the tindog coffeehouse

This is me eating my words.

After stating my preference for Firefox and saying that Google’s Chrome browser “doesn’t really feel complete”, I’m ready to admit I was wrong. In fact, I would even go so far as to say I love it. As much as a person can love a web browser anyway.

The migration from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t planned and it wasn’t really a voluntary move. Firefox forced me out after multiple add-ons started giving me problems on two different computers. I could disable one or two and be fine for a while, but eventually it would crash again or freeze up or just refuse to open in the first place.  The more problems I encountered, the clearer my decision became: I had to move on. And no, I don’t fully blame Mozilla; after all, these were third-party add-ons. But after several days of troubleshooting, it simply was no longer worth the effort.

My main hang-ups with Chrome in the past were the bare-minimum interface and the limited ability to personalize it (as compared to Firefox). I just didn’t see how I could function as efficiently on Chrome — with it’s single “omnibox” address bar — as I could on Firefox, which includes an address bar, small search box, and the ability to add other useful toolbars. But once I figured out how to create custom search engines and keywords, I realized it could work just as well as what I had been using. And most of the problems I had had with early third-party extensions seemed to be resolved with more recent versions.

Not that Chrome is perfect. I’d still like more customization options, and a few websites don’t quite work as expected. Moving items in your Netflix queue, for example, is next to impossible in Chrome. But for the most part, it does the job very well. And it is noticeably faster than Firefox, which is certainly a plus.

Of course, Firefox 4 is due out in the next few months, so I suppose there’s always the possibility I could go back. At this point, though, it doesn’t seem likely.

Previously:
With web browsers, sometimes less is less
Even with extensions, Google Chrome needs polishing
Giving in to Google

If this photo from ZDNet of an early iteration of Internet Explorer 9 is any indication of what the final product will look like, I have to say it’s downright horrid.

I know, I know, I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks that. Just like I’m the only person to not really care for the stripped-down look of Google Chrome (which Microsoft is clearly imitating).

I understand the trend toward leaner and cleaner browsers: fewer buttons, consolidated toolbars, a fear of anything that might impede upon the sacred real estate that is the interwebs. I understand it, I just don’t fully agree with it.

Personally, I would rather sacrifice a few pixels for more functionality. Let me add toolbars if I want them, add buttons, move them around. That’s why I still prefer the slower Firefox over the slightly more nimble Chrome.

IE 9, however, (or at least this version of it) is even more minimal than Chrome, putting the tabs on the same row as the address bar, which might be fine if you only have 2 or 3 tabs open but could get really crowded after that. And as with IE 7 and 8, the home button is as far away from other navigation buttons as possible, which makes no sense whatsoever. Plus Microsoft has followed Google’s lead of ditching the print button, just in case you had any notions of killing the earth with your print-happy clicky finger.

Of course, the final version of IE 9 might not look anything like this, and it’s not clear how much of the UI users will be able to change to fit their preferences. But copying Chrome isn’t necessarily the best move to make from a functionality perspective. Sometimes less is more, but in this case, less is just less.

Previously:
Even with extensions, Google Chrome needs polishing
Internet Explorer 8: Faster but no Firefox

According to Mashable, the first non-Latin domain names have been issued by ICANN. The three issued domains are all in Arabic.

Screenshot from Mashable:

I doubt the majority of Americans will be impacted by this change. After all, the people likely to visit a website whose URL is in Arabic or Cyrillic or Chinese probably already speak the language. And in terms of national security, I don’t think it will be an issue since people in the intelligence community who monitor Arabic websites will be able to make sense of the URLs.

Where it could be an issue, though, is for the average user who doesn’t speak a non-Latin language. As Gizmodo and others have already pointed out, they pose a greater phishing threat. But even for legitimate sites, will there be a way to translate the URLs into Latin characters for non-native-speaking users, similar to Google’s “translate this page” feature?

I guess the rule of thumb for such sites is that unless you can speak (or at least read) the language, don’t go there.

(Also interesting to note how many Arab commenters on Mashable say that Arabic domains are unnecessary and will only cause confusion. Therefore it makes me wonder how many of these we’ll actually see other than from official government sites and extremist groups.)

An Apple employee supposedly loses a prototype of the upcoming 4th-generation iPhone after a night of heavy drinking to celebrate his birthday. A stranger then sells it to tech blog Gizmodo for $5000. Gizmodo makes millions from all the publicity. And now police have gotten involved, breaking in to Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house and confiscating several computers and other property that may have been “used as the means of convicting a felony”.

Not to defend Gizmodo’s actions, but I just have to state the obvious:

It was only an iPhone.

A phone that was going to be publicly announced in two months anyway and whose operating system has already been announced. In other words, it wasn’t that big of a story to begin with except to the tech blogs and die-hard Apple fanboys. But because of Apple’s extreme overreaction, it’s become a big story, and not the kind that benefits Steve Jobs and Co.

Not that it’ll hurt their bottom line in the short run, but it certainly adds fuel to the fire for those who criticize Apple for being overly controlling and secretive. That kind of approach to doing business may have been tolerated at one time, but as Android continues to mature, I have to wonder how long it’ll be before a significant number of customers go Google for good.

Previously:
13 things I would change about the iPhone
‘How Apple Plays Upon Our Insecurities’

There’s been a lot of talk this week about Facebook’s new Open Graph platform and its “connections” feature and what all that means to users’ privacy, and I even considered writing up a blog post about it. But I just couldn’t. I tried, though. Twice. But I realized that honestly I just don’t care.

Is Facebook really “positioning itself to become deeply embedded in almost every single website”? Will your privacy truly be “crushed with impunity”? Has Facebook “removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information”?

Or is everyone overreacting?

Listen, I get it. Facebook doesn’t really care about your privacy; they’ve proven that much. But at the same time, what they’re doing isn’t that different than what Google, Twitter, and a host of other companies do. So if you’re really that upset that the photos you posted of your kids are now viewable to the entire Internet or that everyone now knows what college you went to or the fact you “like” Lady Gaga (which really, you should just keep to yourself), then maybe the best thing to do would be to remove said content from the site so it’s no longer an issue. Or don’t put it up there to begin with.

In the meantime, Facebook, like any other Internet-based company whose revenue depends solely on advertising, will be using every available opportunity to increase its bottom line and fulfill its “manifest destiny”.

Is that news? I guess. Do I care? Not in the least.

Previously:
Why I closed my Facebook account
How exactly is Facebook connect good for users?

Former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass (insert your own jokes here) wrote a pretty indicting op-ed piece yesterday in the New York Times about how his previous employer’s corporate culture stifles any true innovation coming out of the Redmond monolith:

Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera? …

What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

He goes on to use as one example the story of how Microsoft’s ClearType technology was resisted by multiple groups within the company, thus apparently undermining any comparative advantages it would’ve provided.

Microsoft, naturally, doesn’t quite agree with Brass’s assertions. It replied that:

At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact in the world. For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact. …

[F]or a company whose products touch vast numbers of people, what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed.

OK, fair enough. Microsoft admits having “a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea” isn’t their top priority, which is another way of saying, “Bite me, Steve Jobs.” No, Microsoft is more concerned with quality. And if quality takes time, then they’re totally fine with that.

The problem is, in the 21st-century world of enterprise and consumer technology, quality doesn’t mean Jack. It’s all about speed, who can get the newest, shiniest product to market the fastest. It doesn’t have to be perfect (the first-gen iPhone certainly wasn’t, and virtually every Google product carried the “Beta” label for years), it just has to exist. If your product isn’t generating headlines on TechCrunch or Mashable, then you’ve lost, simple as that.

But doesn’t “innovation at scale” account for anything? After all, Microsoft is quick to trumpet that Internet Explorer 8 is now the most-used web browser on the Internet. Of course what they fail to mention is that IE6 is still number two. And why is IE6 still so popular? Because thousands of enterprises are stuck with it because their legacy web-based apps simply don’t work with any modern, standards-based browser. In other words, it’s Microsoft’s lack of quality (combined with corporate laziness) that helps keep its numbers as high as they are.

And while Microsoft may be patting itself on the back for the success of Windows 7, it’s completely left in the dust when it comes to smartphones, social networking, cloud computing, and digital media. Even its venerable Internet Explorer continues to lose ground to Firefox and Chrome, a trend that will surely continue as more sites follow Google’s lead of blocking IE6 altogether.

So I guess I could buy the “innovation at scale” argument if the “scale” was more commanding. But it’s not, and the reason is because the quality just isn’t there in many cases.

Brass claims that the lack of innovation is directly due to Microsoft’s “dysfunctional” and inherently competitive corporate culture, which makes any chance of true innovation nearly impossible, and I’m inclined to agree, at least in part. As a former Microsoft employee myself (in enterprise support, not development), I experienced the direct impact of its muddled, ever-changing org chart and constantly-recalibrating corporate visions.

However, Microsoft isn’t really that much different than any other large corporation. Generally the larger (and older) a company gets, the more conservative it becomes; it’s just the way corporate America works. So to blame the company’s mediocrity on its organizational structure is a bit of a cop-out. The fact is, Microsoft just doesn’t fully understand the various industries it’s in, and no amount of org chart reshuffling is going to change that.

Previously:
The biggest mistake Microsoft made with Windows 7
Windows launch party video: the perfect ad for OS X
New Microsoft ‘I’m a PC’ ads: too little too late

When Mozilla released version 3.6 of its Firefox browser, I immediately installed it on my home computer. Overall, it’s a pretty nice update, but naturally a few of my add-ons didn’t work with it. (Par for the course.) One of those add-ons is IE Tab, which allows you to view a website using Internet Explorer while still in Firefox. Since I use that particular add-on pretty regularly, I decided to take another look at Google Chrome since the latest update of that browser, version 4.0, adds support for extensions such as AdBlock, Xmarks, and IE Tab.

Without question, Chrome has a lot of advantages. It’s fast, it’s more standards-compliant than Firefox, and each tab runs in its own process (thus allowing one to fail without taking down the whole browser). But even with the latest updates and extensions (Chrome’s versions of Firefox’s add-ons), it doesn’t really feel complete.

First, Chrome has always been a stripped-down browser, and this latest version is no exception. The simplicity is fine for basic browsing but becomes a severe annoyance if you plan on using it for any extended period of time. The lack of a native print button, the inability to add buttons or move them around, and the mandatory thumbnail page when creating a new tab are just a few of the nuisances. Some of the limitations, of course, can be remedied with third-party extensions, but not all them.

Second, while a lot of extensions are available, none of the ones I tried seemed as well-developed as their Firefox equivalents. IE Tab in Firefox, for example, allows you to configure which sites or domains will always open in an IE environment and allows easy switching back and forth with one click of a button. IE Tab in Chrome, however, has neither of those options. ForecastFox in Firefox displays the weather in the bottom status bar. In Chrome, you just get a button in the top toolbar that you have to click on for weather details. Xmarks, the popular bookmark syncing service, also didn’t quite deliver. Bookmarks would sync but would screw up the bookmarks on my home Firefox install, and even after multiple syncs, it never did work exactly right. And that seemed to be a common occurrence in my experience. While all of the extensions I tried worked to one degree or another, most felt clumsy and awkward.

The more I used Chrome, the more it reminded me of the contrast between Google’s Android platform and the iPhone. While Android has improved considerably since its initial release, it still lags pretty far behind the iPhone in terms of overall user experience, and the apps for the iPhone are far more numerous and generally better developed than those for Android. Such is the case with Chrome and its extensions versus Firefox and its add-ons; while Chrome continues to improve, it’s not nearly as polished as Firefox.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that it’s a matter of preference. I understand why Chrome is so popular, but in my opinion, Firefox is still the better browser.

Previously:
Giving in to Google
Internet Explorer 8: Faster but no Firefox

…was including Internet Explorer 8 with it.

Hear me out.

Windows 7 has gotten a lot of praise for its improvements over Vista, both under-the-hood changes to the core OS as well as more visible changes such as a revamped taskbar and the introduction of features like Jump Lists and Libraries. It’s not a major upgrade of Vista and certainly not perfect, but most of my complaints are minor. For example, why is there still so much fluff (desktop gadgets, Wordpad, Sticky Notes, etc.)? Why all the boring and/or confusing “Microsoft-isms” (Home Groups, User Account Control, Windows Live Essentials, Windows Easy Transfer, BitLocker, Aero Peek, Aero Shake)? And why is Steve Ballmer still around?

But again, with the possible exception of the Ballmer question, those are minor annoyances. Where I think Microsoft really missed a huge opportunity was in not killing off Internet Explorer. I mean, let’s face it, IE is a disaster. Sure IE8 is better than previous versions, but it doesn’t even begin to compare to Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. It’s slower, consumes a huge amount of memory when using multiple tabs, and miserably fails the industry-standard Acid3 test.

Microsoft needs to completely ditch IE and replace it with a brand new browser built to support web standards, not worry about backwards compatibility. Maybe even build it with Webkit like Chrome and Safari. It would go a long way in restoring the image of Microsoft and would show that they can effectively compete with Google and Apple. They’ve made strides with Bing, now they need to follow it up with a modern, standards-compliant web browser.

To me, Windows 7 would’ve been the perfect showcase for such a browser. Instead, Microsoft seems to be content with the status quo, and that’s a big disappointment.

Previously:
Internet Explorer 8: Faster but no Firefox
Microsoft: Internet Explorer 8 perfect for porn addicts
Windows 7 Beta 1: Initial thoughts
Windows 7 Beta 1: The other stuff

Apple can now fire John Hodgman and Justin Long. Thanks to Microsoft and their ridiculous (but apparently real) Windows 7 Launch Party video, they’ll never need to create another stupid “I’m a Mac” commercial again.

Why anyone at Microsoft actually thought this was a good idea, I’ll never know. If they really have any aspirations of remaining even somewhat relevant compared to OS X or Google or even Linux, this video immediately negates any chance of that. Long forgotten are the “I’m a PC” commercials, which I thought were really well done. Windows 7, evidently, is for 50-something women who blow up balloons and invite people over to play with their computers.

Seriously, would anyone actually host one of these things? And if so, does Microsoft actually want to admit that?

If you do host a Windows 7 launch party, though, you could walk away with a copy of Windows 7, Steve Ballmer Edition.  Instead of a Blue Screen of Death, it throws a chair at you and sweats a lot.

Uh, no thanks.

Of course, if the thought of a party to celebrate an operating system sounds boring, you could always throw one of these instead:

Previously:
New Microsoft ‘I’m a PC’ ads: too little too late
‘How Apple Plays Upon Our Insecurities’
Microsoft: Internet Explorer 8 perfect for porn addicts

Microsoft wants you to know that Internet Explorer 8 is the perfect web browser for porn addicts.

At least that’s the message I walked away with after (reluctantly) watching their new IE8 commercial, in which a wife projectile vomits after finding porn on her husband’s laptop. (If you care to see it, it’s available here.) The point of the commercial is actually to promote IE8′s InPrivate browsing feature, aka “porn mode”, which hides the browsing history from, well, unapproving spouses.

Really, Microsoft? Really? Of all the various features of Internet Explorer you could’ve promoted, you chose to lead off with this one? Yes, the commercial is disgusting, but what I really don’t understand is why Microsoft thinks InPrivate is such a killer feature. After all, Chrome and Firefox 3.5 both have identical features, but those browsers are also much faster than IE and adhere better to web standards.

It seems to me that if Microsoft really wanted to go head-to-head against their competitors, they would try to do so in a way that spoke directly to the user base that would be most likely to use their product. That’s the tactic they took with their “Laptop Hunters” commercials, and it’s the reason those ads work. They’re not targeted at technical users, but rather non-technical consumers who, when shopping for a new computer, just walk into Best Buy and purchase whatever’s on sale.

And that should be the target audience of these Internet Explorer ads: the people who know nothing about Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, and couldn’t care less. They could talk about the speed improvements over previous versions of IE. They could talk about improvements in supporting web standards. They could talk about web slices, accelerators, or other new and unique features. Instead, they resort to low-brow slapstick that says nothing about the product other than it’s great for married men with an addiction to hardcore pornography.

Not exactly a winning message, if you ask me.

(By the way, the vomit commercial is just one in a series of ads — all featuring Dean Cain — that comprise their Browse for the Better campaign. Ironically, as part of the campaign, Microsoft will donate 8 meals to Feeding America for every download of IE8. Here’s hoping the recipients of those meals can keep their food down.)

Previously:
Internet Explorer 8: Faster but no Firefox
New Microsoft ‘I’m a PC’ ads: too little too late