Update your browser!

In the last post we mentioned that Google™ wants to push the envelope a bit more and start offering new and faster features through Google Apps™. This means they want to use the new HTML5 specification – are you ready?
If your using Firefox 3.5 (or greater), Chrome, Opera or Safari you should be ready to go and can skip these tests. If you aren’t sure what your using or if your browser can handle it, try going to the following websites and see if anything breaks.

http://twinkler.in/ (should feel somewhat organic, you can move around and see relationships between twitter folk)
http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/ (should seem like a interactive screen saver with each dot representing a tweet)
http://html5gallery.com/2009/06/karrun/ (should be able to drag elements around)
http://informationhighwayman.com/ (more mainstream site using html5)
http://www.energycell.co.uk/ (again more mainstream)

If you need to update your browser and don’t know where to find one:

To get Mozilla Firefox (recommended)
To get Google Chrome (very good but some older IE only sites have issues)
To get Opera
To get Apple Safari (also recommended)

You may be wondering where Microsoft Internet Explorer is on this list? It’s not, while every browser and every computer has numerous security vulnerabilities, oddities, and is probably missing a bit of something – Internet Explorer is very much behind the rest. We do not recommend using it unless it is necessary for the particular page you are trying to view (which is rare).

Recently, at Black Hat DC conference, a security consultant (Jorge Luis Alvarez Medina) demoed how it’s possible to exploit a flaw in Internet Explorer browser that turns your personal computer into a public file server. In other words, attacker can remotely read files on the victim’s local drive.

From: http://www.taranfx.com/ie-flaw-public-files

As always, when updating your browser its a great time to get great extensions to make your life easier. Here is a small sample of some we’ve found helpful for our clients:

Addon’s for Mozilla Firefox