the microsoft IE7 team continues to make bizarre changes to the UI. now the menu bar is hidden by default!? and a new icontastic "command bar" has been added to replace it, on the right hand side of the window. way to go. i look at the screenshots and feel completely lost, as a user. of course you can bring the menu bar back (not sure how easy it is to find the option), but it's still stuck under the address bar.

i have not yet installed the ie7 beta… i suppose i should at some point, for testing purposes, although i don't want to replace ie6, and i've heard reports of systems becoming unstable or messed up when installing an unofficial standalone version of ie7 beta (i currently use standalone versions of older versions of IE without trouble, though). i should look at that more closely. i wonder if it'd work better if ie7 was installed as the default system ie and ie6 was run as the standalone. hmmm.

note to myself mostly: AOL tries to break a Flash Pre-loader.

i wonder if this could be the related to the problem that some AOL users have in loading the pet customization page, since the customizer loads a flash movie into itself. it's not loading an image, mind you, but still…

the mozilla DOM inspector is very handy, but i sure wish the left-hand tree view had a horizontal scrollbar. some pages i look at are quite deep… i have to keep resizing the DOM inspector window so i can see everything. *sigh*

i've been wondering if it's possible to have multiple versions of safari running on a single mac, for browser testing purpose. then today i read dave hyatt's blog post about running the latest build of safari from cvs. he says:

One question people have asked is "Does this have to replace my system frameworks?" The answer is "No." You can run this custom version of Web Kit with a particular instance of Safari without replacing your system frameworks.

i'll have to take a closer look at this, but this does sound like multiple versions of safari on a single mac may be possible.

summary: pasting pets into rich edit controls on IE!

background: all this time i had thought that the pets were compatible with MSN spaces (as long as you used the image-based version of the pet code anyway). and i'd tested it, even… but with firefox only.

it turns out that when you add a blog entry to your MSN space using IE on windows, you get a nice rich text editor. the rich text editor doesn't allow you to paste in raw HTML code… trying to do so simply results in the HTML code being displayed as text, instead of the desired happy pet image.

(on any non-IE browser, you get a plain textarea where you can enter in all the HTML you want (although many tags are filtered out), so the pets work fine in those browsers.)

what to do? although it's tempting to simply tell everyone to use a non-IE browser, that wasn't a realistic option for me. and unlike many other bloggy sites with rich text editors, MSN spaces doesn't have an option to turn off rich text editing!

ack!
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