Firefox 4 status bar

On run­ning Fire­fox 4 for the first time I was shocked to mouseover a link and appar­ently not be able to see where I was going. Had they ban­ished the sta­tus bar? Of course, everyone’s just play­ing catchup to Chrome’s UI, and its sta­tus bar isn’t really a bar at all — it just appears as and when it’s needed. Perfect.

Floating status bar in Chrome - only appears as you mouseover a link

The way it’s meant to happen!

As and when typ­i­cally just means “right before you click on a link”, with the whole thing trig­gered by mouseovers. The first page Fire­fox loads when you start the browser is avail­able here — http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/firstrun/ — can you see what’s wrong with it?

I love event-listenery JavaScript as much as the next guy, but the icon on Step 2 sug­gested I’d be going to another page (c’mon, that’s just what right angle quo­ta­tion marks have been co-opted to mean on the web!) while the browser wouldn’t say where.

Before vis­it­ing any actual pages in Fire­fox, not much trust­ing it at this point, I did some quick Googling and dis­cov­ered two things:

  1. That you can bring back the sta­tus bar by sim­ply typ­ing ⌘ + / or Ctrl + /, and
  2. That, not know­ing this, peo­ple have cre­ated at least one browser exten­sion to do exactly that.

Fail.

Of course, if I’d both­ered to actu­ally USE Fire­fox for 2 min­utes – trust­ing it even though it wouldn’t tell me where links were point­ing – I’d have dis­cov­ered that ordi­nar­ily it does. Pie-faced, I retreated to blog­ging angrily about how Mozilla’s first run screen is a great HTML5 page but a hor­ri­ble ini­tial demo of the browser’s capabilities.

A few obser­va­tions from this:

  • Browsers need to tell you where you’re going next. Users don’t[/shouldn’t] trust the Inter­net enough to find out when they arrive.
  • None of this would’ve hap­pened had the team cre­at­ing the land­ing page used pro­gres­sive enhance­ment and unob­tru­sive JS technique.
  • The team prob­a­bly didn’t because they wanted to show off how well their amaz­ing browser does fancy “HTML5” (in the Jobs-ian CSS/JS inclu­sive sense) stuff. Fine, but also link to a page that has the same content.
  • Browser ven­dors are respon­si­ble for keep­ing user’s trust from the very start. This is a weird issue because it’s actu­ally noth­ing to do with the browser’s func­tion­al­ity itself, but it tem­porar­ily impacted my opin­ion on how seri­ously Fire­fox take user choice/security/usability in a sig­nif­i­cant way.
  • No-one actu­ally uses Fire­fox any­more, so it doesn’t mat­ter. It is a pain while using Fire­bug to test my own sites, though. ;-)
# by Josh Street on March 29th, 2011 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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CMYK thumbnailing of JPEGs with Gmail/Google Mail

I peri­od­i­cally freak out when review­ing emails that I’ve sent, par­tic­u­larly to print­ers, using Gmail’s (hosted apps) web­mail inter­face. It has this habit of con­vert­ing CMYK JPGs to RGB thumb­nails really badly — but with­out appar­ent corruption.

Gmail getting CMYK thumbnails wrong

The blue in the image above is actu­ally a deep red!

Accord­ingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other arti­facts in the image. Nor­mally this just looks weird — some­times, in the case of logo vari­ants, it looks plau­si­ble but utterly incor­rect! My guess is they’re using an older ver­sion of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.

Still, those peo­ple email­ing CMYK JPGs has to be a lit­tle bit niche, so I’m not heaps hope­ful of this get­ting fixed too soon! The main rea­son I care is because web inter­faces are so much faster than retriev­ing large attach­ments from IMAP stores.

# by Josh Street on September 16th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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New EvolvedHD website: appropriately widescreen!

My friends over at EvolvedHD just launched a new web­site for their bur­geon­ing event pro­duc­tion empire down in Vic­to­ria. It’s a clear, clean microsite with a clear pre­sen­ta­tion of ser­vices offered and an effec­tive call to action with con­tact infor­ma­tion promi­nently fea­tured on every page (there are only four!)

New EvolvedHD site

Notably, the site is very wide (>1200px). As the web evolves we are observ­ing an ever increas­ing stan­dard width for desk­top ver­sions of web­sites — for some, this poses cur­rent issues as indi­vid­u­als grad­u­ally shift to widescreen plat­forms. For oth­ers, it rep­re­sents the inex­orable march away from old tech­nolo­gies towards the new!

While this poses cer­tain prob­lems for mobile clients, etc., even these devices are increas­ingly capa­ble of either lin­earis­ing or pro­vid­ing use­ful inter­faces (multi-touch, etc.) for mak­ing screen con­tent acces­si­ble in mobile con­texts. Here, the need for good infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture cries out even louder than tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. Brows­ing the Inter­net mobile is an ardu­ous task on even mobile web­sites, so the best thing you can do as an author is reduce the nec­es­sary depth of con­tent to make infor­ma­tion rapidly acces­si­ble for all user agents.

In the case of the EvolvedHD web­site, the inclu­sion of con­tact details at the top left of every page effec­tively ful­fills all likely appli­ca­tions of their web­site in a mobile context.

Con­sider more than just the desk­top when design­ing your web­site. Increas­ingly, even low-depth web­sites are being called upon for mobile access as peo­ple seize the con­ve­nience of any­where, any­time Inter­net. Stop mak­ing your users jump through hoops, and start giv­ing them what they want, sooner. It’ll do won­ders for your Internet-based business.

# by Josh Street on July 8th, 2009 Tags: , , , , , ,
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