Gifs suck. PNGs (Portable Network Graphics) are much better – more colours, freedom from intellectual property rights, and (best of all) an alpha channel for transparency. Some good articles:
- PNG opacity (with some nice examples)
- Fuzzy Drop shadows (like on Google Maps)
- Choosing what image to serve in PHP on the server
Related: Opacity in CSS, being able to see through DIVS – CSS Transparency for IE, CSS Opacity
I guess I should include the other plugins I use:
Adblock – the best think in Firefox bar none.
Cookie Culler – a much better cookie controller.
Web Developer Toolbar – Although this might be standard now – I don’t remember installing it last time…
Some good Firefox plugins:
I found my first bug in the Firefox web browser. Basically, if you’ve got a text box with autocomplete=”off” as an attribute, the up and down arrows move the text insertion point left and right. The code for this is:
<input type="text" name="x" autocomplete="off"
value="123456789" />
If you’re using Firefox, you can see this here:
I couldn’t believe that this fixed a problem we were having with the ‘View Source’ option on I.E. 6. It would not show the source at all. We deleted the link to Notepad that was on the desktop, and suddenly it did.
Windows is crap. And this bug has been around for AT LEAST 2 years.
If you’re nerdy enough to care, here’s the code to install a new search plugin…
// Firefox plugin installer code
function addEngine(name,ext)
{
if ((typeof window.sidebar == "object") && (typeof
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine == "function"))
{
window.sidebar.addSearchEngine(
"http://www.example.com/searching/"+name+".src",
"http://www.example.com/searching/"+name+"."+ext,
name,
"" );
}
else
{
errorMsg(name,ext,"");
}
}
Firefox’s search plugins at mycroft.mozdev.org are really neat! There’s no reason that a site shouldn’t publish one of these if it uses GET parameters in a search URL.
Anyway, I submitted my multimap plugin to them. The guys at work seemed quite impressed with these things too.