Less Talk, More Do

Tturn, Tturn, Tturn

Christopher Finke — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:24:29 +0000

As Pete Seeger and King Solomon wrote, “To everything there is a season: A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, a time to start a new job at a new company.”

In that spirit, I’ve left AOL in order to join the team at Automattic. Not everyone has heard of Automattic, but almost everyone has heard of their flagship service, WordPress.com.

At Automattic, I’m a part of the Theme Team: a group of very attractive people with highly specialized skills in the realm of “Making your blog look good.” That’s a daunting task when you’re trying to cater to millions and millions of bloggers (and millions and millions and millions more readers), but I’m enjoying the challenge.

An API for Browser Screenshots

Christopher Finke — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:00:37 +0000

What do the following screenshots all have in common?

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 They will all one day be out of date (if they aren’t already).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:

Or the TwitterBar image could use this URL instead:

(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:

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.

FireFound Shutting Down

Christopher Finke — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 14:00:37 +0000

FireFound is a Firefox add-on and companion Web service that I wrote for the Extend Firefox 3.5 competition in 2009. It allows users to track their device’s location via Firefox’s then-new geolocation API; additional features include the ability to view a device’s location history on the website and the ability to turn on a “killswitch” that would clear your browsing data (history, saved passwords, etc.) if someone opened your browser and could not provide your chosen password. It was the first add-on of its kind, and it has been well-received.

That being said, FireFound will be shutting down on June 1, 2012. I don’t have the time to keep it compatible with the newest Firefox and Firefox Mobile releases, nor can I keep up with the feature requests and bug reports.

FireFound users who would like to save a copy of their location data can, as always, export their data by logging in and clicking the “Download” button on the “My Data” page. Any users who have pre-paid for a Premium account past June 1 will be given a prorated refund.

For those looking for a suitable replacement, I recommend Prey. It’s an open-source implementation of a similar idea, but it runs at the operating system level rather than inside the browser, so it’s always on.

(If you’re interested in taking over FireFound, e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com. If you’d just like to run your own instance of FireFound, all of the code is open-source.)

What do people type in the address bar?

Christopher Finke — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:00:31 +0000

Earlier this year, I added a feature to URL Fixer (a browser add-on that fixes errors in URLs that you type in the address bar) that collects anonymous usage stats from users who opt in in order to help improve the ways that URL Fixer corrects typos; the collected data includes domains that are typed in the URL bar as well as the locale (language/country) of the user who typed them.

I now have six months of data, and I’ve run some statistical analysis on it in order to share some interesting stats with you. (If I were more creative, I would make an infographic out of this information.) Note that this data does not include bookmarked links or links that users click on in websites. It is strictly domains that have been typed directly into the address bar.

Care to guess the most commonly typed domain? That’s right: facebook.com. It was typed almost three times as often as the second most popular domain, google.com.

The top 10 domains account for 20% of all typed domains.

facebook.com	9%	twitter.com	1.1%	amazon.com	0.5%
google.com	3.3%	mail.google.com	0.6%	reddit.com	0.5%
youtube.com	3.3%	yahoo.com	0.6%
gmail.com	1.1%	hotmail.com	0.6%

The most popular TLD for typed domains is .com, followed by .org, .net, and .de.

.com	63%
.org	4%
.net	4%
.de	4%
.ru	2%
.hu	1%
.fr	1%
.co.uk	1%
.br	1%

The top 17 TLD typos are all variations of .com. In order of frequency, they are .com\, .ocm, .con, .cmo, .copm, .xom, “.com,”, .vom, .comn, .com’, “.co,”, .comj, .coim, .cpm, .colm, .conm, and .coom.

The website that appears to benefit the most from users mistyping a legitimate URL is faceboook.com (count the o’s). It’s a scammy website set up to make you think that you have been chosen as a “Facebook Winner.” However, it is only typed once for every 7,930 times that someone correctly types facebook.com. (googe.com and goole.com are runners-up in this category, albeit with much less scammy sites in place than faceboook.com.)

49.5% of domains are typed with a leading “www.”.

The most popular non-.com/.net/.org domains: google.de, vkontakte.ru (a Russian social network), and google.fr.

The only locales where neither Google nor Facebook control the most popular domain are ru-RU (Russia – vkontakte.ru), fi-FI (Finland – aapeli.com, a gaming website), ko-KR (Korea – fomos.kr, an e-sports website), and zh-CN (China – baidu.com).

How does domain length correlate with typing frequency?

(Facebook is to thank for the spike at 12 characters.)

How about alphabetical order? Has the old trick of choosing a site name early in the alphabet in order to show up above the fold on DMOZ had any lasting effect?

Facebook and Google certainly make their letters stand out, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the first letter of the domain and its popularity.

None of the domains with more than a 0.0005% share are unregistered, indicating that this kind of usage data would not be very useful to a scammer or phisher looking for new domain names.

Offline Mode

Christopher Finke — Wed, 25 May 2011 04:30:11 +0000

Last year, I went on a Caribbean cruise with my wife and her family. I had a great time, but the downside to seven days aboard a floating resort in sparkling blue water is that the Internet access is prohibitively expensive: during that week, I was completely offline for the first time since my family first signed up with AOL in 1997, and this made me realize that I rely on search engines to answer the questions that life raises far more than I suspected. I’m sure that, to my wife, “Offline Chris” seems much less knowledgable than “Online Chris.”

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

Using Google Chrome locale files in Firefox extensions, updated

Christopher Finke — Fri, 06 May 2011 22:15:31 +0000

After I posted my latest revision to some code for using Google Chrome locale files in Firefox extensions, Wladimir Palant pointed out some shortcomings with the code; I’ve made some changes to address these issues, and the new code is shown below.

View the code at GitHub.

Usage

The new usage rules are as follows:

Replace MY_EXTENSION_NAMESPACE with the namespace of your extension’s files. e.g., if your files are at chrome://abcdefg/content/, then replace MY_EXTENSION_NAMESPACE with abcdefg.
Rename MY_EXTENSION_STRINGS to something that won’t interfere with another extension.
The _locales directory from your Chrome extension should be in the chrome/content/ directory of your Firefox extension (or update my code to point to wherever you put it).

Advantages

This code has four advantages over the previous versions:

It’s a single code block that works with all recent versions of Firefox.
You don’t need to include an additional library for file I/O.
It fixes a bug in retrieving the proper locale code in Firefox on Linux.
You don’t have to specify true in your install.rdf in Firefox 4.

Thanks Wladimir for your input; this version is undoubtedly better than both previous versions. I can’t ensure that it’s the best possible solution, but it’s the best one that I’ve found so far.

How to use Google Chrome extension locales in Firefox 4 extensions

Christopher Finke — Thu, 05 May 2011 19:48:16 +0000

Update: Don’t use this code. Use this new version.

A few months ago, I posted a snippet of code that provides an API for using locale files from Google Chrome extensions in extensions for Firefox 3.6 and older. I’ve now added support for Firefox 4, and the updated code is shown below:

View the code at GitHub.

The same usage rules still apply:

Replace “MY_EXTENSION_ID” with the ID of your extension.
Rename “MY_EXTENSION_STRINGS” to something that won’t interfere with another extension.
The _locales directory from your Chrome extension should be in the chrome/content/ directory of your Firefox extension (or update my code to point to wherever you put it).
Include the excellent io.js library in your extension.
NEW: For Firefox 4, you’ll need to specify true in your install.rdf.

I’ve been using this solution in ScribeFire in Firefox 3.5, 3.6, and 4.0 (and 5 and 6) for a while now with no complaints. Let me know if you implement this in your extension, and I’d love any feedback you have on the code or its performance.

Discontinuing Slashdotter

Christopher Finke — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 16:35:12 +0000

Slashdotter is an extension I wrote in 2006 in order to customize the Slashdot experience. It was covered on Slashdot and was received favorably by the Slashdot audience, but I don’t have the time anymore to update it every time Slashdot changes their UI or HTML.

If you’d like to take over development, let me know, and I’ll transfer the Slashdotter add-on to you on AMO; if nobody volunteers, I’ll be removing the add-on from AMO in a couple of weeks. (Like all of my browser extensions, Slashdotter’s source code is open source, so you could still develop your own version if you want.)