Category: Software

CYTA is still using Internet Explorer 6

kyriakos

 

I recently had to work on a web project for Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CYTA) and to my surprise they still use Internet Explorer 6 in all their internal PCs. The default hard drive image installed across all their employee PCs includes Windows XP & Internet Explorer 6. The reason they keep using the now pre-historic version of Internet Explorer is that some of their legacy software still requires it to work properly. What’s annoying about it though is that the particular software is only being used by around 50 people while the rest 2950 employees have to suffer viewing the 1999’s state of the art web.

Apparently if you call the support help desk and beg they can agree to install Firefox for you but actually getting it done may take days.

Firefox – a memory black hole

kyriakos

Since version 2 of Firefox I’ve noticed that it doesn’t  release the memory it allocates back to the system after you close some of the open tabs. We’re on version 4 now and the memory issue is still there. I was actually running every beta and RC of version 4 and every time I checking to see if the issue was solved but no luck. I reproduced the problem both on Windows 7 and Ubuntu. To be honest, if Chrome’s development tools were as good as Firebug  I’d probably have uninstalled Firefox already.

There is this open source guru/fanboy at my work who insists that Firefox is the best browser ever because they follow open standards closely. I told him that Firefox seems to have the biggest issues with memory consumption compared to other browsers but he said he never faced any similar problems. Then I noticed that he has Javascript, Flash and every other juicy web bit disabled which might explain it or he was just lying to support his cause. Either way here’s a nice screenshot I took this morning after leaving my work’s PC with Firefox open all night.

How to free up disk space when using Google Chrome

kyriakos

I’ve been using Google Chrome for a while now and one great thing about it is that it automatically updates itself whenever a new version comes out (some would debate this is a bad thing but I feel like its a great thing especially for non very technical users – if this feature was in Internet Explorer 6 web developer’s life would have been so much easier today). Unfortunately for some weird reason after an update is made the previous version remains on disk, it doesn’t take up a lot of space by today’s standards (around 150-200mb) but for people like me whose job’s PC is stuck with a 100GB hard disk having 7 versions of  Chrome lying around makes a difference.

To get that space back all you have to do is delete the older versions. You can find them in C:\Users\username\AppData\Chrome\Application (change C and username to the ones that apply in your case). If you look into that folder you will find something like this:

Folders are named after the version build of Chrome, you can safely delete all of them except the latest release, in this case 11.0.696.25.