Switch your regional Google search page to Google.com

Google’s pretty clever. It knows where you are (based on your IP address?) and so your ‘home’ Google address if you’re in Australia is google.com.au; it’s google.co.nz in New Zealand; google.co.uk in the United Kingdom; google.no in Norway, etc. Even if you type in google.com you still get your local Google. American readers may not even know that this regional redirection occurs as they always see Google.com.

But what if you DON’T want Google to use the regional variation? There are two tricks you can use to stop Google using the local Google:

• To temporarily use Google.com for the current browsing session, go to this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp (webhp = web home page???)
• To permanently turn off the regional variation and always use Google.com, go to this URL: http://www.google.com/ncr (ncr = no country redirect). You may need to clear your browser cache and cookies and perhaps reboot for this to work permanently.

If you use the Google Toolbar, you can change the default regional Google.com site you use in the Options. So, if you’re a Norwegian living or travelling in Australia, you could set the default Google home page to the Norwegian one (NOTE: I haven’t tried this when travelling, so I can’t verify that it works exactly like that!).

[Links last checked September 2009]

Internet Explorer: Cannot type in a field

Something very weird happened the other day. I use both Firefox 3.x and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). I prefer Firefox, but some things are designed for IE (like Microsoft Partner pages, and a link to a client’s system), so there are occasions when I have to use IE.

When I opened IE7 that day, I got some message about an add-on not being compatible. That was the first weird thing — I’ve never seen any messages about IE add-ons, ever.

Then when I went to enter a search term into Google, or enter anything into any field on any website, nothing happened. I couldn’t see the marker for the cursor position in any field and I couldn’t type in any field.

The mouse worked, command buttons worked, and I could enter an web address at the top, but I couldn’t type in any field on the screen. I closed and re-opened IE7, I looked under Tools > Manage Add-ons to see if there was anything there that showed some sort of error. Nothing.

Using Firefox, I did a Google search and found a solution here: http://www.winxptutor.com/ieabout.htm

I closed IE7, then ran the first command suggested on that page (REGSVR32 MSHTMLED.DLL). I re-opened IE7 to see if it worked, and it did! I had my typing function back!

I still don’t know what caused it, but at least I was able to fix it.

Show multiple time zones at once

On this blog, I’ve mentioned a couple of tools for showing multiple time zones simultaneously. While they’re both good, you are limited to fewer than five time zones.

In these days of being able to business anywhere, at any time, with anyone, that limitation is a bit small for me. I have clients, colleagues, friends and/or family in all US time zones, New Zealand, all states of Australia, and Israel — way more than six time zones!

Enter FoxClocks, an add-in for the Firefox browser. You can display multiple time zones simultaneously, and it appears to deal automatically with daylight saving/summer time in various locations too. There are various ways to configure it to display the times along the status bar of Firefox or as a popup list, to display countries or cities or a combination, etc.

FoxClocks

Best of all, it’s free! If you use Firefox, you can get FoxClocks from here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1117

[Links last checked April 2009]

Opening new tabs in a browser

More from the “I didn’t know that!” category…

For years, I’ve right-clicked on a link on a web page to open it in a new window or new tab. That’s the way someone showed me way back (mid-1990s?) when the web was young and mice started to have right-click options. That’s the way I showed my husband in the late 90s.

Then I came across an article discussing opening links in new tabs or windows, and after all these years I find out that there are two MUCH quicker ways to open a link in a new tab. I’ve tested and confirmed both methods in Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 7.x, and have shaken my head and muttered “How come I didn’t know this?”

So I’m sharing, in case you don’t know it too!

• Method 1 (slightly slower): Hold down the Ctrl key as you click on the link.
• Method 2 (quickest): Click the wheel on the wheel mouse as you hover over the link.

Both methods open the linked page opens in a new tab. Who’d have thought?

Market share stats for internet usage

Do you want to know which are the most popular web browsers, search engines, operating systems etc. for internet usage? Then the free data at Market Share is for you. Updated monthly and ‘compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month’, all data is presented in easy-to-read tables and graphs, including trend graphs.

For example, as at the date of writing this post (8 November 2008), the Market Share site reported:

• Google had 81% market share of search engines, with Yahoo coming in next at nearly 11%. Everyone else combined made up the other 8%, so if you’re looking at developing a new search engine, you have a very hard row to hoe!
• Internet Explorer is still the most-used browser with 71% market share, with Firefox coming in at a respectable 20%. Everyone else combined makes up the other 9%. Breaking down Internet Explorer by version, IE6 has only 24% while IE7 has nearly 50%. The other versions of IE make up a combined 1%. What does this mean? Well, if you’re a web developer you should be coding for IE7 and making sure your code also works in IE6—you can probably forget about making the website compatible with earlier versions of IE.
• Windows had 90% market share of the operating systems (no surprises there), with Macs coming in at 8%. Windows XP still makes up nearly 70%, but Vista is moving up with almost 20% market share. and the trend graph shows that Vista is increasing at the same rate that XP is decreasing.

I don’t know how accurate these figures are—there are many sites out there that purport to report usage. But if the claim that they are monitoring usage from some 160 million web users per month is true, then their statistics are pretty compelling.

For more see: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/default.aspx

(Thanks to Wade C who alerted me to this site.)

[Links last checked 8 November 2008]

CSS settings for horizontal rule (hr)

I was having some difficulty with the different ways that IE7 and Firefox rendered any CSS I’d set for the horizontal rule (hr) tag. Here’s my solution (substitute your own color and sizing values):

hr
{
height: 1px;
color: #808000; /* only works in IE */
background-color: #808000; /* needed to color the HR in Firefox */
border: 0px; /* needed for Firefox so that it renders the 1px height correctly */
}

Open multiple tabs at once

Did you know that you can set up your Firefox or Internet Explorer 7.x (IE7) web browser to open multiple tabs at once? If there are sites that you always go to when you open your browser and connect to the internet each day, then you don’t need to open one at a time.

You can set this up in two ways in Firefox and IE7—Method 1 for both is the simplest.

Here’s how…

Firefox: Method 1

1. In Firefox, open each site you want to open automatically in a new tab.
2. Go to Tools > Options.
3. On the Main panel, click Use Current Pages (note that it’s plural!). The Home Page field is populated with each tab’s URL, separated by a pipe (|) character.
4. Click OK—when you next open Firefox, the tabs you sent all open at once.

Firefox: Method 2

1. Go to Tools > Options.
2. Enter each page’s URL into the Home Page field—separate each with the pipe (|) character.
3. Click OK.

You can remove any site by repeating Firefox: Method 1 or manually deleting the URL and its preceding pipe character from the Home Page field.

The only downside to doing this is in Firefox that when you click the HOME icon, they’ll all re-open, even if they’re currently open.

IE7: Method 1

1. In IE7, open each site you want to open automatically in a new tab.
2. Go to Tools > Internet Options.
3. On the General tab, click Use current. The Home Page field is populated with each tab’s URL, one on each line.
4. Click OK—when you next open IE7, the tabs you sent all open at once.

IE7: Method 2

1. Go to Tools > Internet Options.
2. Enter each page’s URL into the Home Page field—one on each line.
3. Click OK.

You can remove any site by repeating IE7: Method 1 or manually deleting the line for a specific URL from the Home Page field.

Resize text

Did you know you can resize the screen fonts on a web page very quickly if you have a wheel mouse? Actually, you can use this trick to quickly resize the display in many applications.

Here’s how:

1. Open any web page your browser window.
2. Hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and roll the wheel away from you—the font sizes decrease with each roll. Now roll the wheel towards you—the font sizes increase.
3. If you don’t see any change, or only a small change, it’s possible the site uses fixed font sizes. In Internet Explorer, you can override these by going to Tools > Internet Options (Internet Explorer) menu, then clicking the Accessibility button at the bottom right of the General tab. On the Accessibility window, select the Ignore font sizes… check box, then click OK. Click OK again to close the Internet Options window.
4. Now try the CTRL+roll trick again—you should see quite a difference.

[This article was first published in the March 2004 CyberText newsletter.]

IE7 crashes when open Office document in SharePoint

I’ve been using a client’s SharePoint 2003 for some months now, and have been swearing at its clunky workflow. My default browser is Firefox—as a result I can’t get all the extras for managing documents directly in SharePoint through it. So I’ve learned to open the client’s SharePoint portal in IE7. However, every time I tried to open an Office 2003 document within SharePoint (let alone edit one), IE7 crashed on me. Well, finally I had enough! I had two choices: continue feeding my SharePoint frustrations (and making the air blue as a result), or find the solution. Off to trusty Google and within minutes I had my answer.

It seems Office 2007 and Office 2003 and SharePoint don’t play well together. But, pondered I, I don’t have Office 2007 installed and have never installed it on this machine, though I have installed the font compatibility pack. Perhaps that was it? Nope. In my case, it was the installation of Microsoft Expression some time back that added some Office 12 components to my system—particularly this file: OWSSUPP.DLL. It seems if you have more than one of these beasties on your machine, IE7 can get tied up in knots and crash when you try to open an Office document in IE7. Who’d have thought? (DLL hell revisited, anyone?)

So on the advice of several websites, here’s what I did to fix the problem:

1. Searched for all instances of OWSSUPP.DLL on my system. I found two—one under the Office 11 installation (expected), and one under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Office12.
2. Went to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Office12 and renamed the DLL to original_OWSSUPP.DLL.
3. Ran the Office diagnostics on my system to replace any old or missing OWSSUPP.DLL files with a new one from Microsoft (Start > Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Diagnostics). This process took a few minutes.

That was it! As soon as I’d done that, I checked the OWSSUPP.DLL file in the Office12 folder and it had updated with a recent one. I opened SharePoint and voila! I could open and edit Office documents within the SharePoint workspace. And I could stop swearing at SharePoint and IE7, at least for now.

Thanks to these websites for pointing me in the right direction:

• http://tinyurl.com/4zcyzr (short and sweet)
• http://tinyurl.com/4f8ug7
• http://tinyurl.com/4awjhu
• http://tinyurl.com/483p62 (Microsoft TechNet forums)
• http://tinyurl.com/2vs33n

Update 9 July 2008: IE7 doesn’t even report a crash now when I try to open a Word document via SharePoint—it just disappears entirely! I wonder if it’s to do with getting SP3 installed on my Windows XP machine last week? Following my own advice, I checked what I did last time (see above), searched for OWSSUPP.DLL and lo and behold I found TWO instances of it in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Office12 and one in my Office 11 folder. One in the Expression folder was the renamed file from last time, and the other was a clean instance. Now how did that get there?

I ran the Microsoft Office Diagnostics again. One issue was reported as found and fixed though there were no details as to what the issue was and what they did to fix it. So I’ll try again… But before doing so I’ll check that Expression folder again—yep, it’s back! This time I just deleted it from the Expression folder without running the diagnostics.

Then I opened SharePoint and tried to open a Word document—and it worked.

Now, to try and solve the problem once and for all… It seems there’s a fix for this problem which updates the OWSSUPP.DLL file in the Office 12 location to the latest version. You can read the details on the Microsoft Support website, and download/install the hot fix from there too; it appears to work:

• Details (KB 929360)
• Hot fix download page (KB 938888)

Has this tip helped you? saved you time? saved your skin? You can thank me by clicking on the cup and buying me a coffee. (An E-Junkie shopping cart page will open where you can pay for my coffee via PayPal.)

Quick way to zoom in and out

If you use a wheel mouse, you can quickly zoom in and out in many applications, thus making the fonts on a web page, Word document, Outlook email, etc., larger or smaller.

All you have to do is hold down the Ctrl key as you roll the wheel toward you (zoom in) or away from you (zoom out). (Note: This may not work on web sites that used fixed font sizes.)

[This article was first published in the December 2005 CyberText Newsletter]