New Microsoft.com website launches

By Martin Brinkmann on September 28, 2012 - TAGS: None

Microsoft back in June 2012 launched a preview of the upcoming Microsoft.com website which looked fundamentally different from the old homepage. Today, the preview design went live onmicrosoft.com. If you visit the website right now, you will notice a clean looking site with less clutter than before.

The responsive design adapts to any screen resolution you display the homepage in. This is a fluent process that happens while you increase or decrease the size of the browser window. The dominant element on the new homepage is the large banner that is advertising Microsoft products and services. Right now, it is teasing Bing it on, Skype and Visual Studio.

It is interesting to note that designs differ depending on which web browser you use to access the Microsoft homepage. The above homepage is displayed to Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and Opera users only. Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 and previous users see an entirely different design.

The design not only looks different, it also is static and not responsive like the design displayed when you open the web page in IE10, Google Chrome or Opera.

The top of the page is nearly identical though in both designs. The search is displayed prominently here, as are the links to products, downloads, security and buy. The first difference is the distinction between home and work on the Firefox and IE9 page. While you can switch between work and home on the IE10 and Chrome design page as well, it won’t change the teaser banner at the top.

It is not really clear why Microsoft decided to launch the site with different designs based on browsers. It is because of technical restrictions, market research or something else?

What’s clear though is that the new Microsoft.com is definitely cleaner and easier to navigate than the old homepage. Have you been to the new homepage yet? Did you see one of the two designs above, or yet another one?

Automatically sort Firefox bookmarks

By Martin Brinkmann on September 28, 2012 - Tags:bookmarks, Firefox add-ons

Firefox bookmarks are not sorted automatically, which may be fine as long as you do not add more than a dozen or so bookmarks to a folder. When the count rises to hundreds, you may however appreciate an option to sort bookmarks in the browser to improve the accessibility.

Bookmarks by default are unsorted in Firefox, which means that new bookmarks are simply added to the end of a folder.  Back in 2007 I explained how you can change the sort order of bookmarks in Firefox manually. For that, you need to load about:config in the browser and edit – or create if it is not existing – the preference browser.bookmarks.sort.direction there. The preference is a string value, and options include setting it to natural to sort bookmarks alphabetically from A to Z, or ascending to sort them from Z to A.

The Firefox add-on Auto-Sort Bookmarks handles the sorting automatically. Once you have installed the extension in the browser you will notice that all bookmarks in Firefox are sorted alphabetically from A to Z. The extension puts folders at the top and bookmarks below the folders by default.

You will also notice that you can’t change the order by dragging and dropping bookmarks into other locations. While you can still move them into other folders, you can’t change a bookmark’s position in its current folder anymore.

The extension has no options dialog. What you can use however are about:config parameters to configure some of its functionality. The following parameters are added to Firefox when you install the extension:

• extensions.sortbookmarks.sortbar – set to true by default. Defines whether bookmarks in the bookmarks bar will be sorted as well.
• extensions.sortbookmarks.foldersbefore – set to true by default. Puts folders on top of bookmarks in the same structure.
• extensions.sortbookmarks.autosort – set to true by default. Defines whether bookmarks are automatically sorted or not.

If you are working with lots of bookmarks, you may want to use the manual or automatic sorting options available in the web browser to put order into chaos. Bookmarks stay sorted alphabetically even if you remove the extension from the browser again.

Visual BCD Editor: edit Windows boot manager items

By Martin Brinkmann on September 23, 2012 - Tags:boot, Windows software

Visual BCD Editor is a free program for Vista and newer versions of the Windows operating system that is enabling you to edit the boot menu of the system. The program displays a visual representation of the BcdStore containing the operating system’s boot configuration data. It displays the structure in a tree-like view on the left sidebar, and the selected item in detail on the right pane.

Here you for instance see all boot loaders currently available with their specific data types allowing you to analyze, verify and edit all boot related parameters. This includes the system root directory and other parameters like the preferred localy or application path for the system loader.

More interesting than that may be options to backup and restore the boot storage. Especially the backup option may come in handy, for instance before you start to install a second or third operation system on the computer as it allows you to restore the previous setting if things do not turn out the way they are supposed to be.

To backup the boot information you simply click on store > backup store or press f4. You can then later import the store again by selecting store > import store or by pressing f3. This is also recommended before you make changes to individual boot parameters.

You can furthermore use the program to repair the BCD or boot records, which is an automated process, create missing Windows loaders in case boot loaders are missing from the boot menu, or add Linux/Mac, Windows NT or Vista/7 boot loaders to the list.The program offers capabilities to remove entries from the boot loader as well. This can be useful if you have reinstalled Windows and notice that the old operating system is still listed in the boot manager.

The latest version of Visual BCD Editor requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0. It is fully compatible with all versions of Windows Vista and newer editions of the Windows operating system. You can alternatively check out Easy BCD, another popular boot editor for Vista and newer versions of Windows.

Browser history spam from view.atdmt.com and other networks

By Martin Brinkmann on September 24, 2012 - Tags:spam

Browser history spam refers to scripts messing up the current tabs history by polluting it with script related entries so that the web pages that have been visited before are moved down the queue or even completely removed from the history when the limit is reached. It is not really clear if that is done on purpose, or if those scripts have a programming flaw that is causing the behavior. As far as I know, this is only happening in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and not in other web browsers at all.

A few advertising services are mentioned regularly when it comes to this kind of spam: http://view.atdmt.com/ belonging to Atlas Solutions which is part of Microsoft,  http://apr.lijit.com which is part of Federated Media, and http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net which is Google’s advertising network. All three are legit networks, which suggests that individual apps are causing the issue.

by Jason Shuler

It should be a temporary issue, as these kind of ads should get reported quickly to the advertising networks and then removed as a consequence from the network’s inventory.

So how can you overcome the issue in the meantime? There are several options:

• Switch to a different web browser, e.g. Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera
• Use an ad blocker like Adblock IE
• Block the ad networks using the hosts file
• Try reloading the page with F5. Users have reported that this removes the ad entries from the history
• Add the networks to the list of restricted sites in Internet Explorer. This is done with a click on the settings button and the selection of Internet Options from the menu (in IE9, may be different in previous versions of Internet Explorer). Switch to the security tab, click on restricted sites, then the sites button, and add the networks that are causing the issue to the list there.

I’d probably start with the reloading option and keep using it unless you run into history spam fairly frequently.