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Previously, it was reported that the German government warned against using Internet Explorer due to security vulnerabilities. They urged users to drop IE for a better browser, like Firefox.
To be fair, the German government has now announced that Firefox 3.6 has a security vulnerability. Time for another update!
Updates to browsing software are pretty easy…for Firefox all you do is click on the menu item Help then on Check for Updates. You may not see the link to check for updates and instead the link Apply Downloaded Update Now… may be visible. This means that an update has already been downloaded, probably from having automated checks for updates.
Here’s how to make sure you have your Firefox set to automated updates — click on the menu item Tools then on Options and you’ll see a new window. Click on the Advanced tab and the Update tab and you’ll get the following:
Firefox Tools Options Advanced Updates
Make sure you select to have Firefox automatically updated. This will run in the background and when an update is found you will be notified via a new window.
When you do search for an update manually, by clicking Help/Check for Updates, a small Software Update window pops up while an update is sought. When one is found the appropriate message is displayed along with a link to the Mozilla website where you can learn more about the latest version of Firefox. Click on Update Firefox to download the latest and most secure version.
Now if Microsoft would only do the same! It is beyond me why Microsoft will support Internet Explorer 6 until 2014. That’s just a ridiculous waste of time and energy that could be applied to the later browser versions, like IE7 and IE8.
Check out this article from the BBC about the SNAFU that IE6 caused Google. International intrigue, espionage, threats, big business — sounds like the making of a great movie!
It turns out that some key functionality of Google Docs and other bits of its software won’t work properly for users using IE6. If you haven’t upgraded to a later version of Internet Explorer yet, it’s time!
If you’re a developer or web site designer, check out ie6nomore.com for conditional statement that you can use to alert your IE6 site users that there are better browser alternatives.
If you’re taking care of more than one website, it might interest you to know how to easily follow keyword rankings for each site as listed by the top search engines.
Grab the SEOBook.com Toolbar which has a lot of other goodies to explore. Once installed, bring up the Search Engine Ranking Checker by clicking on the fireball.
Enter the domain and keyword combination that you’re interested in tracking and then hit ‘Start.’ If your site is in the top 200 listings for the given keyword phrase, its position or ranking will be listed. If not, just a dash will show.
Export the file for future use. Here, you should take a second to make a new folder and call it ‘rankings’ or whatever. Export the results that you want to keep as a csv file into the new folder.
Collect these rankings reports over a period of time, say weeks. Then you can check out the Site Rank Reporter Add-On for Firefox. Just point it to the folder containing the ranking report csv files.
TIP: Make sure the files are saved with filenames that fit the format MM-DD-YY.csv, where MM, DD and YY are the numbers representing the actual date of the rankings.
A file with the name 21-jan-10.csv wont’ work!
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