Sounds stupid ? Why would you want to run IE from Linux ? Why not use Firefox or Chrome ?

But that is not always the scenario.

Reason no 1 : Web designers who use Linux need to test their site on IE . Do not forget IE still commands majority of browser market 59.95%. Can you afford to ignore IE .

Obviously not !

Reason no 2 : Organizations who have created IE only applications 7-10 years back and are now switching to Linux platform , do not want to spend time and money porting the application to new browsers.

So when confronted with this problem what can be done ?

Solution 1 :

If you have windows as your OS then you can use this fantastic plugin IE Tab for Firefox. I have tried this and our UI was pretty heavy bit worked perfectly fine with plugin. I think as of date, the developers are not supporting this plugin so you might not be able to find upgrade for latest version of Firefox.  There are other plugins similar to IE tab in firefox which you wanna try out.

Drawback : This does not work on Linux.

Solution 2: Read more…

In one of my earlier post  Performance Improvement with Firefox ,  I had mentioned how we had to switch to firefox for our application response time in IE.  Andres in his post Garbage Collection in IE7 heavily impacted by number of JavaScript objects and string sizes is sharing his experience with performance issue in IE 7 java Script Engine .  One of his key recommendations , Be careful with string allocations and objects in memory -> GC in IE7 performs really badly

There is another presentation by Frank on browser problem in AJAX application in which he used PushToTest TestMaker to drive an Ajax application on IE 6 and 7 and on Firefox 3. to find out why some Selenium tests of Ajax applications were running at 3 minutes while the same test on a different browser took 30 minutes. You can find the details here Browser problems in AJAX applications

Web developers and applications developers must have faced this problem related to performance of their Websites.

In this post I will focus of how to track website performance. Remember the websites behave different under different browsers so if your site loads faster in FireFox , it may not load with same speed in IE.

Firefox has some very good plugins to track the performance of your website. The two plugins which I really like are

1. Yslow : ySlow analyzes web pages and suggest how to improve performance based on yahoo’s rule for high performance website. You may not agree with some of the recommendations but nevertheless , it gives very good feedback.

2. FireBug : Firebug is not only an excellent  tool for editing and debugging java script, html , css  but also helps you analyze the performance of pages. Read more…

We had a requirement in which we wanted to open an applet in a new tab instaed of new window.

Here is how to do it

window.open(”, server[0], ‘height=1,width=1,left=1,top=1,status=yes,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes’);

change this to

window.open(”, server[0]);

This will open the applet in new tab. As soon as you remove sizing parameters, it will open as a new tab.

But there is one issues here. The focus is on the applet tab instead on main screen. Read more…

We had an application in production running on I. You must be wondering who the hell is still on IE6.

But we have a very heavy UI with touch screen keyboard functionality and our UI consists of Yahoo’s YUI 2.7 and JSP and JSTL.  Initially we never supported Firefox and then we did not had bandwidth to fix the whole application.

The new version of application when launched had a very bad performance in field with page load times > 15 sec.

Within our facility , even on QA server we had load time of < 7 seconds on IE. The same application loaded in <4 sec on firefox.

In Firefox 3.5, Mozilla introduced a new high-performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses just-in-time compilation and an optimization technique called tracing to deliver faster JavaScript execution.

A decision was taken to upgrade the application to support Firefox 3.5 and we updated the application.

We are scheduled to go live end of this week with new version but QA and beta testers are pretty pleased with what they are seeing in terms of performance improvement.

Will keep you posted.

I upgraded my browser to  new version of Firefox 3.5 and then upgraded all the add ons which I was using , particularly Firebug . I  am now using Firebug 1.4.0b4

There has been some changes in the new version of firebug as compared to old 1.3 version. You can read the changes from their blog here FireBug1.4

One of the problems I faced was activating the tabs. I had to explicitly activate the script tab and the console tab.

Second issue was debugger. My debugger was not running even though i had set the break points. When I went through the blog post  of firebug, I understood the reason.

You would have to enable the firebug by either popping it in a new window or always keeping it up. If you minimize it , it will assume that you are suspending firebug and will not get activated.

Since my buttons were at bottom of page, I had to minimize the firebug which caused the debugger to be suspended.

So I popped the firebug in new window , reloaded the page and my debugger starts to work.

Happy firebugging!!!