A couple weeks ago I decided to finally make the move to using Firefox as my default browser. The main reasons I hadn't done this before were the fact that the product I work on has been largely IE-centric and some of the services and sites I visit frequently still aren't optimised for non-IE viewing.

Fortunatly, due to some clever guys in Taiwan we have IE Tab, a handy extension for Firefox that, with a single click, switches the current browser tab to the IE rendering engine. Now if I want to work with IE I just open up an IE Tab directly in Firefox and away I go! Great for Windows Live Mail (the successor to Hotmail), which is STILL hobbled for non IE users!, and development testing! Now If they only did an "Opera Tab"

Another cool feature is the ability to create a list of sites and have Firefox automatically switch to IE Tab when rendering them. Innovations like this make switching so much easier can certainly do Firefoxe's uptake rates any harm… Great stuff!

In my last post I mentioned Opera Softwares "Grass is Greener" marketing message, and it got me thinking, or rather exploring… other options in the blogging space. It is from this exploration that I made the decicion to abandon my current asp.net blogging engine DasBlog in favour of the vastly more mature WordPress 2.0.

My intention in using dasblog was to be able to modify and build on the base engine as I work in a .net environment… but, as I was soon to discovered, that just wasn't going to happen. WordPress is written in PHP with a MySQL backend, two technologies which I have had a lot to do with in the past, it's interface is largly standards based and far more evolved than anything in the .net blogging space, AND there is a huge community surrounding it meaning a wealth of plug-in's, theme extensions and support ALL of which were lacking with dasblog.

At the same time I am moving this blog from the blog.conceptfusion.co.nz sub-domain to the base www.conceptfusion.co.nz as I no longer need to run the two disparate sites so from now on you will need to update your RSS readers and bookmarks (I will place a redirect here in a week or so). All the existing content from this blog, including comments, has been migrated to the new site and over the next few weeks I will be developing the interface and adding some new features so it should be interesting.

I hope to be making more posts moving forward… on subjects such as Web 2.0, CSS, Ajax, JavaScript and Web Design in general… plus the usual occational rant

I'm currently working on some cross browser testing for Archive Manager, the product I work on, and as a result I had to download the latest version of Opera. I must admit, I was rather surprised after clicking on the "Free Download" button to be presented with a third party download mirror (PlanetMirror) which in itself seemed less than professional but was made worse by the fact that, sitting bold as brass at the bottom of the page was a "Get Firefox" button!

Granted it was a "Firefox with Google Toolbar" button which I believe is a revenue paying affiliate program, but perhaps Opera should be a little more selective (and aware) in their choice of download mirrors.

On a side note, I love the subtle "Green with Envy" and slightly less than subtle "Grass is Greener" themes Opera have used on their homepage.