What’s really new in Firefox 4?

Since I wrote about the latest version of Internet Explorer about a month ago, it seems only fair to do the same for Firefox, who was finally updated to version 4 earlier this week. There were a number of articles on the web surrounding the launch mentioning the new features and improvements; here’s my opinion about them:

Multiple tab selection in Google Chrome

It was just yesterday that I read about new features coming to the developer channel in Google Chrome, including a very promising one: the ability to select multiple tabs. Today, after a minor update to the Canary build I am using (now up to 12.0.711.0), this feature is already up and running for me.

The feature is simple, as you would expect: hold down Ctrl while clicking on tabs adds them to the group; holding Shift will select a continuous set of tabs; clicking on a tab without any keyboard modifier clears the group and reverts to a single selection. The selected tabs in the background have a lighter color than the ‘normal’, unselected tabs, which is more visible with the Honeycomb theme than in the default.

The more interesting part comes later, when you realize how many actions can be performed with the group. It works basically as a single tab, so you can drag the group to a new window or merge it back into the original window, close it, duplicate or reload it – and this duplicates / reloads all the tabs in the group. Another nice touch is how the entries in the context menu change to use the plural when you right-click a group instead of a tab. This is how you realize you can also pin and unpin multiple tabs at once…

There are a number of cases where this could come in handy: managing tabs by grouping them into different windows, quickly cleaning up the tab bar by closing anything but the selected tabs. The only thing that could be improved in my opinion is the way reopening a group of tabs is handled: right now closing breaks the group and if you want to bring the tabs back you need to reopen each of them individually. It would be nice if the ‘reopen’ command would remember the group and restore it completely with a single keystroke.

Facebook Memories gets the wrong date

A couple of months ago, Facebook started testing a new feature, ‘Memories’, as reported on Inside Facebook. I recently got a glimpse of it as well in my account, as a couple of old photos from me and friends started appearing in the right sidebar under the heading “Photo Memories”. I also got some random ‘memorable status updates’, a good confirmation they are being rolled out more widely.

But coming back to the photos, I couldn’t help notice something very wrong about them: the date! A random friend looking at the first one wouldn’t know it, but that photo was actually taken in March 2006, so three years before, back when I didn’t even heard of the social network. It’s more obvious on the second one, as the title of the album clearly states the photos are from 2008, not from February 2010 as Facebook seems to think. I guess Facebook is only considering the upload date relevant and simply discards the metadata contained in the image file; most digital cameras now save the date in EXIF format. It’s hard to understand why Facebook doesn’t check this on upload; maybe it just assumes most people upload photos right after taking them, so the difference would be insignificant. But since I got two examples with wrong date in a single box, I would say the problem is pretty wide-spread.

As Louis Gray wrote recently – and most certainly other as well – the web is focused more and more on the “now”, so much that we are losing sight of older relevant information, pushed down by fresher content. Facebook Memories could be a step in the right direction; but labeling hundreds of photos with the wrong date is only creating another issue: should we prefer a flawed record to no record at all?

A day in the life of a browser

If you used the beta version of the Firefox 4 for longer, you might have noticed Test Pilot, an add-on designed to collect data about how people are using both Internet and Firefox. It has already delivered some interesting data; some of the results have probably led to the controversial removal of the RSS icon from the default browser installation. Since I use (portable) Firefox at work, I decided to save my results from the test “A week in the life of a browser” and see what information I could extract from them. Because of the nature of the test, I decided to compare the memory use of the browser with the number of opened tabs.

But first let me add some things about my system: an Windows XP SP3 PC with Firefox 4 beta 10. I have completely disabled the Flash plugin because the browser was getting slower every time it was loaded. And the only extension installed is AdBlock Plus. The data was extracted in the week starting with February 1st.

It’s not exactly in a friendly format: every captured event is listed top to bottom along with the date, so it needs some processing before it’s ready to be properly analyzed and graphed. If you’re interested in the raw data, I have saved it online in a Google spreadsheet. After removing some of the less interesting bits I noticed the test captured memory data only for the first day of the period, hence the name of my article. That day I had Firefox running non-stop, so it should give a pretty good picture of memory use over a long period. I also removed a couple of outliers in the tab count: the data reported 2 data points with as many as 40 tabs; I am quite sure I never had that many open!

Back to Internet Explorer?

Even though I love playing around with new software and apps, I’ve been putting off testing the new version of Internet Explorer, waiting for something closer to the finished product. About a week ago the release candidate became available, so it was high time for the testing to begin.

The installation was smooth and quick and didn’t even require a reboot; it just prompted me to close the other browsers, Windows Explorer, the IM client and, surprisingly, Microsoft Security Essentials. That doesn’t really seem like a good idea, but I went with it anyway to get things done quicker. The first impression is certainly positive: the browser is very responsive, both the UI and page loading. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s faster then Chrome, but they feel pretty close. But if you start using Internet Explorer longer, some quirks are starting to surface. As they say, the devil is in the details.

What I expect from Google Me (3)

The feature set

• Complex filters: like Gmail enhanced filters in email and introduced more flexible labels, Google Me could hugely improve organization in the stream by offering customizable filters and the ability to save them as custom views. Even the current filters in Facebook do a great job at surfacing content that would otherwise be lost in a sea of updates about apps and new connections. It would be even better to create your own filters and add them to a sidebar, like labels in Gmail. Every time you click the ‘label’, you see only those updates; for example links from your ‘outer circle’, photos from a particular group or list of groups, new contacts and events in your professional network, books your close friends are reading; and the list can go on forever. And a final twist: offer the option to choose one of the filters – either built-in or custom – as the starting screen whenever you log in; maybe even a different one based on whether you are using it on the desktop or mobile.

• Alerts: if filters can help organize large amounts of updates, alerts would be more specific, suited for rarer events that you don’t want to miss. Like when your sister gives birth and a family member posts about it; or when a friend moves to another city; or when somebody starts reading a book you also read, to give you a chance to discuss it with them. You could define alerts targeted at specific people or – more general – sources of content, with certain words or update types. Or set an alert for a single update, without publicly liking or commenting on it; since this could be a frequent activity it would be nice to have it as a single-click action, starring the update for example. As I read recently, there are already a number of start-ups offering social alerts. Both filters and alerts could be great use cases for the extensive social search mentioned in the first part.

What I expect from Google Me (2)

Better control over privacy and the news feed

Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber. Lev Grossman’s profile on Mark Zuckerberg for Time

Much has been said about the (in)ability of Facebook to model real-life human relationships or that they should allow unidirectional connections – the ‘follower’ model – like Twitter. Not to mention the convoluted and ever changing privacy settings. In my opinion, a system with three levels of privacy would be more flexible, while remaining relatively easy to manage:

• The inner circle – friends: this would hold your real-life friends, people you trust and communicate with often. Naturally it will contain a small number of people, but they would have access to pretty much everything you do on the network: your real-time location, your current and future events, are allowed to tag you in photos and can see them, have access to your full contact details, can chat with you, add you to groups, etc. This will basically function like the early-days Facebook, a private network with people you actually know and want to actively keep in touch.

• The outer circle – connections: containing more casual connections, people you worked with or members of the same club or gym, old friends you no longer keep in touch with, it should have tighter default privacy controls. People on this level can only see some of your contact details – no home address or phone numbers, maybe only one more generic email address, location restricted to city-level and events to free/busy indicators; if they tag you in photos you should be able to approve the tags first. And I wouldn’t mind an option to prevent them from inviting me to play games or use apps. This could become similar to LinkedIn or to the present-day Facebook, but without limits on the number of connections you can add.

• The public realm. Here the two-way connection would be replaced by the follower model to create a network similar to Twitter or FriendFeed, where you could follow people with similar interests, publicly share links and status updates and comment on them.

The profile should also reflect the three privacy levels: display everything for friends, less information for connections and even more closed for the public; at this level users could also be allowed to replace their real name with a pseudonym.