Sunday, February 27, 2011

Chrome Features

Chrome is already at par with modern browsers and now other browsers have to increasingly play catchup with chrome features. It's hard to imagine the kind of progress they have made with it in just under three years. Two new features which caught my eyes recently are fine examples of adding features which actually help the user and raises the bar for others.

Extending Omnibox

The omnibox API lets extension developers add their own keyword command to the omnibox. And just like that it opens a whole new world of possibilities. New extensions can be created which might not need the real estate on browser interface. I played with Switch to Tab extension and immediately fell in love with it.

Search Settings

How many times you need to change a setting and you spend a lot of time just looking for it. Just look at Internet Explorer settings and you get drowned in a sea of settings. For example, sometimes I need to block javascript to test some functionality. Now I can serach for the keyword and get all the related settings.

It even shows that the keyword is inside Content Settings.

Even inside Content Settings, the keyword is highlighted to easily see the setting.


Friday, February 18, 2011

How NOT to launch a new version without testing?

I was going through unread blogs list when I saw this news - New version of the ASP.NET Forums is live!. Now being a asp.net developer I naturally went to see if it can help in my work (I tend to go to StackOverflow) but still any help is good help. Only if the site actually worked...

A quick look of the site through this link and found the following issues -
- Search was not working
- Navigation items were not working

Perhaps it was left to the users to test the site as the feedback thread contained all these issues and more. But can we really allow sites to go live without doing such basic testing especially when it is one of you premier sites for your users?

Update: By the time I finished this post and went back to check most of the links and search was working. But still it took about 2-3 days to fix. Perhaps we are asking too much from Microsoft.

Update 2: Search still doesn't work if you try to search from this page.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

How to Handle Errors?

It's been a while since I got an error which makes you get more of these! It should be a part of  creative error handling (without annoying your users). If you find the monkeys, please point them here. :)