(alecs)

No doubt the biggest hype around the web these days is the launch of Google’s own web browser: Chrome. Introduced as a sleek and very fast web browser (in terms of rendering), it follows the simplistic lines of Google’s other products. There are only three toolbars: the tabs, address and bookmarks (yep, no title bar :)).

Everything seems to work smoothly. Tabs can be dragged out of the main window to create a new one and back. The download manager is nicely integrated in a small bottom toolbar. Almost every toolbar that appears or disappears has a smooth motion tween.

A big difference from other current browsers is that each tab runs as a different process. Should one tab crash, it will not take all the rest with it.

There is good news for web designers. Chrome doesn’t have its own rendering engine; instead it uses Webkit (also used by the Safari browser). So it is one less browser to worry about.

As for its usefulness, although it is a breath of fresh air, Chrome is still in Beta. Firefox still has a huge advantage given by the use of add-ons. I can’t imagine not having Firebug or the Web developer toolbar among other things at my fingertips.

Google Chrome screenshot

Links

• the official Google blog entry
• download Google Chrome

On a side note, I wonder how much traffic is sent to other “chrome” websites that have nothing to do with Google’s browser: www.chromebags.com (1st on Google for “chrome”), www.chrome.com, etc. I would very much like the next Google product to be named Ylipsis :).

Recently, I signed up for an ebanking account at ING. The first thing I’ve noticed was the digipass (scroll down for pictures) they gave me free of charge. It seems they don’t trust their clients enough to let them use one static password for account access. But that is… a good thing — although I’d rather not have to use this device each time I log in to my ebanking account. Probably many ebanking users can’t tell the difference between the authentic ebanking login site and a phishing page.

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It seems Microsoft had a hard time marketing Windows Vista upon launching. Otherwise they wouldn’t creating the following website: mojaveexperiment.com. Basically, a group of people that already had a bad opinion about Vista without trying it out for themselves were shown some of the features of the new Windows Mojave. After being amazed they were told that Mojave was in fact Vista. Most of them rated the Mojave version higher than Vista.

Of course, things would have been different if they were left a couple of days/weeks to really explore the “true power” of Vista with all those “fast” response times.

The problem with this type of surveys is that the people are selected in a manner that will ultimately will only prove the intended point of view.

Let’s have a look over another example: a video on  YouTube entitled Why people believe Americans are Stupid. What are the odds of a random person walking down the street not knowing how many sides does a triangle have? Of course, you won’t see all the positive responses in the final video, just the extreme ones.

Today almost every blog and media website has at least one feed. But some of them prefer to include their entire articles in the feed, while others have only a small snippet or catchy paragraph. The latter ones aim to achieve one goal - by reading the small (and usually teasing) introduction, the person might be tempted to visit the actual page from the website to read the full story.

Before jumping to conclusions, let’s take a look at the details:

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Tineye is an image search engine that uses an image as input for generating results.

Long story short, most SE (search engines) use keywords supplied by people for generating image results. The downside is that by using this technique, SE try to guess the content of an image by it’s file name, surrounding keywords, etc.

TinEye tries a different approach. It uses an image provided by you to search for similar images. Here are two advantages I can think of:

• You have a picture, but need a higher resolution. A regular SE won’t help you much.
• There is a watermark on your image. It is possible to find the original image, unedited.

But the major drawback is… you need the actual image to begin your search!

At this moment, TinEye is still in beta. You need an account to perform any searches, but obtaining one requires a few days (invitations are not given immediately). Fortunately it seems I have 3 invitations to send. So if you need any, drop a comment.

In the future I’m hoping they provide an API for their search service. Yep, I need it for LOLhome

The favicon appears both in the address bar and in the tabs on Mozilla browsers

So why should you even bother creating your favicon?

1. It gives you exposure. Visitors can quickly match your website with the image. Just to test this out, can you quickly match each of the following icons to their corresponding website/brand?
2. Favicons are used in bookmarks across many browsers. Your website has the ability to stand out and create a visual impact (even through a small 16 x 16 image) in a visitor’s bookmark collection.
3. It only takes 5 minutes to set up.

How to make one

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