What are SOPA and PIPA?

SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. [...]

Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people’s access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.

For the record, I fully support Wikipedia’s protest — and so does Mozilla. However, this blog post isn’t really about that.

What if you really, really need to read that particular Wikipedia article today and you don’t have your mobile phone nearby, and you’d rather not disable Javascript of the entire browser? I thought I’d share this simple method that will allow you to quickly get access to the content:

Update: Asa Dotzler pointed out that there’s an even easier method than what I explain below: just replace the “en” part of the address of the article you’re visiting to “m” and you’re done — that will take you to the mobile-optimized version of the Wikipedia article. Example: change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation to m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation. That’s it!

The original instructions were:

1. In Firefox, navigate to the Wikipedia article you want to read. You’ll see something like this:
   
2. Press Alt on your keyboard to reveal the classic menu of Firefox:
   
3. Click View > Page Style > No Style. You’ll then see a somewhat crudely formatted version of the original article:
   

This setting is not remembered in Firefox, so when you’re done reading the article, just close the tab and things will go back to normal when you open it the next time. (Wikipedia itself will also go back to normal, tomorrow. In the meantime, take action!)

Olympus E-PM1 “Mini” with the new 14-42mm lens.

I’ll focus this review on the differences (good and bad) between the old E-P1 and this new E-PM1:

E-PM1 advantages:

• Much faster focus algorithms – even with the same lenses, the E-PM1 focuses noticeably faster. With the new lenses, it’s faster than any non-dSLR camera I’ve ever used.
• Extremely lightweight and small – I think I managed to shave off another 100 grams of total weight in my camera bag with this upgrade! (For our fine Americans, 100 grams is approximately 1/2 cup of sugar, or 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour. I’ll leave the mpg calculation as an exercise for the reader.)
• Much improved kit zoom in terms of size and focus speed/noise. Although the lens mount is in plastic, it doesn’t seem like there will be any problems with worn out mount connections.
• Slightly, slightly better high ISO performance, though this is only confirmed by reading professional reviews.
• Up to 5 fps burst mode – really impressive.
• Nicer menu interface (though menu layout is mostly unchanged).
• Comes with a useful snap-on flash that I’ve really missed on the E-P1 at e.g. very dim party nights. Now I just have to remember to bring it along with the camera.

E-PM1 disadvantages:

• I definitely preferred the retro design of the E-P1, but I was happy to give it up in favor of a much more portable package.
• There is absolutely no grip on the E-PM1, making it a bit hard to hold. You can essentially forget about holding the camera with just one hand.
• For some reason, Olympus leaves out a basic orientation sensor in their simpler models, which means that if you take photos in portrait mode, you have to manually rotate the photos on your computer. Not a big deal, but I can’t understand why they would take out such a basic feature — there’s not a single mobile camera phone out there that doesn’t include it, so it can hardly be a size (or cost) issue.
• I really miss at least *one* more programmable Fn button, or at least the freedom to assign *any* feature to the one that exists (the Rec button). For some reason, Olympus decided to omit certain essential features that you can assign, which means that some combinations of direct button access aren’t possible.
• The video mode is crippled in the sense that it’s no longer possible to re-focus while recording by e.g half pressing the shutter (or assigning the AEL/AFL lock button to focus). It’s possible to program the AEL/AFL function (which can be assigned to the Rec button) to re-focus while in Manual mode when taking photos, but for some reason Olympus forgot to inherit that feature when switching to video mode. So, the only way to re-focus while recording a video is to give the control over entirely to the camera’s hunting focus algorithms by switching over to continuous focus. This is a shame, really, and it makes the video feature much less useful to me.
• The screen, while higher resolution than on the E-P1, actually ends up being a disappointing experience because of its aspect ratio. This is a widescreen (16:9), while the E-P1 had a lower resolution 4:3 screen. Because both screens are labeled as 3″ sized, the widescreen actually ends up being a lot smaller if you still shoot your photos using the sensor-native 4:3 aspect ratio. (This is the same thing that happened a decade ago when you compared an old 28″ TV with the, then, new 28″ widescreen TVs — the latter ended up being a much smaller screen in most practical purposes.) If would be nice if Olympus gave you the option of only seeing 16:9 cropped version of the view when framing a photo, while still actually recording the full frame (this is admittedly possible if you shoot in RAW, which I never do).

My old retro-looking E-P1 (sold).

All in all, by selling my old E-P1 and (with a little help from Michael Verdi) buying the new E-PM1, I ended up spending an additional ~220 USD, which, all in all, feels like a pretty cheap upgrade. The E-PM1 is better than the old E-P1 in many important respects (to me) such as overall size/weight, autofocus speed, and flash — but it’s admittedly a step back in some others. As an interim upgrade until the “next big thing” comes out, it feels like a good choice to me in the end. But if you own an E-P1/E-P2 and plan to hold on to your next camera upgrade for a long time, I would suggest you wait until sometime like a future E-P4 is announced, which may be a far more significant upgrade with (supposedly) a much improved sensor.

One side-effect of a richer web experience with html5, Javascript and CSS is that it becomes increasingly harder for web browsers to stop bad web design practices for the benefit of the user. Firefox is known for putting the user’s needs first and pioneered mainstream use of features designed to make the web experience better for users – the pop-up blocker is perhaps the most notable example.

Features like the pop-up blocker were not designed for web developers — they were designed completely in the interest of users, who were fed up with annoying ads that popped up over and under the web page you were currently visiting. This effectively forced web designers to adjust their practices and keep the users’ interests more prominently in mind. I think this is a wonderful example of how web browsers can change the web for the better. Before the pop-up blocker, web designers were dictating how their web sites should behave, and users had no other choice but to put up with it.

There are of course many other examples of when browser features have helped tame annoying web design practices, such as scrolling text in status bars, disabling the context menu when right-clicking, and blocking third-party cookies — the general theme is that the browser balances the sometimes bad urges of web developers and designers with the actual needs of the user. And as a result, the web becomes a better place. Mozilla has its own spin on this that captures the essence of Firefox: Firefox answers to no one but you.

The yellow pop-up blocker info bar in Firefox. A rare sight these days.

Today, however, you don’t see the little pop-up icon  in the location bar of Firefox very often anymore. This is because “true” pop-ups, (in the traditional/technical sense) are no longer common. It used to be that, in order to display a pop-up, web developers had to use Javascript methods like window.open to tell the browser that it wants a new window to be open so the (usually annoying) ad could be shown.

Back in 2004, when Firefox was first launched, window.open was the way of displaying pop-ups. These kinds of pop-ups are trivial for Firefox to detect, since the web page creates a separate browser window for the ad (this usually happens when a page loads, or at some other event which is straightforward enough for a browser to determine that it isn’t explicitly requested by the user).

Today, most modern web sites have become smarter and use more sophisticated technologies to display pop-up ads embedded within the web page triggering the ad. In fact, a quick anecdotal survey shows that most large, international websites have completely stopped using the traditional pop-ups. You can still find them on smaller or more local websites though (for example, Swedish news sites like aftonbladet.se are typically a year or two behind the more recent web page practices used on websites from the US in general, and the Valley in particular). The original pop-up blocking implementation certainly still matters, but its relevance is decreasing.

New websites use all sorts of clever (and highly annoying) tricks to make sure their ads are not missed by anyone:

• Inline pop-ups — these behave similar to the traditional pop-ups, but the ad content isn’t actually displayed in a separate window. Instead, the ad is embedded in the web page itself. From a technological point of view, a browser is then unable to distinguish the ad from the rest of the web page, so it can’t block it.
• Hover ads — this is similar to inline pop-ups, but taken to an increasingly more annoying level: here, the ad doesn’t just block a particular area of the web page, it follows along on your screen as you scroll down on the page — often with a smooth movement to give the impression that it’s actually hovering over the page. It’s like the ad is trying to say “I’m here! Look, I’m still here!”
• Splash screen ads (I just made this term up) –  these are by far the most annoying ads and are commonly seen on sites like di.se and e24.se (two popular finance websites in Sweden). This is like an ad saying: “Look, I’m not going to let you read the web page until you’ve paid attention to ME!” Web designers do this by overlaying the ad so it completely covers the content of the page (alternatively, it redirects you to a separate page). If you pay close attention, you will see a tiny link to get to the page you actually wanted to visit, but the web designer has usually made it the smallest link on the entire page — despite the fact it’s the link you are most likely going to want to click. These type of web pages clearly answer to no one but the ad provider — certainly not to you.
• Video ads — as videos are getting more and more mainstream, the most common practice today by content providers is to show an ad before playing the video clip you actually requested. This is similar to those “important messages” you see when inserting some DVDs, and just like those messages, you can’t skip these ads. You simply have no choice but to watch the entire thing. (Some content providers add a small clock countdown in the corner to at least let you know how long you have to put up with watching the ad — it’s clear that they’re aware of the inconvenience for the user here.)

All of these types of web ads have one thing in common: it’s next to impossible for web browsers to block them. These ads are, from a technical point of view, integral parts of the web page itself, and as such they’re indistinguishable from the “good” content on the page.

Where do we go from here?

Web browsers make at least a bit of an effort to block advertisement today with their aged pop-up blocker feature, but it’s also clear that they are not able to block all attempts of displaying advertisement on the web. (And should they? Unless we can create a world where advertisement is not just generally unwanted, but also not necessary to make the online economy spin, I would say we probably shouldn’t try to block them all. But that’s a much deeper discussion than I’m aiming for in this blog post.)

More importantly, however, web browsers are no longer stopping bad design practices. Showing an ad as a splash overlay covering the entire page and blocking the user from seeing the actual content of the page is exactly the kind of thing that Firefox effectively stopped in 2004 — but so far there is no solution in place in any web browser on the market to stop the new pop-up behavior that is at least as bad as the traditional pop-ups.

Taking a step back, what is the role of the browser in this new world where web pages are becoming more like web applications that live a life on their own terms? How can we ensure that the browser still acts as a balance that puts the user first? Of course, I don’t have the answers to these broad questions, but it’s definitely something I think must be discussed.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another way could be to just say: Hey, I’m back! I’ll try to be a little more frequent in the future, but for now let’s summarize the most important bits that have happened up until now:

• I got married on September 3rd. It was fantastic!
• Sophie and I went on a honeymoon trip to Cyprus on September 5th and it was also fantastic.
• The plan was to get back home again this Monday so I could take an early flight to SFO on Tuesday morning to join the Mozilla all hands on Wednesday. However, the plan didn’t go so well, because the trip from Cyprus back to Sweden was delayed, and I missed the flight to SFO. So in case anyone at Mozilla wonders where the heck I am, I’m doing the best I can to work remotely while everyone else is on site.
• Oh, and during the honeymoon trip, my LDAP password expired and I haven’t been able to read mail or access my calendar since then. Resetting the password proves to be hard when all of Mozilla’s IT staff is asleep in the US.

• You recently discovered Firefox and are still new to this idea of participating rather than just passively using software. That said, you’ve always been considered helpful by your peers.
• You’ve used Firefox for a while now, and you know about Mozilla’s open source values. You wish you could contribute in a meaningful way, but you’re not sure if you have the required skills.
• You know quite a lot about Firefox and have helped friends with their problems, but you don’t really have time to do it regularly more than maybe 5 minutes per day.

Do any of these descriptions sound like you? If so, Mozilla’s all-new Army of Awesome comes to rescue — a lightweight, quick and super-simple way for anyone to help fellow Firefox users with their web browsing experience!

Becoming an active contributor of the Mozilla community has never been simpler:

• This is a super-simple way for anyone to reach out to actual Firefox users — the main idea is to direct people to where they can get help with their problems: support.mozilla.com. In other words, you can help even if you don’t know the answer to their problem!
• It’s also a great way to get in touch with users who aren’t necessarily looking for help, including people who just raved about the latest beta, or people who openly asked which browser they should use. You probably know the answer to that question, which means that…
• Everyone can contribute here, including you!

I really want to stress that last point: everyone can make a difference here, and it doesn’t have to take more than a couple of minutes per day. It will go a long way in spreading helpful ripples in the Twitterverse. Please give it a go and let me know what you think!

By the way, we’re also thinking about ways to integrate other social media into this effort, such as Facebook; and we’re thinking of creating a Firefox add-on that will allow you to use the same helpful snippets when helping people on blogs, various forums, and other places online. More on that later. If you have other ideas on how to spread the helpfulness to other places, let me know!

Lastly, a big thank you to everyone who helped pull this project together — William Reynolds, Kadir Topal, Michael Verdi, Alex Buchanan, Fred Wenzel, James Socol, Paul Craciunoiu, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, Craig Cook, Mike Morgan, Mike Alexis, Anurag Phadke, and Daniel Einspanjer.

1. Seal of Quality

Isn’t it great that Apple reviews all programs before they’re added to the App Store? It’s a bit like the Seal of Quality™ stamp that good old Nintendo put on their NES games to ensure you that your purchase would give you hours of quality game play in front of the television set make more money.

In practice, this means that we can feel safe with our iPads knowing that the virtual chocolate box app we purchase meets Apples’ rigorous quality standards. And it’s only $0.99! That’s almost free as in beer, folks (who cares about free as in speech anyway?).

2. Browser Choice

We all know how important the web browser choice is. That’s why it’s so convenient that Apple already made the choice for us on the iPad: Safari! They even went the extra mile to make it impossible to install other browsers, so I don’t need to worry about whether or not Safari is the right choice for me.  And besides, Safari is the best browser out there, right?

Or as they say themselves:

“Our lives are full of choices. iPod Touch or iPod Nano? Silver, Pink, Orange, Green, Blue, Purple or Black? All of them?

As a for-profit corporation, we have always believed that the freedom to make smart choices should be restricted to Apple to make the product experience, the Web, and the world, a better place. This shows through with our iPad running Safari, a free-as-in-beer, closed-source Web browser that we have chosen for more than 350 people in the US. Values of choice and self-determination are built into everything that we do: you can either buy the iPad, or don’t. You know you want to.”

The new placement of window controls in Ubuntu 10.4 (beta)

This is why Ubuntu’s recent change to move the window control buttons to the left side of the window in the latest beta confuses me, because it appears that a chance has been made for no real purpose whatsoever other than a vague hint that it’s preparations for “some innovative options” on the now empty right side. But those experiments won’t start until version 10.10, due out in October 2010.

There are a couple of problems I see with this redesign:

1. The Ubuntu layout is not just about switching from right to left — it’s introducing a completely unique layout never before seen in an OS. See how the Close button is still on the right side of the button group while the buttons were moved to the left side? This means that neither Windows nor Mac OS users will benefit from the change, as both user groups will have to relearn things here.
2. The actual icons/symbols on the maximize and minimize buttons are also completely different from both Windows and Mac OS.  While Windows uses a horizontal line to represent minimize, and a square box to represent maximize, Mac OS uses colors instead (yellow to minimize, and green to maximize/zoom). Again, this means that neither Windows nor Mac OS users will benefit from the Ubuntu change, which uses some stylish arrows instead (pointing up to maximize and down to minimize). The icons make little sense (isn’t maximizing more about changing the size of the window, rather than the direction? does minimizing a window always move it down — what if your task bar is at the top like I have it?). To make it even more bizarre, once a window is in a maximized state, the icon for restoring the window looks like the actual maximize button in Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/7.

Ubuntu’s design lead Ivanka Majic tries to explain why the changes were made, but fails completely. She instead lists some questions they were asking themselves without providing any answers:

- Why do Mac OS and Windows have the buttons where they do?

- What was the functional reason behind the Mac OS choice (or the Windows position for that matter)?

- Why, when most application menus are top left should the window controls go top right?

- Why, when we read left to right is the most destructive action first?

So, what are the answers? Given that I haven’t seen any, allow me to guess:

1. Mac OS and Windows have different conventions.
2. I don’t think there were any serious usability studies behind either of the choices.
3. Why not?
4. Because it’s the most common action on a window?

It’s things like this that makes me skeptical of so-called usability experts when they think they can get away with changing things for the mere sake of change, without any evidence whatsoever that it’s a change for the better.  Majic ends her blog post about the window control button placement by indicating the true reason why they went for a completely unique arrangement:

Personally, I would have the max and min on the left and close on the right.

Update: My insanely sharp colleague Jennifer Boriss writes about this topic more elegantly from a user experience expert perspective.

linux-humor, originally uploaded by David Tenser.

Björn hittar det roliga i den här bilden på två sekunder!

Following up on my post yesterday about my impressions with web browsing on the N900, I wanted to elaborate on one of the points I was making: Firefox’s UI model of showing controls (a.k.a. chrome) on two sides of the web page.

I see a few problems with it:

• You need to swipe your finger in a specific direction in order to reveal specific chrome (e.g. swipe to the right to show tabs, and swipe to the left to show Back/Forward buttons and some other controls).
• The split between the chrome on both sides isn’t natural. For example, both Back/Forward and tabs are types of navigation, but they’re on separate sides. This means you simply have to learn on which side specific UI is located. Not a huge problem, of course.
• If you’re zoomed in on a page, you may have to swipe several times to reach the side of the web page and reveal the chrome (or double tap and then swipe).
• Having controls at the bottom of the screen feels more intuitive to me. More objectively, though, it also works better in portrait layout when you’d rather not waste width on chrome.
• The required panning of the web page itself when reaching for chrome feels rather clunky. I’m swiping to reveal toolbar buttons, not to pan around on the page, but I have to do both at the same time in Firefox.
• The tab thumbnails are always of the same (small) size, since the chosen tab model doesn’t allow for flexibility.

My simple ideas:

Allow me to present a few ideas on how the UI could be simplified. Please excuse this poor GIMP mockup:

The mockup above shows a redesigned navigation toolbar and a different way of switching tabs. Let me explain each feature in more detail:

• The new toolbar is overlaid on top of the web page and fades (or slides) into view when interacting on the page (e.g. when scrolling or tapping).
• All buttons are on the same toolbar. This means that you don’t have to remember which direction to swipe to reveal the controls, because any direction works.
• The web page itself doesn’t pan when the toolbar appears.
• After a short while of no interaction, the toolbar fades/slides away again.
• The left side of the toolbar shows the Back/Forward buttons, the center shows the Tab (or Web Page) Switcher button, and the right side shows a Bookmark and a Tools button.
• This toolbar can easily fit in a portrait layout.
• Clicking the Tab Switcher button shows the currently open tabs. The size of the thumbnails change dynamically depending on the number of open tabs. Clicking on the Tab Switcher button again or outside the tab switching “pop-up” takes you back to the current web page again.
• Clicking the Tools button reveals a “pop-up” similar to the Tab Switcher chrome, but this one of course shows the Firefox options window. Rather than clicking a back button to come back to the web page, you click outside of the “pop-up”.

In addition to the ideas above, I would also suggest that the toolbar is made customizable. Personally, I would like a zoom button (maybe even a +/- type of button) instead of a bookmarks button, but there’s obviously a limit on how many buttons you can show at the same time. This mockup assumes approximately the same button size as in the MicroB browser, so there would be plenty of space for buttons, at least in horizontal layout.

Thoughts? Piece of crap? Just shoot me.

However, I have a confession to make: Firefox isn’t yet my default browser on the N900. I think it will be very soon, but right now, my browser of choice on this particular device is another Mozilla-based browser: MicroB. It’s actually the best web browsing experience I’ve ever had on a mobile device (but to be fair, Firefox is the second best experience, so it’s definitely up in the same league already).

Allow me to summarize my initial impressions with both of these Mozilla browsers:

• The Awesome Bar in Firefox is… awesome. I never actually reflected on how convenient it was to use until I tried MicroB, which forces me to remember URLs again.
• Weave is probably extremely useful, too, but since I’m using the latest trunk builds of Firefox (“Fennec”), I can’t actually use it.
• I’m not completely sold on Firefox’s UI model of showing controls on a surface on the sides of the web page. I’d be curious about whether there has been any usability research that suggests it’s better than the more traditional toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Btw, I’ll follow up with some ideas about this in a future blog post.
• I’ve fallen in love with the volume rocker zoom in MicroB — it’s smooth, fast and surprisingly accurate. Would love to see this in Firefox!
• When double tapping to zoom in MicroB, a subtle zoom animation is used which feels intuitive and responsive. In Firefox, the zoom is instant, making it feel less fluid.
• The default page zoom in Firefox is designed to make the full width of the page fit on the screen. This unfortunately has the side effect of making the text on almost all web pages too small to read. It seems like MicroB has chosen a different approach where the default zoom includes about 800px of the web page width, which makes it possible to read most pages without zooming in.
• Actually zooming in on a page in Firefox is a bit tricky, because it auto-zooms on the object you double tab on, even if that object is only e.g. a small image. This means that you often zoom in too much, and since it’s not possible to adjust the zoom level in an easy way (keyboard shortcuts don’t cut it, especially not for me since I have the Scandinavian keyboard layout where [Ctrl]+[-] doesn’t work), you have to double-tap again to zoom out and then try again.
• MicroB feels more responsive when panning around on a page. This is mostly due to the fact that the UI and panning is done in a separate process from the actual Gecko web rendering process. At FOSDEM, I was pleased to hear in the Mobile talk by Mark Finkle that Firefox will make full use of the Electrolysis technologies that are currently being baked. What this means, in simple terms, is that Firefox will be just as responsive as MicroB in the future since the web rendering process will be separate from the UI/frontend. I can’t wait to see the results of that (which of course will benefit desktop Firefox as well).
• The checker pattern seems to show up more frequently on the screen in Firefox compared to MicroB. I don’t know if Firefox is just more conservative with how much of the web page it pre-loads off-screen, but sometimes it can cause the whole screen to remain “blank” for a few seconds, which rarely happens with MicroB.
• The Back button history in MicroB is a good idea in theory: when clicking the Back button, small thumbnails of the previous pages are shown, making it easy to pick the page you want to get back to. However, the implementation sucks because it takes several seconds to load these thumbnails and the thumbnails are big enough that you have to pan around in order to see anything more than one page back. Would be nice to see some kind of combination of Firefox’s and MicroB’s implementation: when tapping on the Back button, Firefox would simply go back to the previous page, but when tapping and holding, it would show a pop-up with preloaded thumbnails in a similar fashion as with MicroB, except without the delay. (Maybe the actual thumbnails could be recorded when you navigate away from a page?)
• Flash — as much as I hate it — works pretty well in MicroB out of the box. In Firefox, I have to enable it manually, and the responsiveness of the UI with Flash enabled isn’t great. Can every web site switch to open video, please?

I personally feel that both MicroB and Firefox are really good web browsers, and the fact that they’re both powered by Mozilla’s Gecko web rendering engine is a huge plus for me. So in a way, I don’t feel bad for not using Firefox primarly right now, because my current web browser of choice is still filled with Mozilla love.

That said, I can’t wait to use an Electrolysis-powered version of mobile Firefox later this year!