thisStrangeEngine.com

Someone came up with a way to install IE 7 beta without it intruding on your IE 6. Brilliant. Now I can check it out.

Opera 9 Beta has been out for a little while now. Even though Opera is not as popular as IE or even Firefox, it is probably the real leader in web browsing innovation. Opera was the first browser to introduce the concept of tabbed browsing and mouse gestures. The trend now continues as Opera 9 is the first browser to have a built in BitTorrent client in the download manager! And now that Opera is without ads, there is no longer any good excuse to not download it and try it out.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 has also been announced. Rumors are that it has significant improvements with rendering CSS and following standards and, of course, it comes with a host of new features including native tabbed-browsing and increased security. If what they say is true, then it’ll be a much nicer world out there for web developers if IE users upgrade quickly. No doubt the beta will simply overwrite the IE 6 that is embedded in your Windows, so download it only if you’re willing to deal with using beta software instead of stable software as opposed to having a choice.

One of things that make MySpace popular is that people have the ability to customize their profile pages, albeit through less than ideal means. This has created a small crop of programs or something that will generate layouts and such, but given most people fail to have a reasonable sense of design, it’s caused most of MySpace to look like utter tripe. A real web designer took a shot at trying to make a nice looking MySpace profile and came out on top looking like a champ. I wouldn’t want to go through what he went through trying to wade through all that G-awful markup, but now we can all benefit from the fruits of his labor.

It was apparently announed at Mix 06, a web developer conference held by Microsoft which I had never heard of until recently, that the rendering engine in IE7 Beta is complete and frozen, and Microsoft is now only working on security and UI bugs. This means that if you download and install IE7 beta now, you can view your sites in it and know exactly how it will look and what adjustments you will need to make before IE7 goes official. It is supposed to be out during the second half of 2006.

DivX has just releasesd their “Web Player”, which is essentially a browser plug-in to let people play embedded DivX files. I’d like to think this would really help DivX catch on and that it would become as commonplace as Windows Media or Quicktime. I also like how on all of their preview shots they show the embedded player in what is obviously a Firefox browser.