Real Estate and Technology

I try not to make life more complicated than it needs to be. For this reason I used Internet Explorer for a long time without trying any other browser. At some point I downloaded The Firefox browser and found that I like the way it works a lot better than Internet Explorer.

For a while I’ve had both browsers installed on a couple of my computers. I’ve been sticking with Explorer for one reason. Text just did not look as good in Firefox. There are lots of “less than perfect” things in my life that I get along with, but font rendering, the visual quality of the text you see in the browser, was terrible in FireFox. If you read the news or blogs this is a fatal flaw.

I discovered something today. You can improve the quality of the text in Firefox so it looks as good as Explorer. Funny thing is that it is a Windows setting, not a Firefox setting. I wonder how Microsoft could make such a mistake, causing a competing browser to look crummy with default settings in Windows?

The windows option to turn on is called “ClearType” and here is how you do it(in Windows XP at least). Go to control Panel and choose “Apearance and Themes” then click “Display”. In Display Properties choose the “appearance” tab, then click the button in the lower right called “effects”.

Check the box in front of “use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts” and then in the selector choose “ClearType”. Here’s a screen shot. Click on it to make it bigger.

You might ask what I like about Firefox. ? I just discovered ? a good thing just now. ? For the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with an annoyance with Wordpress 2.33. ? When you insert a photo you can supposedly set padding ? and other attributes by clicking the ? little tree icon ? in the top of the editing window.

Only problem is ? that if you do that ? with internet explorer the image disappears replaced by two dots. ? If you dig around in the code you find out Word Press has made two copies of your photo and reduced them to a size of ? 1 pixel by 1 pixel.

I had wondered how Wordpress could release something that was so buggy. ? It turns out if you use firefox the photo formatting options work just fine. ? I suppose the people who design Wordpress use Firefox.

I think its best to have a couple of browsers loaded on your computer. If something doesn’t work in one, try the the other. That way you’re covered