browsers

Shorter URL? Longer URL? Funny URL?

This Slashdot discussion got me started. The discussion is about URL shortening services and their impact on the Web. Needless to say, most people who care about the Web, hate all kinds of third-party URL manipulations with a passion. The reasons are numerous, and here are two that annoy me the most:

Obscurity. You have no idea where you are going anymore. It can be the newest scam website, an image, a huge video, or anything else for that matter. When you see full URL, even if you don’t always can understand the full path, at least the domain name is a hint.
Latency. Most (all?) URL shortening services work via a redirect. So whenever you click on the URL to visit a page, instead of going to the page directly you are going to the web service which expands that URL first, and then redirects you further. This takes time and gives you nothing in return.

A lot of Slashdot people feel similar. Yet it still makes for an interesting discussion. Here are the bits that I picked up:

HugeUrl.com – web service that does the opposite of what URL shortening services do. It takes any URL and makes it huge. Just for the fun of it.
ShadyUrl.com – web service that obscures given URLs, making them look very suspicious. Also, for the fun of it.
There are a number of browser plugins that automate the expansion of short URLs, either on-demand or as you go. Here is one for Firefox. Here is one for Google Chrome.
Last year’s Coding Horror blog post discussing the problems of URL shortening services.

Also after a brief discussion and fooling around with my colleagues, I learned about Abcd-Whatever, which is a web service that lives on an extremely long domain name and offers free email addresses. Such email addresses are hard for people to type correctly, impossible for some SPAM bots to grab, and excellent for testing web forms.

Installing Google Talk plugin for voice and video on Fedora Linux

With recent news of Google adding support for telephone calls from GTalk, I thought it was time to finally setup voice and video plugin on my system. The good thing is that Google provides the Linux version of the browser plugin. The bad news are that the plugin is only packaged for Debian-based systems, while I am a Fedora Linux user. But thanks to a couple of Google searches, the solution is known and is quite simple in fact. Here is what I had to do.

Download the browser plugin-in (.deb file, 6 MB).
Extract the content of the google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb file, using ark, or file-roller, or, like me, using Midnight Commander.
In the extracted files, you’ll see data.tar.gz . Extract it to your system folders (/opt, /usr, /etc). In fact, you can skip /etc part that sets up a cron job to update the plugin daily. It relies on apt, which you probably won’t have installed and configured on your Fedora system.
Try running the plugin in command line, using: /opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by creating a symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0a libssl.so.0.9.8
If you see the error like “/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, fix it by installing Adobe Reader: yum install AdobeReader_enu-9.3.3-1.i486 , and then creating the symbolic link: cd /usr/lib && ln -s /opt/Adobe/Reader9/Reader/intellinux/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 . If you don’t have adobe repo configured or want an alternative to having Adobe Reader on your system, examine the output of “yum provides libcrypto.so.0.9.8“, which will tell you which other packages have the required library.
Restart your browser.
Check that the plugin is installed and enabled by looking at “about:plugins” or a similar page of your browser.

Now you should be able to use voice and video chat in GTalk. Here is a screenshot I made of a video chat after I did all of the above steps.

If your browser still complains about not having the plugin installed, or plugin crashes for some reason, just run it from the command line (step 4). Examine the output and act accordingly. Usually everything should just work, and pretty much the only scenario when it doesn’t is when you don’t have required libraries installed on your system, or you have them installed in a different path than the plugin expects them. Symbolic links should fix the path issue. Yum should help you with locating any missing library.

Enjoy!

Ad CTR ratio by browser

Download Squad attempts to analyze a recent report about advertising click-through rate (CTR) ratio based on different browsers. Apparently, more than 40 million impressions were used as the data for this report, and Opera and MSIE users came on top – they click the most ads. Firefox and Chrome users are further down the list, and Safari users are at the bottom.

I think this chart makes a lot of sense. While there are ad-blocking solutions for both Opera and MSIE, neither one of this browsers has a healthy plugin ecosystem. In other words, even if there are ways to filter ads in these browsers, most users don’t know how to do it or simply don’t care enough. Both Firefox and Chrome browsers are blossoming with addons and extensions which filter all ads, known ads, annoying ads, flash ads, ads on specific websites, ads of specific sizes, and so on and so forth. In fact, I don’t know any Firefox or Chrome user who doesn’t have some sort of ad-filtering extension installed.

That leaves us with Safari. Why Safari users are clicking the least ads? I don’t know. I’m thinking that might be a statistical inaccuracy or something along those lines. Or maybe they all are just broke from buying all those Apple products and have no interest in ads no more. Who knows?

On browser compatibility

Here is a quote for you on browser compatibility from an excellent book Diving Into HTML 5, which is available online.

The last time I tried to count, there were 5 doctypes that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.

And just in the flowchart link will break anytime soon, here is a copy of the image.

Back to Mozilla Firefox

About a month ago I praised Chromium browser (and Google Chrome incarnation of it). It’s fast, slick, and like Firefox has a gadzillion extensions. Unfortunately, I switched back to Mozilla Firefox for now. And as much as I’d like to use Chrome, there is an issue that annoys me enough not to – profile corruption.

As any other young application, Chromium crashes quite often. That is understandable. But the problem is that every time it crashes, my browser profile is corrupted, which results in loss of history, saved passwords, and open tabs. That’s just something I can’t tolerate. Crash all you want, but bring me right back to where I was, when I restart your sorry butt!

Hopefully this problem will annoy enough people for someone to step up and fix it.