Design Changes Revealed: Firefox 4.0

The release of Firefox 4.0 may still be nearly 6 month away, but the excitement for the new version is already growing. One of the designers behind the browser has shared on his blog updated mock-ups of the new design.

1) App Button One of the more challenging, not to mention contentious, aspects of the Firefox UI update has been how to handle the MenuBar. On our first pass we were informed by how Safari and Chrome had handled this problem by paring down all menu items into two separate Page and Tools buttons. This approach has a few advantages but also some disadvantages. The new proposed approach to this problem is an App Button which is similar to the single menu approach taken by Windows 7 native applications (Paint, WordPad) and by MS Office.

The UX team feels this approach has several advantages over the previous idea:

•It is less complex
•Takes up less space

•Instead of two potentially conflicting locations for menu items, there is now only one unified location

•Can be placed in the upper left analogous to the Menubar paradigm it is replacing
•Similar to the far more ubiquitous Office 2008/2010 + Windows 7 application menu
•Reduces clutter on the Navigation Toolbar

•It also creates a more flexible and rich canvas for perhaps doing some decidedly non-menu-esque things

Appearance and Placement

One of the benefits of the App Button is that it is similar to the way Microsoft is treating its native apps and Office. Another benefit is that the placement is closer to where the Menubar would be and therefore it is more familiar.

One idea that we have already explored with the Pages and Tools buttons is to use text on the button instead of an icon. This is also reminiscent of the Menubar’s textual display and removes any ambiguity involved with icons. This approach is also explored in the most recent Office 2010 beta with the tab simply being labeled “File”. We discussed naming our App Button simply “Firefox” because it contains all the actions that apply to Firefox.

Attaching the button to the top of the window further implies that this menu affects Firefox as a whole.

Status of the Titlebar

In all the mockups up to this point the Titlebar has been removed and the space reallocated for portions of the tabs. Enough room was left for traditional window dragging. The rational behind this change was to further shrink vertical space and to address the redundancy of having the page title in the Titlebar and the tab.

In the original approach you would lose approximately the width of one tab (or less!) due to the window widgets. This was before talk of placing an App Button or an Identity button in this area. As it stands now you would be losing much more. It seems the vertical space tradeoff doesn’t stack up quite as well when losing so much horizontal tab space.

It would be better to leave the Titlebar, giving full access to it and not losing any tab space. It also won’t be frustrating for someone wanting to drag the window.

State of the Menu

What will this single menu look like? Something like the sketch I posted previously but not exactly. Ideas on this are welcome. Thoughts about what should and should no go into this menu can be based on work already done for menu cleanup.

2) Refining Toolbar Button Appearance:

Some initial work has gone into making the toolbar buttons more visible on light backgrounds and more crisp and dimensional (pressable).

This is work I am constantly reevaluating since they appear on variable backgrounds.

3) Location Bar:

Created some very early visuals for reevaluating site identity. Also the location bar is now properly recessed instead of floating.

4) Retain Separate Search Bar:

With the LocationBar containing an increasing amount of functionality it may be best to retain a clear distinction between the two fields.

5) Bookmarks Widget:

On a default profile or existing profile that hasn’t modified the Bookmarks Toolbar it will be hidden by default and the Bookmarks Widget placed in the Navigation Toolbar.

If the Bookmarks Toolbar is shown the Bookmarks Widget will appear there instead.

Current version available at:

www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Google search gets eyes and ears!

Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone.


On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

"It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query."

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the "nascent nature of computer vision" and with the service's present shortcomings. "Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories," he said.

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone.

"It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era," Gundotra said, with "devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further."

Offering one real-world example of the service in action, Gundotra said that when a guest came by for dinner, he snapped a photo of a wine bottle she gave him to assess its merits. The result--"hints of apricot and hibiscus blossom"--went far beyond his expertise, but that didn't stop him from sharing the opinion over dinner.

He also demonstrated Google Goggles to take a photo of the

Itsukushima Shrine in Japan, a landmark tourists may recognize even if they can't read Japanese. The uploaded photo returned a description of the shrine on his mobile phone.

Although the service can recognize faces, since faces are among the billions of images in the database, it doesn't right now, Gundotra said.

"For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition," Gundotra said.

"We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place."

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Google's SPDY: Doubles the speed of Web!

SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web
Google is apparently in the early stages of a research project that appears to aim as high as perhaps replacing the HTTP protocol, the fundamental technology that essentially makes the World Wide Web possible.


In a somewhat obscure post on the Chromium blog, the development branch of their Chrome browser, Google reveals they’ve been working on a new protocol dubbed SPDY for “SPeeDY” for its goal of making the web faster.

While HTTP is an “elegantly simple protocol” that has powered the web since 1996, the tone of Google’s post is almost patronizing, as if HTTP were our doddering old uncle that’s had his day and needs to be put out to pasture. Then again, Google’s hubris is perhaps warranted as one of the only companies with enough clout and resources to indeed spur on the “evolution of websites and browsers” with an entirely new protocol designed to speed up the communication between web servers and clients.

They reveal they’ve already got a prototype web server and a Chrome client with built-in SPDY support that they’ve been testing in the lab. With these tools they’ve reportedly been able to see an up to 55% speed increase in page loading, and feel like the project is now stable enough to warrant soliciting feedback from the web community. The SPDY documentation is now available, as well as the source code. Google encourages feedback on the new protocol in the Chromium Google Group.

Google:
Executive summary
As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a specification of the protocol, we have developed a SPDY-enabled Google Chrome browser and open-source web server. In lab tests, we have compared the performance of these applications over HTTP and SPDY, and have observed up to 64% reductions in page load times in SPDY. We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code, and test results, to make SPDY the next-generation application protocol for a faster web.

SPDY frequently asked questions
Q: Doesn't HTTP pipelining already solve the latency problem?
A: No. While pipelining does allow for multiple requests to be sent in parallel over a single TCP stream, it is still but a single stream. Any delays in the processing of anything in the stream (either a long request at the head-of-line or packet loss) will delay the entire stream. Pipelining has proven difficult to deploy, and because of this remains disabled by default in all of the major browsers.

Q: Is SPDY a replacement for HTTP?
A: No. SPDY replaces some parts of HTTP, but mostly augments it. At the highest level of the application layer, the request-response protocol remains the same. SPDY still uses HTTP methods, headers, and other semantics. But SPDY overrides other parts of the protocol, such as connection management and data transfer formats.

Q: Why did you choose this name?
A: We wanted a name that captures speed. SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", captures this and also shows how compression can help improve speed.

Q: Should SPDY change the transport layer?
A: More research should be done to determine if an alternate transport could reduce latency. However, replacing the transport is a complicated endeavor, and if we can overcome the inefficiencies of TCP and HTTP at the application layer, it is simpler to deploy.

Q: TCP has been time-tested to avoid congestion and network collapse. Will SPDY break the Internet?
A: No. SPDY runs atop TCP, and benefits from all of TCP's congestion control algorithms. Further, HTTP has already changed the way congestion control works on the Internet. For example, HTTP clients today open up to 6 concurrent connections to a single server; at the same time, some HTTP servers have increased the initial congestion window to 4 packets. Because TCP independently throttles each connection, servers are effectively sending up to 24 packets in an initial burst. The multiple connections side-step TCP's slow-start. SPDY, by contrast, implements multiple streams over a single connection.

Q: What about SCTP?
A: SCTP is an interesting potential alternate transport, which offers multiple streams over a single connection. However, again, it requires changing the transport stack, which will make it very difficult to deploy across existing home routers. Also, SCTP alone isn't the silver bullet; application-layer changes still need to be made to efficiently use the channel between the server and client.

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Doodle 4 Google - My India

Google likes to reflect the ever-changing world of the users through the logo designs on their homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate scientists, artists, local events or special dates and are designed by the original doodler, 31-year-old, Dennis Hwang.

Google now giving you a chance to design a doodle for them, through their doodle competition, Doodle 4 Google. If you are currently a student in any school in India (between the 1st and 10th standards), then this is your chance to have your doodle be displayed on the Google India homepage. The theme of this competition is 'My India'. The best doodles will be voted on by a panel of judges as well as by the Indian public, and the winning doodle will be featured on the Google India homepage for a day, to be viewed by millions of people. The final winner will also win his or her very own laptop (and a technology grant for their school)!

Winning Doodle 4 Google 'My India' Doodle - Puru Pratap Singh

Original Doodler

Google doodles, the drawings that are designed on, and through, the Google logo on our home page, are the creation of 31-year-old Google Webmaster Dennis Hwang. Since Dennis began celebrating and marking worldwide events and holidays with his doodles in 2000, his work has been seen by millions and reached cult status, with fans waiting with bated breath to see his next creation, and even websites and blogs devoted to his work. We spoke to Dennis about his doodles and how he got his ideal job:

Most people have to choose only one of their interests to pursue. How did you get such a cool job that meshes computers and art?

"I had an internship with Google in college. I was given the task of helping with maintenance of the website and I soon became an assistant webmaster. Before I joined Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were already thinking about holiday logos...and when I joined, they knew I was studying art and suggested I should give it a shot. I've been doing it since then as my 20% project."

Are you constantly trying to keep up with current events and holidays?

"How far I work in advance depends. Sometimes, we react really quickly to current events. When the Mars Rover landed, I created a logo in less than 24 hours. For all of the international countries, if there's a special day and we think it's in line with the Google brand, we want to commemorate it."

Do you get suggestions from Google users?

"I get quite a lot of suggestions from users. We're really open to user feedback and having ideas sent to us because our users are really creative. For example, a French astronomer had emailed us about the Venus Transit, in which Venus casts a shadow on the sun every 122 years. During the transit, you'll see a black dot moves across the sun, so here is what I drew."

How do you decide on the design of the drawings?

"First, I do a lot of brainstorming, search for images on Google, and absorb all the imagery. Then I apply a design that interacts with letters. I find that a bit more interesting."

Do you have favorite doodles?

"I have several favorites. Usually, artists' birthdays are the ones I spend the most effort on, like Monet's birthday."

How difficult is it to reinvent recurring holidays?

"It's definitely a challenge, but it's one I look forward to. I've been doing this for quite a while and need to come up with fresh ideas every year. There's only so many ways to draw a turkey or a pumpkin!"

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The anatomy of e-mail

History and Evolution of Electronic mail

The History
In 1957, at the heights of the Cold War, the Soviet Union scored one against the United States when it successfully put in place the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. To up the ante with the Soviets, the US Department of Defense set up a division dedicated to extreme technology research, ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency), which later fashioned ARPANET. For the first time in history, computers were able to exchange information electronically.

 How it works?

Evolution

1969 The birth of ARPANET, the precursor to today’s Internet, designed for sharing research among scientists. The system crashed at the first login!

1971 Ray Tomlinson sends the first e-mail

1979 Emoticons bring life into otherwise boring computer newsgroup

1982 TCP/IP, where the Internet owes its true origins, is invented

1984 William Gibson coins the world cyberspace in his book Neuromancer

1991 The WWW is officially created by Tim Berner-Lee. He created the first www protocol at CERN, Switzerland

1993 The world’s first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, is released to the public and the concept of ‘surfing’ comes to life

1996 40 million people are online in more than 150 countries around the world

2000 Over 4 billion e-mail per day are sent in the world. Over 1 billion Web sites exist on the Internet. Every day, 7 million new pages are added!

2001 1.8 billion pages on the Web, with over half on them in the English Language

2005 Worldwide, the number of e-mail boxes will grow to 1.2 billion from 505 million in 2000



Not a bed of roses!
The sheer freedom and flexibility that e-mail offered has made it the number one application used on the Internet. But with the fruits of e-mail also come the pits of invasion. In its early days, e-mail was a very safe means of sending messages since the e-mail itself consisted mostly of text. But once e-mail was capable of carrying attachments, malicious hackers started using it to send Viruses, Trojans and Worms.

As if this isn’t enough to face users to take a cautions approach towards e-mail, things get nastier with the abuse of unsolicited e-mail, spam. Named after the tins of American “SPiced hAM”, for each legitimate message send across the Net, there seems to be a disproportionately higher amount of spam filled with promises of getting filthy rich, shedding pounds off your waist, and buying fabulous offers that you can’t afford to miss.


Commerce takes a twist
The growth of e-mail has had a profound influence on enterprise. Documents, visual designs and just about any piece of business correspondence can be sent instantly, and at much lower costs than overnight delivery services. E-mail has provided a grand replacement for telephone calls in many instances. What’s more, as this medium is so informal, one doesn’t have to worry about composing grammatically correct words and sentences.

Since there is no paper involved, the storing and retrieval of message becomes much easier and quicker with less space consumed.
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