Internet Explorer and Firefox updates released

During October new versions of both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox were released, marking the latest stage in the competition between these two browsers.

Internet Explorer 7

This new release from Microsoft is a major update, providing a range of new features, many of which aim to match those provided by Firefox on its release in 2004, these include RSS bookmarks, “tabbed” browser windows and an updated look.

As IE7 aims to be more compliant to W3C standards for displaying websites than its predecessor, now would be a prudent time to review how your own site is displayed in this new browser, particularly as usage should start to increase rapidly when it becomes bundled with the new windows ‘Vista’ release over the winter.

Firefox 2.0

This is the latest release to the Firefox browser, which now has roughly a 10% browser market share.

The release mostly addresses small performance and usability issues, rather than adds many new features.

From personal experience we noticed a marked improvement in the speed the new version performed at, although there where some difficulties with the range of 3rd party extensions we use not being compatible yet.

Regarding extensions, overall we find these are the most useful aspect of Firefox, so here’s a quick list of those that can be of most use to marketers:

SEOpen ‘ Provides quick shortcuts to search engine results showing the back links and pages indexed of the site you are currently viewing.

SEO for FireFox ‘ This superimposes information about each result in a search engine listing, showing pages, back links and more. Useful for assessing how tough it could be to rank highly for a search phrase.

Web developer toolbar ‘ Of most use to developers and designers, this extension allows you to view the structure of pages, and also makes it easy to disable features such as the browser cache, javascript, style sheet, and meta redirects ‘ great for investigating any sneaky tactics your competitors may be using!

Fireftp ‘ A simple ftp program which is embedded within FireFox, allowing you to upload / download files easily.

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