Month: November 2007

The state of browser affairs

First, a little joke to set the scene (forgive a rough translation from Russian)…

Lion, the king of all animals, was running some statistics over his animal kingdom.  He called all animals and made the speech.  “Dear all,” – he said, – “I am trying to figure out how to direct the educational program in the upcoming year.  For that I need some stats.  Those of you who are strong, please stand on my right.  Those of you who are smart, please stand on my left.  And let me count you…”

Strong animals – elephants, bulls, hippos, etc – all moved by the lion’s right paw.  The smart animals – beavers, rats, foxes, etc – grouped by lion’s left side.  When the dust settled, there was a one animal still running around blubbering something.  All attention turned towards the creature, and everyone saw the monkey.  It was running back and forward from one group to another and back again, thinking out oud: “strong to the right, smart to the left.. .strong to the right, smart to the left… and me? what about me?  Do I have to cut myself in half or what?” …

For the last few days, I feel a little bit like that monkey.  The thing is that I’m using two browsers right now, I can’t continue using two browsers, and I can’t pick one.  Those of you following me on Twitter might be somewhat aware of the situation.

I love Firefox.  I’ve been using it for years, and I don’t see it going anywhere.  It has plenty of functionality (especially through plugins and extensions) that no other browser has.  It does whatever I want it to do and then a little bit more.  But it’s so slow that I can’t stand it.  I have removed all extensions that I don’t use.  I have disabled all extensions that I use from time to time.  I read all optimizations tips on the web and tried a few thoughts of my own.  It helped, but not enough.  Nothing has solved the problem.  Scrolling is still slow.  Especially with a few tabs open.  Switching between tabs is slow. Opening a new tab is slow.  And these are things I do a few thousand times a day.  Even milliseconds count for this operations.  Firefox allows itself to spend almost full seconds.

On the other hand, I have Opera – a fantastically fast browser.  It even has a lot of features that make browsing the web so pleasant. Tabs, search bar, downloads management, history and bookmarks, fast dial, notes, and many more.  But.  Those aren’t enough.  Even with recently introduced widgets it still doesn’t cover the functionality that I need.  By far.  Not even 50%.  But it’s so fast that it almost makes me not care.  Almost.

Opera has practically no integration with social services – something that I work a lot with.  No comparison can be made with Firefox extensions for Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us here.  It has practically no integration with other, less social, online tools – specifically the Google pack of services (Gmail, Calendar, Reader, etc).  And it misses the most important area of my work – web development.  Source code formatting, highlighting, editing, analysis, testing, troubleshooting…

I am confident that the situation will improve and resolve itself pretty soon.  Firefox is getting a lot of momentum and already plenty of optimizations went into upcoming Firefox 3.  Opera is getting a lot of hype and user base on mobile devices.  People are starting to develop for it.

But I can’t wait…

Tip for web promoters

If you care about web promotion of your web site, if you post articles titled “10 steps to do XYZ” or “ABC in 3 minutes”, if you want your blog posts to be bookmarked across all social networks, if you follow your incoming links with more attention than your personal hygiene, then here is a tip for you.

Look at the limitations that social bookmarking services impose on their users.  Make sure that you provide a quick way to bookmark your site with sufficient information which is within those limitations.

Take del.icio.us for example. Which limitations does it impose on the users?  There are a few, but the main one is the length of the description.  Whenever I bookmark your web site, I can only post 255 characters of the description.  This is too much and this is too little.

This is too much if I will have to type my own description.  I don’t have the time to describe all the web sites that I bookmark.  For many of them, I don’t even have any idea of what to write, since I bookmark the web site to check it out later… So whenever I bookmark a web site, I look around for a quick way to generate that description.  And the easiest and fastest way is always a copy-paste.

That’s where that description length limitation becomes too small.  Most web sites have an “About” page these days.  But it’s too long for a description.  A couple of paragraphs could do, and I can almost always find those paragraphs to copy-paste, but they almost never fit into 255 characters.  That’s where you come in.

First of all, make sure that there is a piece of text, less than 255 characters long, that gives me an idea of what the article is or post or page or web site is about.  Secondly, make sure that I can find that piece of text easily.  Make it bold.  Put a border around it.   Slap a “Synopsis” or “About” or “In brief” label somewhere nearby.  You can even go as noisy as “del.icio.us users might want to use this as description: …”.

Why would you want to go into all that trouble?  Because this will help me, your visitor, to keep my bookmarks organized and annotated.  I will be able to find this bookmark much faster later on.  And that means that chances of me coming back, of me sending this link to someone else, or blogging about it are much higher.  And that is what you, as a web promoter, want.  Isn’t it?

Waiting for an online advertising revolution

Quoting Stan Schroeder of Mashable:

The thing is, AdSense is just too easy to abuse. Click an ad, and there goes a couple of dollars. Turn it into a meme or a viral joke and thousands go down the drain, together with the entire idea of click-based ads.

I agree,  the system is easy to abuse and it is getting abused a lot.  But it still works.  It helps a lot of people make a lot of money. And until it is so, it won’t go or even change much.

Now the question is – what are the alternatives?

Marking Google Maps

I have to admit that I am not a power user of Google Maps.  Sure, I visit the site often to search for a parking space or a better route around Limassol downtown.  But I never actually explored the power of the application and all of its useful features.

Today I accidentally realized that I could actually place marks on the maps and share them with other people. This is more than valuable while providing someone with driving instructions or just to make sure several people talk about the same place.

In case you don’t know how to do this, here is a quick guide for you.

  1. Visit Google Maps while being logged in with your Google account. If you already have an account with Gmail or any other Google service, you can use that one with Google Maps.
  2. Click on the “My Maps” tab under the search bar on the left of the map image.
  3. Click on the “Create new map” link.
  4. Navigate the map image and zoom to find the location of your choice. Drag and drop the marker (icon with blue something right next to the icon with the hand at the top of the map image) on the location, or draw a shape around it (another icon up there).
  5. Fill in the title and description of the map on the left.
  6. Mark the map “Public” in the privacy settings on the left, under the description.
  7. Click on the “Done” button to save the map.
  8. Click on the “Link to this page” on the right side, above the map image. You’ll get the URL that you can copy and paste into email, instant messenger, or blog.

If you did everything right, you’ll have something like this – my map with a few Limassol locations.