wheresrhys

Collider of large hadrons, or large collider of hadrons?

If you know the answer please leave a comment.

If, like me, you subscribe to a number of web-related blogs in an effort to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of websites and the internet, you’ll have heard all the chatter about Chrome, Google’s new web browser. I reckon it sounds good in boring, but important, ways – more stable, faster javascript, ability for certain components to crash without crashing the whole browser. They say they’ve re-thought the web browser from scratch, and it seems they have addressed some important issues that maybe no-one else, committed to extant browsers, would have been able to – but from the point of view of allowing people to use the web in new and exciting ways it’s a bit of a dud. Firefox’s add-ons, and even IE8′s anticipated new features are far more innovative, flexible and of use to users.

One immediately obvious attempt by Google to break new user interface ground is the positioning of their tabs. All existing tabbed browsers (Safari is the example in the picture) put the tabs below the address bar. Chrome, on the other hand, puts them above.

This makes sense, as the address bar is the address of the web page in the tab – the address of the whole browser doesn’t actually make sense when a browser supports multiple tabs.

But does it make the browser easier to use? I think not (although one has to assume the people at Google have tested it thoroughly and found the opposite, or at least inconclusive evidence either way).

Often I open up numerous tabs for the sole reason of wanting to hop between them. In this situation I can imagine the address bar getting in the way, both physically (you have to move the mouse further to get from hovering over the page and clicking on the tab), and conceptually (In these days of super-doopa search, and long, dynamically generated URL’s a website’s URL doesn’t take on the de facto role of “page title” it once did. It could be argued that putting the address bar physically within the tab adds semantic clutter rather than information of high priority to the user. Putting it outside the tab makes it less of a distraction).

So to sum up, I think it’s a good example of when the logical, ideal way to set up a user interface doesn’t necessarily equate to the most ergonomic way.

I’ll be leaving London again very soon (sooner than anticipated – A journalist back from Moscow (alive) will be taking my room on Sunday, booting me out in the process).

There is, as I expected, lots to take care of in order to ensure everything relating to my relocation runs smoothly. Already in the course of taking care of everything I have been appalled not once, not twice, but thrice!

1. At the Indian embassy they take your passport for visa processing, and tell you “you can track the application online by just typing in your passport number.” It’s only when you get home that you realise that they have your passport and they didn’t give you anything with your passport number on it. (Well they do, but it doesn’t say passport number next to it, and just looks liek a credit card receipt, and unless you already know your passport number you can’t very well recognise that that’s what it is).
2. Since the last time I had to put anything in storage both Big Yellow and Safestore, the market leaders, have prevented you from taking out insurance with somebody else. It’s bad enough that they make insurance compulsory, but to force people to take out their over-priced insurance, about five times the price of competitors, is naked profiteering. I’ve reported them to the office of fair trading, the first time I’ve ever done such a thing. In the meantime, I’ve used www.theselfstoragedirectory.co.uk to find an independent self-storage depot which is happy to not fleece you for every penny.
3. I’ve just taken out a card protection plan for the first time in a few years. Like many secure banking and related services in addition to a user name and password you have to choose some pass phrases: answers to set questions. What is odd and, dare I say, appalling about CPP is that it’s compulsory to use the question “What is the name of your favourite actor?”. I don’t have one and, put in a corner, just typed in the name of the first person whom I’d seen in a few things and generally liked, but I bet I forget it at a crucial juncture in the future.In hindsight I probably should have put Rob Brydon