Archive for March, 2010
March 24th, 2010
Find yourself doing a lot of shopping on NewEgg.com? If so, the New Egg button is a browser enhancement you need to install. It allows you to easily navigate through all of the most popular NewEgg destinations at the click of one single button.
Once installed, the NewEgg Button gives you access to all the categories across the wide spectrum of things you can buy at their web site. Some of the categories included are:
- Computer Hardware
- PCs & Laptops
- Networking
- Electronics
- Home Theater
- Cameras and Camcorders
- Software
- Gaming
- and much more!
You can also login, search, check on your order status and history, add things to your wish lists, or just visit your account page. You can also customize your menu with up to three menu items.
One more hidden feature that the NewEgg button brings is the ability to, in the browser, highlight any text, right click, and choose "Search NewEgg for ….".
It should also be noted that the author’s affiliate ID is attached to the purchases you might make, but he’s very upfront about that fact, and it is really a small price to pay to support such a great add-on idea. You can download the NewEgg Button add-on for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons web site.
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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
March 23rd, 2010
As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.6.2 has been released ahead of schedule and is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://www.firefox.com.
We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.6 you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.
For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.6.2 Release Notes.
Note: All Firefox 3 and 3.5 users are also encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu and clicking on “Get the New Version”, then checking for updates again once Firefox 3.6 is installed.
March 19th, 2010
Looking to make your web browser a little more blue? I am here to give the Bluetacular theme for Firefox two thumbs up, for an original look and feel when it comes to giving Firefox a new face.
While the color choices used in the theme might be too busy for some, I do have to give the designer of this theme credit for bringing an original design idea and concept into his work. As the notes on this release say, this is a work in progress too – so if you like this theme, it will only get better from here.
Let us all go check out this theme (you can download it from the Firefox Add-ons web site) and help encourage this new theme designer to keep up the good work.
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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
March 19th, 2010
Last week at an Open Source Digital Voting Foundation event I had the chance to meet Debra Bowen, the California Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is the elected official responsible for the integrity of the electoral process — making sure that our voting system is accurate and honest and counts every vote correctly.
After talking to Secretary Bowen I ended up quite happy that she was elected to this role. Secretary Bowen is deeply interested in transparency, openness, and privacy. She is also a strong advocate for using open source software as the basis for digital voting equipment. Not long after she was elected she commissioned an independent review of the reliability of voting equipment and the auditing process, and found some disturbing facts. She’s been active in trying to fix these to bring more accuracy and trustworthiness to our system.
It was really fun to meet an elected official who understands implicitly that software code can effect our lives in much the same way as legal codes can.
I also learned that one of the big surprises I had at my local polling place recently is due to Secretary Bowen. The average age of the people who donate their time to run the polls in California is — again according to Secretary Bowen — 77 years old. But last time I went to vote there was a young woman there. We talked to her a bit — she was a high school student. It turns out that Secretary Bowen has a program to encourage high school and college students to participate in making the voting process possible. It seems a giant step forward from how I grew up, which was simply taking the whole process for granted.
March 18th, 2010
There will be no more updates for Firefox 3.0.x anymore, so if you haven’t upgraded to Firefox 3.6 – you had better hurry up and do so. That was the official word from Mozilla on the topic in a recent meeting.
March 18th, 2010
Two weeks after the wider community bestowed the People’s Choice Award for the Home Tab Design Challenge (Winter 09), we now have the results for our Best in Class honors.
A panel consisting of the Firefox UX team (Jennifer Boriss, Alex Faaborg, Stephen Horlander and Alexander Limi) bestowed the following honors:
- Chatree Campiranon and Craig Birchler for Best in Class: Innovation
(for the solution that has the newest / most original interaction model) - Amine Zafri for Best in Class: Producible
(for the solution that would be the easiest to ship to users immediately) - Yatrik Solanki for Best in Class: Design
(for the solution that has the most visually expressive concept) - Daniel Goodwin for Best in Class: Risk Taker
(for the solution that tests the limits of current thinking) - Blake Cutler for Best in Class: Utility
(for the solution that has the highest overall utility)
Congratulations to all participants, our First Round Top 10 concepts, the winner of the People’s Choice Award and the Best in Class honorees in this Design Challenge!
Head over to the Design Challenge page and see the winning concepts. And make sure you follow the Firefox UX team and their work on their wiki (also check out their “Behind the Bikeshed” blog).
- Pascal on behalf of the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Team
March 18th, 2010
In February, the Test Pilot team at Mozilla Labs rolled out a test to explore usage of the Firefox menu bar . This menu item usage study aims to help guide the UX team as they create a fully optimized design by answering 3 questions.
* Which menu items are the most commonly used?
* Which menu items are the least commonly used?
* How long do users spend exploring the menu bar contents before selecting each particular menu item?
After we received the raw data, Blake Cutler and Christoper Jung from Mozilla Metrics team did some great work to understand what this data is telling us. Here are a couple of preliminary findings regarding the first 2 of these 3 questions. Take a look!
Initial Findings
The most obvious way to determine the most and least commonly used menu items is to simply aggregate the total number of menu item clicks for all users.
This graph shows just that, presenting each menu item’s relative use for all UI methods (both mouse and keyboard shortcuts). Even from this simple analysis, we can see some justification for a condensed toolbar as many of the items are used very infrequently compared to the other menu items. For example, the menu items from “Page Setup” to “Character Encoding/UTF-16″ each make up less than 0.01% of the total menu bar clicks.
While looking at the total number of item clicks can be informative, since menu bars are designed for mouse use, it is more relevant to look at item usage for just the mouse UI method (excluding keyboard shortcuts).
Examining the data in this way presents a slightly different picture: the top 5 most commonly used menu items are now “User Bookmark Item”, “Copy”, “Paste”, “Add-Ons”, and “Back”. In addition to “Add-Ons”, “Options” and “Bookmark This Page” are newly part of the top 10, replacing “Find”, “Open Location”, and “Find Again”.
Again these changes simply result from eliminating keyboard shortcut clicks and help us distinguish between mouse driven menu items and keyboard driven items. For example, by comparing the mouse UI chart (right) with the original all UI chart (left) we can clearly see that “New Tab” and “Close Tab” are predominately driven by keyboard shortcuts (as expected) and may not be the two most critical items to a mouse oriented toolbar (as suggested by the original chart).
Another interesting approach to these questions is to group the items by menu and visualize the data in this form (again, data is just for Mouse UI).
This visualization presents information on two levels: the area of the circles are proportional to the total number of clicks for the menu group as a whole, and the slices correspond to the share of clicks for each item within the menu group. Bookmarks and Edit are by far the most utilized menus, representing over 70% of total clicks.
The high use of the bookmarks menu is somewhat surprising; an obvious problem of looking at aggregated data like this is the potential for outliers to skew the data. It will be interesting to delve into this issue more in depth and determine if the Bookmark menu (and other menus and menu items) is genuinely an important menu group for all users, or if the high usage is driven by a set of relatively few users who interact with the Bookmark menu extremely frequently.
Get Involved
These are some initial findings we learned from the study. We understand that we cannot draw simple design conclusions by just looking at these numbers, that’s why we really hope to keep the discussion with you in our forum! If you have any questions or new ways of interpreting them, please let us know!
Also, if you are interested to run some numbers by yourself, here is the place to download data samples for this menu study . Don’t forget to share your findings with us by submitting your analysis to the Test Pilot website!
By the way, if you haven’t joined the Test Pilot team, now it’s the time, – we are about to upgrade the Test Pilot extension to version 1.0 beta very soon!
March 18th, 2010
Contacts as first class objects in the browser
Today, we’re announcing the release of an experimental version of our new Contacts addon. With Contacts, we’ve enhanced your browser by making it aware of your online contacts and friend lists. You can then search and browse your contacts in the browser, and a website can ask for permission to access them through an API.
The Service Import pane
The Contact View pane
Autocompletion
Contact Access Permissions screen
Why is this information important? Address books and buddy lists have become an integral part of how we manage our relationships online. Your email addresses, twitter handle and openID are used in hundreds of ways as you connect, follow and share online.
Every desktop operating system, and hundreds of web-based service providers, has some way of representing “who-you-know”. Managing all of this information can be a lot of work. There are multiple copies of your data, and they are inconsistent and disjointed.
This information is also special, because it represents the boundary between “my data” and “your privacy”. When you disclose your friends’ email addresses on a website (maybe you want to invite them to a cool new site you just joined), you are trusting the website to keep that address private. At most sites today, you do this by sharing an entire contact list from some other website (say, your Yahoo address book), and don’t have much ability to restrict what information gets shared. The disclosure of your friends’ contact information is an important step: we think you should be in control of it.
How it works:
The Contacts prototype consists of these pieces:
- A browser-based Contacts database that stays in sync with your address books (so far, it supports GMail, Twitter and Mac OS Address book)
- A generic importer system for Contacts from desktop or web-based address books (so you can implement missing ones)
- An email autocompletion feature, which demonstrates how the browser can auto-complete email addresses on any website. The autocompletion is performed entirely in the browser, without sharing the your list of contacts with the website.
- A Javascript API that websites can use to access the Contacts database, with explicit user permission and filtering
Try it out!
There is an experimental, pre-alpha version of the addon available for download here.
Please be aware that this experimental code. If you are not comfortable with running software that can crash your browser, or cause you lose work, you may want to wait. Please read the Release Notes first.
This version has support for importing from Gmail, Twitter, and, on MacOS-based machines, the local Address Book. This list of importers is far from final — it simply represents three interesting classes of address book data. We’re going to keep working on the list of supported importers, and we will be documenting an open importer API to let everybody join in (and, of course, if a site uses an open standard like Portable Contacts, everybody’s job is much easier!)
Dig deeper
As with all Mozilla projects, Contacts is developed in the open, and we welcome participation from everyone.
Hack on the project sources.
Discuss on our forums.
Chat with us on IRC (irc.mozilla.org, #labs)
Learn More
- We’re indebted to our friends and colleagues at Mozilla Messaging, who have been working on address book integration in Thunderbird for years, and have the exciting new Raindrop messaging application in experimental development now. We are working on integrating the Raindrop project with the Contacts API!
- The Portable Contacts initiative is an important effort to define a common data definition for contact data. We use the Portable Contacts definition internally for Contacts.
- The W3C Contacts initiative is defining an industry-standard, cross-platform API for access to contact data in the browser. The spec is new and evolving, and now is the time to experiment and provide feedback!
March 17th, 2010
Want to clear any stored information about one web site in particular, without clearing out all of your browser’s history files? Hidden deep within the Firefox browser, there is a way to clear Firefox’s history for just one single web site. You just have to know where to look.
From the Firefox menu bar, click on History and then Show All History. This should pull up the Library window. Now, in the Library’s search box (located in the top-right corner) type in the name of the web site you want to forget.
Scroll through your results, till you find the web site you wish to forget and select it. Now, right-click on the entry and click, “Forget About This Site”. All history items (browsing and download history, cookies, cache, active logins, passwords, saved form data, exceptions for cookies, images, pop-ups) will be removed only for that site. So be careful with using this choice and only use it if you really want Firefox to forget everything.
Now your browser history is cleared of that one annoying web site.
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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!
March 16th, 2010
I am always looking for a way to search the site I am on, and now thanks to CyberSearch – there is an easier way to do just that.
Having just installed the CyberSearch extension, I can tell you my new favorite feature is the ability to search the current web site you are surfing via Google.
For example, say you are on FirefoxFacts.com and you want to search for “themes”. With CyberSearch already installed, just go to the address bar and type in:
> themes
You will then be taken to a Google site search of FirefoxFacts.com for the word, “themes”. Very nice.
It has been way too long since I have given a shout out to my good friends over at CyberNet News. Go check out this most recent innovation to the CyberSearch extension over at CyberNetNews.com.
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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!