies such importing options, a Firefox extension, Google Reader integration, Google Gears support, RSS for your bookmarks, and a mobile interface for both regular phones and the iPhone. Unfortunately, ReadBag doesn't support tagging.

Will Firefox 3 Set A New World Record?

Mozilla hopes to set a world record for the most downloads within a 24-hour period on the day Firefox 3 is released (currently expected to be in June).

The online edition of Guinness Book of World Records does not list a current record for most downloads within 24 hours.

The final release candidates for Firefox 3 are showing a number of improvements, including greater rendering speed, the use of fewer resources, and more baked-in security features than other browsers.

To help Mozilla set a world record, the foundation recommends the following:

Yahoo! BrowserPlus: Sneak Peak

Yahoo! has released a sneak peak into Yahoo! BrowserPlus which came out today as

A platform for extending the Web: an end-user installs it and a developer uses its features through a small JavaScript library. Some of the features that exist in the platform today include:

Drag-and-drop from the desktop
Client-side image manipulation (cropping, rotation & filters)
Desktop notifications

You can head over to the main BrowserPlus landing page to learn more about the services.

Here they also show using a text to speech service

Mobile Web Browsing with Skyfire

Skyfire, the mobile web browser that allows users to experience the web as they would on a PC, has secured $13 Million in Series B Funding. The application has a waiting list that amounts to the publicity Gmail received with its invite system. Here's a closer look at a next generation web browser that users should look forward to.

Funding Investors
The new funding round takes Skyfire's total raise to date up to $17.8m. Currently in private beta for Windows Mobile, Skyfire will use the funding to expand their browser to even more people on more platforms. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and included previous investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. The funds will be used towards further rollout and distribution of the mobile browser and will add Jake Seid, Managing Director of Lightspeed, to its Board of Directors.