Solution: IE8 does not connect to the Internet

There are many complaints that IE8 (a recent automatic upgrade) does not connect to the Web, ie cannot access any website.

People have been dismantling their Firewalls, virus checkers but no success. Happily there is Firefox so we can browse for a solution.

Here is the solution that worked for me:-

in IE8 go to Tools->Internet Options->Advanced

and click on both Restore Advanced Settings and Reset Internet Explorer settings, you might want to see if pressing just the Advanced Button is good enough.

Then restart IE8

This warns that you about to lose all your settings but that was no no problem for me as I have very few, being mostly a Firefox or Opera person

Hope that Helps

FireFox Web Debugging Tools

I normally work from home as a technical web designer anything PHP,MySQL,Perl,ColdFusion,CSS,JavaScript,XML etc etc and think myself pretty up to date, well for the past few weeks I've been working on a contract with another programmer Hanif and he's showed me the Error Console in FireFox which lists and indicates HTML,CSS and Javascript errors, when I said how useful I found that he then showed me the FireFox add-ons FireBug and web Development which I found sensational.

What I'm trying to say here is how useful it is to co-operate with other experts and also of course how wonderful Firefox is

Installing Firefox's Spell checker

I've often wanted a spell-checker when writing Squidoo lens etc.

Am I the only who didn't know you can install a spell checker in Firefox?

Firefox's Spell checker is an Optional Plug-in! When writing your blog or
squidoo lens right-mouse click and select "add
dictionaries". Thereafter misspelt words will be underlined. Curiously the American dictionary I installed didn't contain "Firefox"

As soon as I installed it I started noticing small typos and British spelling in my popular lens http://www.squidoo.com/creatingideas Just How do you Create More Ideas?

Configuring FireFox to use Vim for View Source

Unexpectedly I had trouble Googling this, remember it is not in the standard Options Menu, no you have to go into "about:config"

in FireFox Address Bar type "about:config"

in the filter bar type "view_source" and configure following options as follows
view_source.editor.external user set boolean true
view_source.editor.path user set string c:\vim\vim.bat

rem contents of vim.bat
c:\vim\vim72\gvim.exe %1 %2 %3

NOTE it would be simpler to configure view_source.editor.path to point directly to c:\vim\vim72\gvim.exe but you'd have to remember to change next time Vim is upgraded

FireFox 3 New Features

What is extraordinarily useful in the new FireFox is the predictive URL when you type in the URL toolbar. Formerly these operated on the beginning or the URL eg www.go would autmatically flash up all urls you'd typed beginning www.go in your history log. Now if FF3 it will match any text anywhere in the URL or in the description. So if I wanted to recall a page about goats, all I'd have to do is type goat and the URL would pop-up. Excellent