They have introduced a feature where closing the browser can remember the tabs you had open, and rehydrates these again when you start Firefox. This feature is controlled in the Settings > General > Startup section. If you have this set to Show my windows and tabs from last time, Firefox will no longer expire session cookies when the browser is closed.

This seems to be a pretty big security concern, as you are prompted to switch this setting on the first time you try to close the browser, so the majority of users would have this set-up. I’m not entirely sure how it decides when a session cookie should expire under these conditions, any ideas?

After learning that I have at least one occasional mobile using accessing the site (yes Jimmy, that’s you!) I’ve put in place a much more appropriate stylesheet, linked in with the handheld media type. I’ve been testing this against Opera – pressing Shift-F11 will switch Opera to handheld mode and will emulate it’s rendering behaviour when running on a mobile device. I think overall it works pretty well. Some of the features include…

• Only 2 images in the design, and these are mini, mini images (3K each)
• Single column fluid layout
• More appropriate text sizing and margins
• Better sizing of form controls

I don’t really know enough about how widely the handheld media type has been adopted by mobile browsers, but I guess at least Opera crops up all over the place and it will render really nicely. Any feedback from my one mobile user would be appreciated

While I was in the mood I’ve also added a print stylesheet, so think I should now be covered all round. I might have a little rant about Aural media type shortly, but will save that treat for another day.

I can only assume that Jon Hicks was involved in the design – look at the logo below, then think about Firefox. I’m not complaining at all – love the fishy logo.

Something that totally slipped past me is that Firefox 2.0 has also just been released! I have no idea what’s new just yet, but I love this little browser so I’ll be installing today. I think you should too.

One of the hacks used to get around this was to apply height: 1px to an element (in a hacks file, served only to IE6 via conditional comments). As IE6 treated height like min-height, this would have no adverse behaviour, but would result in haslayout resolving to true for the element.

This morning I came across my first strange rendering issue in IE7 due to haslayout being false on a container element. I think a lot of the quirks have been fixed, but just be aware that the engine can still render differently according to haslayout. The previous height:1px fix is no longer applicable, as IE7 quite correctly respects any absolute height that you specify.

The fix in this case was to set min-height: 1px, which is another attribute that will now result in haslayout being set. In our case this had no adverse effect on the desired rendering, and therefore was a suitable fix. The actual problem was minor – 1px of extra padding on an element for no good reason.

I think in a lot of cases setting a min-height value would be a good approach (obviously this can be abstracted to a seperate file and served with conditional comments). However this is a fairly unobtrusive fix, so could stay with the core set of instructions without polluting the water too much.

I think that up to now the format has never caught on in a big way, as the main benefit is having full control over the alpha channel and being able to layer up semi-transparent areas, and IE6 would not natively support the opacity specified in the image.

There were a few workarounds – more can be read on AListApart. These are based around using the AlphaImageLoader proprietary filter in Internet Explorer. However doesn’t provide the kind of flexibility you can usually get when you specify CSS background properties – for example, getting to control horizontal and vertical tiling behaviour.

So with IE7, all of the major modern browsers will now support the alpha channel in PNG format (cheering from the stalls). This all sounds a bit geeky and dull so far, but this makes the life of a designer much more exciting.

We’ve been able to do a certain amount with transparency up until now, but generally by faking it, where images happen to match up perfectly to give the illusion of transparency. However, this would mean that moving things around too much would require cutting new image assets.

No longer! We can now see a point where the general browsing populous will all be rendering PNG images correctly, which means that we can do some very cool things. I’ll try to whip up some examples in the near future – feel free to add links to any showcase sites that you’ve come across.