From Amazon’s Cloud Reader Installation:

From the University of Virigina’s guide to setting proxy settings in Firefox:

From HootSuite’s TwitterBar acquisition announcement:

From Tecca’s Guide to Internet Explorer:

That’s right: they all include portions of browser chrome. (Chrome 13, Firefox 3, Firefox 4 for Windows, and Internet Explorer 9, I believe.)

What else do these screenshots have in common? They will all one day be out of date (if they aren’t already). As soon as Google modifies their extension installation dialog, or Mozilla changes their proxy settings tab, or the Firefox address bar gets a new background color, these screenshots will no longer accurately represent the interaction through which they’re meant to guide the user.

A Modest Proposal

I propose that this problem of stale browser screenshots could be alleviated by the creation of a Web service that exists solely to serve semi-dynamic screenshots of browser chrome. Allow me to explain with examples.

The Amazon screenshot above could be replaced with a call like this:

<img src="http://browsers.foo/addons/installation?highlight=confirm&w=460&h=60" />

Or the TwitterBar image could use this URL instead:

<img src="http://browsers.foo/toolbar/?include=url-bar,icon&icon=http://foo.com/hoot.png&highlight=icon" />

(Note the idea of being able to merge existing images into the screenshots.)

The IE add-ons dialog screenshot could just as easily call this URL:

<img src="http://browsers.foo/addons/tracking-protection?browser=ie&version=9&highlight=easy-list" />

The API would automatically use the user’s user-agent to determine what browser, version, and platform to show in the screenshot (although these could also be specified manually, as seen in the IE example). If images from the exact current version aren’t available, the most recent version could be used instead.

I think that with a couple dozen high-resolution, high-quality screenshots of the various windows and dialogs in each major browser version on each major platform combined with metadata defining the position of key elements in those screenshots (e.g., the home button, the address bar, the History menu), 90%+ of the browser-specific screenshots on the Web could be replaced by calls to this service.

What do you think?

Is this a solution in search of a problem, or is it a legitimately useful idea? I think it would be worth its development costs just for organizations like Mozilla or Google to use in order to populate their help documents with screenshots that would always be up to date. Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Presented below without comment is a list of searches I would have performed if I could have; I don’t think it will be turned into one of those Google commercials any time soon, but it’s a pretty concise summary of our trip. See if you can infer anything about our trip; post your guesses in the comments.

• define:Kirschwasser
• How many people on Carnival Valor
• define:vichyssoise
• How many people have tattoos?
• Capital of Belize
• Denver channel 4 anchor
• How to get cork out of bottle
• Anteater bite
• Tetracycline
• Treat infection
• Capuchin monkey
• 10 knots in mi/hr
• BWI cayman
• Honduras ca
• iTunes hey baby
• Satellite Internet speeds
• Office webisodes
• Jack Welch
• iTunes Brand New Day
• Convert KW to HP

Forward this Christmas letter to at least 10 friends in the next three days, and next year, you will receive 100,000 Christmas letters. IT REALY WORKS!

Last spring, we went on a Caribbean cruise with Christina’s family. We visited the tropical locales of the Cayman Islands, Cozumel, Honduras, and Belize; due to the air travel industry’s impeccable on-time record, we also got to experience the beauty and wonder that is the Philadelphia airport and Philadelphia airport Holiday Inn.

In March, Gabriel turned one year old, as children tend to do a year after they are born. (Next year, we are hoping that he will turn two, but we would settle for three.) He is a regular chatterbox; I stopped keeping track of his vocabulary once it hit 350 words. Speaking of which, did you know that it is possible to only know 350 words but never stop talking?

We bought a parcel of land near Hutchinson, MN. Wait, is it passel or parcel? We bought a passel of land? That doesn’t sound right. We bought a parcel of land. We’re just renting it to a farmer right now, but we have dreams of someday renting it to a farmer for much more money.

I visited Virginia and New York City for work, and I flew to Vancouver, Canada for a technical conference this summer. The highlights of the New York trip were eating real New York pizza and visiting the top of the Empire State Building; the highlight of the Canada trip was wandering through the Olympic Village from the 2010 Olympics; the highlight of the Virginia trip was… leaving Virginia.

This summer, we went camping again. Well, Christina and Gabriel went camping; I went to a mental happy place for four days while, I assume, my body went through the motions.

Christina is pregnant.

Since September, I have been working on remodeling our home office. We’ve added French doors, built-in desks, bookshelves, and cabinets; we’ve subtracted money from our bank account, time from my evenings and weekends, and any delusions I had of being more than simply competent with power tools.

October through December were completely uneventful, except for the fact that Gabriel learned to say fart.

Merry Christmas,

Chris, Christina, Gabriel, and Henry (est. April 2011)

The first website I ever built was called “The Humor Archive:”

• It went online in late 1999 at the URL http://ticon.net/~finke/. The motivation behind the building of the site was that our ISP offered free Web space to all subscribers; my dad agreed that I could use the space if I learned how to create a website, so I chose to use the spacious 5MB to build a collection of funny lists and jokes. I curated the archive by copying/pasting funny things I found online (usually without attribution, because I was young and didn’t know any better), and I also included a new humor column each week written by my dad. He didn’t write them specifically for my site; they had been published previously in a number of Midwestern newspapers.

• I dutifully submitted the site to various directories and search engines; at some point, I realized that I was getting the short end of the stick from dmoz, since it listed sites in alphabetical order. That’s when I had the stroke of genius to rename “The Humor Archive” to “Absurd! The Humor Archive.” I would later rename it again in an attempt to game the listings, this time to “!Absurd! The Humor Archive.” My SEO skills were obviously ahead of their time. (Looking back through the archives of alt.html, I realized that I had originally named the site “Did you hear the one about?…”, but changed it after this response from legendary Finn Jukka Korpela.)

• Not long after I launched it (using Notepad and WS_FTP), I noticed that my odometer-style hit counter was jumping up by dozens each time I would refresh the page. As it turned out, The Humor Archive was the fourth result when AOL users searched for “humor.” That high placement didn’t last long, but the feeling while it did was exhilarating.

• For a short while, I ran a mailing list called “The Daily Laugh.” I doubt I sent out more than five editions of the “daily” laugh over a period of six months, but I never bothered to change the name to “The Occasional Laugh.”

• When my family moved and I no longer had access to our old ISPs Web space, The Humor Archive disappeared. Surprisingly, someone actually noticed.

Eventually, I took The Humor Archive offline and forgot about it.

UNTIL NOW!

I’ve collected the pieces of the site that I could find online and in my backups and reinstated it at humorarchive.efinke.com.

Sharp-eyed readers with a memory for early-21st century websites may recognize the header graphic as coming from FlamingText.com. I was unable to find the original header image, but as it turns out, FlamingText is still up and running, producing exactly the same graphics as it did ten years ago, so the current header is a faithful reproduction. (I don’t remember why I chose cows as the theme for the site – besides the bovine header, the list bullets are all little cow heads – but it was probably because cows are hilarious.)

The solution I’ve been using for a while is to pop up a dialog like this:

There are several problems with this approach, all of which I decided to ignore when I implemented it:

• It steals the user’s focus.
• It’s annoying.
• The user might click cancel without reading it just to get rid of it.
• It’s annoying.
• The user might immediately (but accidentally) click elsewhere, hiding the dialog behind another window, never to be seen again.
• It’s annoying.
• It’s extra code and work to pop up a special dialog like this.
• It’s annoying.

Back when there was only one dialog, I decided that these were acceptable faults. However, since then, I’ve come up with a few more questions I want to ask users, so now instead of one annoying dialog, there are three or four annoying dialogs – a new one appearing each time you restart Firefox.

Predictably (or so it should have been), users don’t like to be assaulted with new dialogs each time they start their browser. Most likely, they’re starting their browser for some purpose other than using my add-on, so my add-on shouldn’t steal their attention. As one user so elegantly put it,

“I really love the TwitterBar, but after the most recent TwitterBar update, I noticed I kept getting these annoying as hell pop-ups from TwitterBar about TwitterBar. After the third one (while I was in the middle of doing something and became distracted with this pop-up dialog box TwitterBar tip of the day), I uninstalled it. If you want to keep your clients, don’t constantly tap them on the shoulder.“

I had already been working on redesigning these add-on/user interactions when I got that email, so the user’s message reinforced what I had suspected: I was alienating my userbase.

Here’s the new scheme I’ve settled on for now:

It’s a notification bar, much like the one that appears when Firefox blocks a popup. It has these positive qualities:

• It doesn’t steal focus or interrupt the user.
• It’s not in-your-face, so it’s less likely (I assume) to be dismissed without thought.
• It can’t be lost behind another window.
• The amount of code to implement it is less, and it’s more in tune with the browser interface.
• It’s not as annoying.

I’d love your feedback on this change. Is it enough? Should I stop bothering users altogether and just let them discover their way around the add-on? I’m open to all ideas.

(If you’d like to try a version of TwitterBar with this new notification method, you can download it here. Although, if you’ve already seen the old dialog-style version of these notifications, you won’t see the new-style ones anyway.)

“December: Jesus is the reason for the season.”

“November: It’s probably cold out. Stay in and do a puzzle.”