New microsoft commercial with Jerry Seinfeld & Bill Gates

I'd say this is a good commercial for vista - it leaves me with the same feeling i get when thinking about vista - *shrug* eh.

cool service to test website on multiple browsers/os

I discovered a cool little service that you can use to test how your websites behave on many different browsers and several operating systems. It's called CrossBrowserTesting.com. The service starts off free, limiting you to 5 minutes each session but unlimited sessions. This is usually good enough to give a website a quick once over or to test some specific functionality of a site.  

You log into the site, request a session, pick which operating system you want to work in which determines which browsers you'll have access to, and then using a VNC like interface directly in the browser window, you get access to the system desktop where you can open which ever browser you like and load up your website. 

If you need more then 5 minutes a session, you can buy 5 minute block intervals starting at $1 each. If you buy them in bulk (starts with 6 or more) the costs go down.

I think this would be an invaluable service for any web developer/designer.

Chrome - the google web browser

So some of you may or may not have heard by now that google, somewhat suddenly, announced availability of a browser they developed. I'm typing this blog post using it. You can download it from www.google.com/chrome - it will live side by side with IE, FF etc.

It does have some rendering quirks on various sites, but for the most part it works. And when it does work, it works fast. It renders pages noticeably much faster then IE6 does. And perhaps even a tad bit faster then FF3. It has tabs which sit all the way at the top of the window. And one nice thing about them is that each tab runs in it's own process so if one crashes, only the one tab goes down. It comes with it's own task manager to monitor the tabs (shift-esc to bring it up) which will show you the cpu, memory and network usage of each tab, plus plugins.

Another nice little feature when you first start it (and it starts as fast as it renders) are medium sized icons on the start page of the most frequently visited sites. I also noticed it will let you resize a multi-line text box it make it easier to type.

And for those of you who prefer to surf anonymously, it comes with an incognito mode, which will basically erase the history, cookies etc of that session once you close the browser. 

I also just noticed one other little feature. The little icon in the corner of the tab will turn grey and rotate counter-clockwise if its trying to connect to a website, and it will turn blue and rotate clockwise if it's downloading content from a site.

If you are using it and notice anything else cool (or not cool) about it, please feel free to let me know in the comments.