AddType application/x-xpinstall .xpi

But the problem was that my server (godaddy) for some mysterious reasons was not recognizing the above directive. Searching around I found that godaddy has some restrictions on the various htaccess directives (yuck!). After fiddling for some time I finally had to try another solution.

What the Apache ‘AddType’ directive does is that it maps the given filename extension onto the specified MIME content type, so that the browser can understand what it is supposed to do with the content. If we could replicate that in PHP than we are good. A possible solution that worked for me is shown below. You can also use the idea for other MIME types.

<?php
 
 
/* File we want to send to the browser */
$filename = "codediesel.xpi";
 
 
/**
 * The following header is required for browsers that do not
 * recognize the xpi extension. i.e all browsers other than Firefox.
 * This will display the familiar 'save/open' dialog if the xpi
 * extension is not supported.
 */
header("Content-Disposition: filename={$filename}");
 
 
/* Tell the browser that the content that is coming is an xpinstall */
header('Content-type: application/x-xpinstall');
 
 
/* Also send the content length */
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($filename));
 
 
/* readfile reads the file content and echos it to the output */
readfile($filename);
 
?>

Of course if the filesize is large the readfile function could possibly incur a performance hit. But for small files it works good.

As you can see it is blazingly fast, being twice as fast as Firefox 3 and twenty times faster than Internet Explorer 6.  If you are using JavaScript heavy applications like Gmail or Javascript UI frameworks like Yahoo UI, extJS, jQuery etc. than you can really reap the benefits of a fast engine. If you like to see a visual comparison try running one of John Resig’s Processing.js demo in Firefox 3 and Chrome and you can see how fast Chrome can run JavaScript.

Some of the other interesting things Google Chrome offers can be read in a comic format here – designed by the brilliant Scott McCloud, a sample page is shown below.

You can download Google Chrome here.

With the help of WebSlices you can keep your users connected to your site. Any content on your site that regularly changes can be tagged as a WebSlice. For e.g products, horoscopes, weather, stocks, news, photos.

For example ebay has a search page for ie8 that supports WebSlice. Lets say I have to track a particular product on eBay for bid amount and other details. Whenever you navigate to a website that supports WebSlice a discovery button highlights as show below for the following url: http://ie8.ebay.com/

Now whenever you hover over a portion of a WebSlice, a icon pops up which you can click so as to add the WebSlice to your favorites bar.

Shown below is the WebSlice for the above link.

Whenever the content for this particular portion changes, the corresponding WebSlice is automatically updated. Now I don’t have to visit eBay to see the latest update on the product I’m interested in. I get to see the updates on the particular WebSlice. Whenever the slice content is updated the title of the slice on the favorites bar turns to bold.

The HTML that is displayed in the WebSlices details view comes from the description property of a WebSlice, which is set by the developer during design. The preview window has limited ability though; for example, the window allows no scripting or form controls.

Creating your own WebSlices:
You just have to wrap whatever content that you want to become a WebSlice in a div tag, and set the class name for the div as ‘hslice’.

There are a few sub elements that you can use to further define the WebSlice: ‘entry-title’, ‘entry-content’ and ‘ttl’ … among others.

<div id="1" class="hslice">
<p class="entry-title">Item - $80.00</p>
 
<div class="entry-content">high bidder: buyer9 …</div>
</div>

Conclusion:
At first it looked a little unremarkable but after trying some examples myself I think it could be a neat feature to add to your web pages.