One of the many interesting changes that came to the new site was the ability to follow users and publishers a la Twitter and Facebook. So it would be awesome if you would join us on Digg too like you did on Twitter (you did right?).

Windows Chrome users can now take advantage of a new Chrome Channel called “Canary Build”. This is in addition to three other Chrome channels already available for all platforms: Dev > Beta > Stable. With Canary build Google hopes to deploy faster updates for developers and early adopters to try it out before rolling it out to other channels, in other words its supposed to be on the “bleeding edge” of deployment of Chrome features. Think of it as Nightly Builds for Firefox, also known as Firefox MInefield.

One of biggest gripe with the other Chrome builds was that you couldn’t install more than one channel at the same time, with Canary build you can run Canary and either one of the other builds. However you cannot choose Canary build as your default browser, which is not such a bad idea considering that updates and features deployed on Canary build is likely to be less sable and may be prone to crashes.

You can read more about the release here.

I have heard of WOW playing geek pornstar, but I don’t think I have ever heard of a pornstar programmer.

Thanks Firefox for not opening 43,648 new windows!

Sometime we take certain things for granted. Certain things like Pop-up blockers that makes your online experiences much more pleasant. But if you want to be pedantic about it, we should thank Opera for being the first browser (among other firsts) to implement Pop-up blockers.

There are fanboys and then there are Apple Fanboys.

Personally I am anything but an Apple fanboy. I have a Unibody Macbook, which I bought one year after it came out. I waited six months after iPhone 3G came out, and almost 2 years after the first iphone release to get my iphone. But I like my Apple products the same way I am content with my Windows7 PC and Ubuntu-only laptop.

Fanboys, by definition, are irrational supporter of whatever they support. They will stay on line for days to buy the latest release of phone or laptop or movie or gaming system. This is not unique to Apple, Microsoft has its share of fanboys with Xbox and Google has its share of fanboys with Search, gmail and Chrome and Star Wars franchise has its share of fanboys with each extended, super-HD, behind-the-scene, collector-edition release.

But what makes Apple fanboys unique and why is it so easy to be an Apply fanboy?

In my opinion, Apple has consistently pushed the envelope in whatever new product they have released and even with their existing products, with new releases, they have set a higher bar for themselves. Year after year they have been doing this consistently. So even when they have occasional mediocre products release and updates, it gets massive support from Apple Fanboys by the sheer strength of past reputation.

Every single new product that I can think of since 2001 (minus AppleTV) have been blockbuster success for them and almost all of those new products have created new markets for those products. How many companies can honestly say they have created three new block-blaster market in a decade? I honestly can’t think of any, if you can please let me know.

When ipod was first released, it wasn’t the first mp3 player but the market was very small. iPod single handedly created a standard for how a portable mp3 player should look like. Almost every mp3 player that followed after that tried to copy the way ipod looked and functioned. And with each iteration, Apple evolved ipod in to many form factors and bigger screens and now in to a touch-screen; everyone else tried to copy Apple’s implementation instead of trying to innovate (successfully) on their own.

They have done the same with iPhone. Before Apple introduction of iPhone keyboard phone was the standard and now for most (some still prefer keyboards) touch-screen is suddenly the standard of how phone should be. Not only the form factor of the touch-phone but Apple’s implementation of the UI and marketplace has been closely followed and copied by other companies.

And now with iPad, Apple is rolling the slate device market on its head. Its not to say that there weren’t any slate device before iPad, its just that there weren’t any slate device market of this size before Apple’s introduction of ipad. And now, as it happened before, the rest are trying to catchup to Apple’s implementation of iPad.

Of course add to that, their strategy of über-secrecy (or controlled leaks) and excellent hyper-bolic marketing team and you have a successful product release in (almost) every single product release.

From an Apple fanboys perspective (I can only presume) you take pride in belonging to an exclusive club of consumers who are the first in getting the product that will create markets in coming years and everyone will follow.

Very few companies (if any) can say they have a large, loyal, consumer waiting to buy whatever you will throw at them.

Firefox 4 will be the biggest release in its history in terms of the amount of changes coming to the most widely used open-source software and the second most popular browser. A lot of these changes are a long time coming and Mozilla has received some flack in recent times for not being able to keep up with the pace of changes in performances and features already available in much lesser used browsers. Some even went as far as calling Firefox the new IE with its constant stability issues and lack of major updates.

Lets look at some of the exciting changes coming to Firefox 4, which is expected to be released by the end of this year. Some of these changes are already available on Minefield nightlies.

1) Major UI Redesign:

If you look at the new Firefox 4 UI you might confuse it with Chrome design, since the tabs are now on top. But to be precise the new Firefox design looks less like Chrome and more like Opera 10. Alas Opera never gets credit for design and feature ideas, which is likely where chrome found their design inspiration and Firefox 4 followed.

Firefox Minefield on top, Opera 10 at bottom.

Mozilla is moving cautiously with this new design choice and they started to promote the new tab on top choice. But rest assured, its not a question of if they will do it. The decision has been made already they are just promoting the idea to make sure that the majority are kosher with the idea. As far as the new menu bar is concerned, it may stay there by default but you will have a choice to go back to the old format.

Another design concept they took from Chrome is the Sticky Tab concept where you will be able to leave your most widely used website in the form of a permanent tab/button on one corner. You could do this with Firefox extensions, but now it will be a permanent feature with Firefox 4.

2) JägerMonkey JavaScript Engine:

Its amazing how fast things changes in such short time. In less than a year ago Firefox was proud of having one of the fastest JavaScript Engine out there and Opera, IE had one of the worst performing JavaScript engines. Fast forward now, Opera has the fastest JavaScript engine as far as stable releases are concerned and even IE9 preview is beating Firefox in JS performance but a long shot.

Firefox currently uses nanojit for its native code generator and will be moving to Webkit’s JSCore engine for Firefox 4. Which combined with Tracemonkey’s powerful optimization should give them a better performance over their current engine. However it will be interesting to see how or if they will ever get faster than other webkit engine as far as JavaScript performance is concerned, since their implementation will be based on webkit.

3) New add-on manager:

Firefox 4 will be featuring a new add-on manager which will work on the background to update extensions instead of all the annoying pop-ups on every startup or every time there is an update available. You will also be able to search and install extensions from within the add-on manager. The UI itself looks a lot like the new Ubuntu Software Center.

4) TaskFox:

Perhaps one of my favorite feature or at least the one that I am most looking forward to, is TaskFox. Which is an implementation of the power of Ubiquity within the Firefox browser. If you ever used Ubiquity you will understand how exciting this is. The final implementation may not be as powerful as ubiquity but you can check out the demo video  and see what it actually does or try it yourself (very limited demo).

5) More Standard Compliant:

Firefox has always been in the cutting edge when it comes to being standard compliant. With Firefox 4 they are pushing the envelope farther by supporting some of the CSS3 and html5 standards missing on Firefox 3.5. Some of those major supports coming on Firefox 4 are:

- CSS Transition
- CSS touch properties
- Forms in HTML5
- HTML5 Sections
- Support for WebM video
- WebGL

There are literally dozens of new standards coming up on Firefox 4, if you are a developer/designer you should definitely check out the whole list. However, it is important to understand that some of these standards are not necessarily de-facto standards, but standards that are likely to be accepted soon.

Final Thoughts:

I have always been a big supporter of Firefox and converted many friends and family to move to FF when IE development was stagnated. However in recent times FF was infected with the same “bug” that destroyed IE. The “bug” of slow innovation. Firefox has been slower and more crash prone in recent times and that’s why I moved to Chrome which is innovating in extreme pace.

However Firefox 4 new features and UI looks like a great reason to go back to using it as my default browser. Here, I just mentioned some of the main features that will end up in the final version, there are literally 100s of new features that I didn’t mention. Including one big one, Electrolysis, which is similar to tab per process model Chrome currently uses. However it is not clear if it will make in to the final Firefox 4 release.

Fortunately there is a nice, simple Chrome plug-in that can fix it. its called Define your own new tab!

Just install the plugin and set your website on the plugin option. As simple as that. Hey I did say its a quick tip.

I am a long time Smashing Magazine fan. They dish out some quality contents all the time and they are constantly improving. But recently they have been a little bit too cluttered with ads for my taste. So when I saw this post on their site I couldn’t stop laughing to myself.

How ironic is it, that a design blog with an opinion piece on why web designers shouldn’t use Ad blockers and yet the site is flooded with ads and has zero content above the fold? This is a full screen on a Macbook, obviously you will get more screen-space on a larger screen, but not much really.

You can also read my opinion on ad-blockers, which seem to be a hot topic now that Safari comes with readability (called reader) integrated into the browser.

These limitations of extensions also effect how all the ad-blocker on Chrome work. Chrome ad-blockers don’t actually block ads the same way Firefox ad-blockers do. You will be still downloading those ads to your browser but the ad-blockers will just hide the ad elements to remove visual clutter. Its still as good as removing ads like Adblock Plus on Firefox.

This limitation has two implications:

Bad: You are being tracked by ads under chrome with ad-blocker, even if you don’t actually see them.

Good: Anti-adblocking scripts don’t work on Chrome ad-blockers like they do with Firefox ad-blocker (on Firefox you can still bypass anti-ad-blockers, but needs some custom work).

An interesting observation is that currently Chrome AdBlock Extension is the most popular extension on Chrome extension gallery, it has more than 1 million users and almost more than double the user base of second most downloaded extension, which is Google’s own Gmail Mail Checker. That’s 1 out of ~7 chrome users using ad-blockers (Google claims Chrome has 70+ million users). The second most popular Adblock extension is AdThwart which is the 20th most popular Chrome extension with ~200,000 users, as of this writing.

What does it all mean?

I think mostly power users rely on extensions like adblockers, and just like Firefox, early adopters of Chrome are also mostly power users who are helping spread Chrome to the mass.

As mentioned before, both extensions works by hiding ad elements, because of API limitations so they don’t actually have any advantage over one another. What we will look at is their implementation of removing ad elements, how they effect the speed of the site and extra options each extensions comes with.

Benchmarking Ad blocking:

We tested 5 popular sites on normal browsing, then using Adblock and finally using Adthwart. Both extensions works under incognito mode (which is how we tested), we made sure that caches were clean before running site with or without each ad-blocker. We were surprised to see that site loaded faster with AdThwart on every single sites we tried on. Admittedly, not by much, but still interesting to see that a less popular ad-blocker has faster site load time than the most popular Chrome ad-blocker.

When it comes to blocking Ads, both extensions blocked (or rather hide) every single ad element on all sites we tried; just like Adblock plus on Firefox.

 * Both Adblock extension was running under default configuration on Chrome Stable, Windows7.

Options and Configurations:

Both Extensions have almost identical options, with the ability to whitelist/blacklist sites, choose multiple filter list and manually update them, block YouTube Video ads and text ads. Adthwart has a great option where you can block/blacklist element within a site with a single click on the icon. This is great for blocking non-ads or static ad elements. I think this single option along with faster site speed makes AdThwart a better extension. I think the reason Adblock extension is more widely used because its name is more obvious than AdThwart and probably has been around since the beginning. I also tried AdThwart when it first came out on extension gallery, I remember it being slow and resource hungry at that time, which is probably why it didn’t get off the same way AdBlock did. You should check out both of them and decide for yourself which one works best for you.

 AdBlock Options

AdThwart Options

Few Words on Blocking Ads on Sites:

There has been a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about ad-blockers (renewed with Safari 5’s Reader option) and how it affects small publishers and blogger and their single most popular source of revenue in the form of ads. I think people who use ad-blockers will use ad-blockers, regardless of whatever countermeasures or rational persuasion you want to employ. Its a losing game and there is not much you can do about it because you don’t have control over the content, once its rendered and downloaded in to a reader’s browser.

That doesn’t mean that everyone will block ads and all publishers will go out of business, because users who block ads are a minority power users, and often they have very valid reasons to block ads. They don’t like to be tracked by ad scripts even if the purpose is to give relevant ads, some people are distracted and put off by large number of flashy distracting ads. But even so there are power users out there who will whitelist sites that they frequent and care about, I know power users who do it and I myself whitelist sites I care about.

As publishers/Bloggers we will have to try harder to stand out so that readers can find value on the content and they will either whitelist your site or spread your  content to other readers who don’t care about ad-blockers. Another option would be to remove all ads and replace them with a single non-intrusive ad similar to The Deck. Unfortunately these kind of ads are not mainstream enough for small publishers like this site to take advantage of.