I've just read a post over at Search Engine Journal about statistics from Hitwise UK suggesting British users are increasingly using browser toolbars to search for domains they know already like tesco.com rather than typing them directly into their browser address bar.

I use this technique a lot because I frequently misspell a domain name or get the wrong domain extension for a website. When this happens more-often-than-not you get a holding page, cyber-squatter site, or worst still a site that attempts to mimic the intended destination in order to "phish" log-in details.
When you use a search toolbar to navigate to a domain the top search result is most likely going to to be the real domain.

As an avid user of Firefox the dangers of using one browser (apart from initial testing) became apparent today, especially considering most web users still use Internet Explorer.

I recently converted my site to use Blogger, and I also thought I'd share interesting news articles I read with my visitors by using Google Reader's Javascript widget.

Google Reader is still in Beta

I placed the Javascript widget on my home page and my blog pages a while back. I just checked my site in Internet Explorer 7 and was amazed to see only the template was rendered. There was a distinct lack of content!

I looked at the source HTML, and the content was there. I was puzzled for a few minutes until I realised what the blog page and the home page had in common; The Javascript Google widget.

I quickly removed them and FTPed the pages, the problem was resolved. I grabbed the URL the script block was trying to call and tried to download the external Javascript straight to my browser... it timed-out.

It appears that Internet Explorer will get stuck when external Javascript doesn't load, so be aware of this the next time you choose to use an externally hosted Javascript file. Opera and Firefox didn't seem to have a problem.