Fiddler allows you to inspect web browser traffic, see what Internet Explorer (or Firefox) is up to. Very useful for web developing and debugging, and for other purposes, too, such as sussing out the link so I could bring you this. (more…)

If you ever do any web development, you’ll be acutely conscious of the fact that you need most versions of IE available to test on. Of course, a virtual machine (using Virtual PC, Virtual Box, VMWare or whatever) is one solution, but it would be nice to have everything available on the same machine. Sure, using Multiple IEs you can install IE 3 to 6, but what about 7?

Well, you can. Credits to Tredosoft for the details, and Softzilla for spotting it….

I had to try this…

Well, it made me laugh, anyway

Google have finally done what a few people said they would a while ago – launched a new web browser called Chrome.

It’s got some very interesting concepts behind it.  First of all, of course, it’s completely open source (more…)

OK, my last post was about DirectX 10,  and why I thought it might be Microsoft’s biggest mistake of all time.  So now I revert to the pair of posts I was originally going to make: 10 things I do and don’t like about Vista.  I’m doing this one first out of laziness because I now have only 9 to do 

1. Performance
   Vista is slower than XP, which in turn was slower than Windows 2000.  It does feel funny running a 2GHz processor that used to run XP as fast as lightning, and having it perform like the older PC upstairs running Windows 2000.  Worse, Service Pack 1 won’t fix it, either.
2. Internet Explorer 7
   It’s not much faster or better than Internet Explorer 6, and yet it manages to claw its way back to the front every now and again and displace Firefox as default browser.  Naughty.
   Oh, and of course, there’s  always the fact that they’ve changed the rendering engine significantly to eliminate some, but not all of the rendering problems with IE.  So we just have another version of IE to test everything against.  Thanks for that.
3. DirectX 10
   Well, as I said yesterday…
4. Aero
   I like being able to choose the colours of things.  It gives me a feeling that there’s an area of my life, however small, where I have some control.  Now I get a single colour to change, and the only one that looks good is the black.  And even when you do that you still can’t change the highlight colour. Reminds me of the quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy about black buttons with black writing on a black background lighting up black when you press them…
5. Windows Media Player
   Yet again, another one that keeps snooping on you.  While I use VLC to counter most of its DRM infested  horribleness,  it’s still embedded in things like Channel 4′s 4oD. Which is still, currently, better than the BBC’s effort.
6. User Account Control
   When you try to do anything to your PC, like install software, you have to wade through half a dozen inconsistent prompts (allow the program or cancel? Continue or cancel). Then sometimes it will fail because of permissions anyway and you have to start again, as administrator.
   You can tun it off, of course, but then the Security Centre will sit there and irritate you instead…
7. Disk Defragmenter
   There used to be visual feedback on the defrag. It used to be quite fascinating (in a monotonous sort of way) to sit back and watch the show. Now a little dialog box sits there. Or, the defrag kicks in late at night, halfway through that late-night gaming session you already know you shouldn’t be having. This is especially true during racing games, especially the ones that make you do an entire quarter-hour race without saving, so that defrag can kick in and slow the machine to a crawl on the last lap, the first time you’re leading the race, so you end up flipping three times in the air and coming last.
   Not that I’m bitter, you understand.
8. Cleartype
   Supposedly, it makes it much easier to see the fonts by adding more smoothing, designed for LCD screens. (All right, I know this one came in with XP Media Centre edition, but hear me out.) You can’t tune it (at least not that I’ve found) without a third-party addon. You can, of course, turn it off – which looks fine on CRTs, but looks a little bit worse on LCDs. Why provide the feature without the ability to make it work properly? Unless Microsoft get paid by a sinister secret society of corrupt ophthalmologists, of course…
9. Automatic Updates
   Some of us have download limits with our ISPs (actually, don’t we all nowadays?) So when automatic updates downloaded a 50MB service pack for Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition – when I had it on my USB drive already – I wasn’t best pleased.
10. Windows Explorer
    I didn’t rank this list, but if I had, this would be number one. The rewrite seems to have made it much slower, it has so many toolbars around it that it takes forever to change folder, there’s nothing displayed in the title bar (I mean, ever – what’s up with that?), the twisty things next to folders fade in and out with disconcerting ease. And worst of all, the wait for the CD to spin up as soon as you launch Explorer with a CD in is still there, continuing a Windows tradition of annoying people that dates back to Windows 95 release 1.

Worst of all, of course, there are plenty of others that could have made this list: Security Centre, Windows Genuine Advantage, Vista’s in-build CD burning features.  I could go on, but I’m sure everyone could make a list like this just like me.  However, tomorrow, I shall redress the balance a little by highlighting ten things I like about Vista.