Category Archives: Browsers

Click to activate – no more?

Back then, Microsoft was forced (by some lawsuit) to require a mouse-click to activate each ActiveX control embedded in a web page, even Flash. This was implemented as an IE6 update, and also built-in IE7.

No need to explain why it's really annoying for users.. Ok, I'll explain anyway: think of an ActiveX control that contains buttons. Clicking the button first only activates the control, and another click is required for the button to be pressed..

Most sites used some types of hacks to overcome this.

So now Microsoft solved that law-issue (lots of $$$$s I guess) and they're about to disable the click-to-activate "feature" and bring everything back to the way it used to be, this time- legally.

However, there are already millions of computers with the "click-to-activate" IE version, and some of them won't install the update.. This means that I'll still have to use one of the hacks for the next few years. Annoying.

Cross-browser tab control keyboard shortcuts

The more keyboard shortcuts - the better. The amazing fact is that both Firefox and IE have very similar keyboard shortcuts for handling tabs:

Ctrl+T Create a new tab
Ctrl+W Close current tab
Ctrl+PgDn, Ctrl+PgUp
Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Go to next/previous tab
Ctrl+[0-9]
(In Linux: Alt+[0-9])
Go to tab #[0-9]

Got something else? 🙂