When we are working on our blogs, we tend to focus on a very narrow range of browsers , because these browser are likely the ones that we found installed on our computers when we bought them:

IE6.0 or 7.0 on windows machines; Konqueror on Linux; and Safari on Mac….

But what about the visitors who use different browsers on different machines? What happens to them?

If my stats are anything to go by, visitors come from a variety of browsers , and about 4.5% of my own visitors come from outside the top 2 browsers. That’s a fairly large community of users.

Perhaps you can try out this service called BrowserShots. It’s not a particularly quick service as once submitted, your website is put in a queue. I’m still waiting for mine to be processed.

But, after nearly 50 minutes the shots came back and here is what the page looks like for the selected browsers:

I chose one image for you to look at showing this blog below, but in fact you can click download all options for you to compare yourself. This is the image of my blog in Safari on a 2000 system. It looks okay, right.

It didn’t load so well on Konqueror or on IE5.01 (not surprisingly). On Konqueror, the problem lay in some missing plugins.

But the purpose of this website is to allow users to see how their blog would look on machines, systems and browsers that they themselves may not have. While the range isn’t comprehensive, most of the general browsers are there that are currently used and a few older ones, too.

I was browsing on StumbleUpon this evening when I came across this rather unique specimen which is claimed to be the smallest Linux computer in the World. I personally can’t verify this claim, but it is a unique product.

“The picotux 100 is the world’s smallest Linux computer, only slightly larger (35mm×19mm×19mm) than an RJ45 connector.”

It runs a form of Linux called uClinux, but I’m just not sure what consumers could do with this product. It hasn’t got much of a user interface…

What would you do with one of these? I guess in a few years, we’ll be seeing entire pcs with operating systems mounted in these devices!

For those of you who like to do things manually, PCTipsBox explains how you can “double the speed of Firefox”, in their article.How to Double Firefox Speed

The article goes into some detail, and there are a couple of suggestions I didn’t know, including the values content.interrupt.parsing, and content.max.tokenizing.time.

Of course, you can use the FasterFox plugin for Firefox to do much of this automatically! But plugins do tend to slow things down a little on startup!