Photo Picker

A cool web-service that every web-designer was waiting for: the Flickr Color Picker. You set the background color and it picks some "relevant" photos from Flickr.

Google tech support

About a week ago I have contacted Google's support. I wanted to let them know, that when their web services (Google Apps, Google Reader, AdWords/Adsense etc.) are being accessed via httpS, the browser sometimes shows a security warning: "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items". This message is always shown when you click the "help" link, sometimes it even pops-up during normal operations (opening items, logging-in etc), especially when using "Google Apps".

Simple steps to reproduce: navigate to https://mail.google.com/mail/ and click "Help".

[webmaster-hat-on] The reason is obvious: some element on a secure web page (one that is loaded with "https://") is not being loaded from a secure source (uses "http://" absolute path). This typically occurs with images, JavaScript, frames, CSS etc. It's a well known "mixed content error" which can be easily fixed [webmaster-hat-off]

Anyway, I decided to contact support. First, it took me dozens of clicks to finally get to the Google Apps support form through all their suggestions and troubleshooters. Then, Google has answered me with an automated email with links to FAQs, top suggestions and the closing phrase: "if you still have unresolved questions after looking through this material, please reply to this email". I still had unresolved questions, so I replied. After 4 days of waiting the Google's answer was:

Please switch to Firefox
OR
use our application via unsecured http.

I don't want to read my confidential emails via unsecured http. I don't want to switch to Firefox. I guess I will continue seeing this lame error from Google webdevs...

When Windows Vista was first released we had a lot of trouble with our network switcher tool, cause Vista requires administrative permissions to change network settings on the fly. And getting admin permissions is a real pain under Vista. We've had tons of support requests. Imagine if we would answer:

Please use Windows XP
OR
Disable "User Account Control" in Vista security settings.

Of course Google is a giant company which gets tons of emails and support requests from their users and crazy fans. They are obliged to filter these requests by forcing users to read their FAQs and troubleshooters. They simply can't afford being personal. It's not their fault. But that's the advantage of being a mISV. You're small enough to be personal to your customers.


[UPDATE] 2 seconds after posting this, I found this thread on BoS: Google support

6 reasons to switch back to IE after months of Firefox

***Disclaimer: these opinions and views are my PERSONAL opinion and may be right or wrong.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was happy using IE6 and Symantec Antivirus and was pretty much sure I was protected from all kinds of malware, being very skeptical about all the IE vulnerability horror stories.

But you know what they say: "there are two types of users - the ones who already do backups, and the ones that will".

Of course after a while I accidentally discovered several trojan-programs on my drive. One was trying to connect to a botnet, another was trying to steal my email passwords... So I installed Comodo Firewall (which I believe is the best personal firewall software, which is also free) on all our machines, changed my antivirus, reconfigured my office and home routers and their built-in firewalls etc. etc. And moreover, I switched to Firefox.

But after many months and the release of IE 7 I'm back with IE and here is why:

1. Firefox is slow. Which is no surprise since much of Firefox and many extensions are written in Javascript (like any other application based on Mozilla's XUL platform).

2. IE7 is fast. In spite of all my toolbars - and I have ieHttpHeaders, IE Developer Toolbar, Google Toolbar, SEO Quake toolbar and more. But IE7 is still surprisingly fast

3. Memory requirements. I'm writing this post with 8 other tabs open in IE7, and two of them are loaded with heavy AJAX-rich Javascript applications that I've been running for more than two hours now. And IE7 uses only 89 Mb of memory. Firefox wants over 280 Mb for the same task, which is 3 times more.

4. Security & Privacy. IE7 comes with the latest code updates introduced in Windows XP SP2, including download blocker, improved URL parser, ActiveX add-on manager and optional Phishing Filter. IE7 also has privacy cleaners similar to the ones in Firefox (delete cookies, delete history, cache etc.)

5. W3C Standards. Firefox has always been a better renderer than IE6. Yes, writing HTML code for IE6 has always been a nightmare. Now IE7 has changed that.

(But still a lot of people use IE6, so we have to check our pages in it - we use a great tool called Multiple IE which makes it possible to test your websites under different IE versions, from 3 to 7).

6. Usability. I believe that IE7 has a cleaner look and is easier to navigate. IE7 finally has tabs, and tab-operations are simpler (for example, closing a tab in Firefox is a two-click operation).

IE8 public beta

Microsoft has released IE8 beta 1 to the public. The new version features HTML and CSS developer tools, Javascript debugger and more. Check out the first screenshots: