Opera is once again set to screw up its UI in the upcoming version 10 of the web browser.

Granted, that the new iteration of Opera is faster and bloasts loads of new features, but the UI is still such a mess to look at. See for yourself:

This is the default theme named Opera Standard. Couldn’t be uglier.

The last time I wrote about it, the interface was much better!

There is another themed named Windows Native which is bundled with the application. Even though it does offer a more native UI feel to Opera, it leaves a lot more to be desired too:

How can a major player like Opera ignore the usability point of its products? What makes them think that they can fool around with the UI in every new version? I cannot undersand.

It is time Opera starts analyzing the relation between user friendly user interface and market share. Opera is now a distant fifth behing IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome in browser market share.

You guys wont believe this: I have a hard time convincing some of my friends that facebook is having more users than orkut !!!

Why is there a confusion? It is because in India orkut is more popular than facebook. So they think that facebook is just a clone of orkut and it is less popular.

So I show them this statistics:

Facebook traffic is shown in red color. Orkut traffic is shown in blue (If you can find it at the bottom).

Orkut traffic reduced by 7.7% last year while faceook traffic increased by 69.5%.

So that is about popularity. The next time you have to explain this to anyone, it is better to show them this graph.

For a national paper presentation contest in a reputed engineering college, they developed a website for participant registration.

Before opening the website, they changed the database table name to a better one. (You know, these developers have got a habit of naming tables and variables after their pets).

After one month of operation, they closed the registration recently.

When they checked the database for the details of the participants, they were in for a surprise. Guess what? The database was empty.

Why? They forgot to change the table name in the code.

Two things I cannot understand:

1. Why did not the application throw any error?
2. Why they did not test it after it went live?

What are they going to do with the paper presentation contest now? I am anxious.

I saw the following comparison chart in a web hosting site:

This is just nonsense. Scalability and Reliability are two things which you cannot enable on the flick of a switch. Scaling web applications is a very difficult job. For instance, twitter is still fighting scaling issues. Reliability is hard, very hard, too.

The web is celebrating the advent of the new competitor in the browser arena - Google Chrome. Here are some points you should note before jumping into the conclusion that Google Chrome is a huge revolution in the browser history.

The bugs

Here are some bugs I saw in the Google browser:

1. The task Manager is a main feature in Chrome. But let us get this straight: It does not work as intended always. Look at the screenshot below:

Chrome crashed and the Task Manager option was disabled so that I could not check what was wrong. If the task manager is disabled when the browser crashes, what is the point in having a task manager in the first place?

2. The browser crashes too often. I used the browser in three different machines and the browser tends to crash once in a while. This is very annoying considering the fact that the latest versions of Firefox and IE are rather robust.

There is even a very simple way to crash the browser.

Just type “:%” in the omnibox (address bar). Voila !!!

Another annoying thing is that when the browser crashes, it crashes every single instance of the browser running, not just the current window.

Other Interesting facts

3. Chrome is not the fastest in terms of JavaScript performance it seems. Two different tests confirms this. In one test Firefox is ahead if Chrome while in the other, Safari is ahead. It is just that Chrome outperforms the other browsers in certain tests which Google handpicked by itself. Anyway it should be noted that Internet Explorer versions are all lagging behind by great margins in every single test.

4. Tab manipulation and the omnibox are not really a big step as far as web development is concerned. Those are just usability tweaks that can be incorporated in to any browser without much effort.

5. Chrome does not support add-ons as of now. This is a very huge drawback when compared to Firefox. Without add-ons, the functionality of Chrome is very limited. We can only hope that Google will incorporate the support for add-ons in the next iteration of the browser. The Firefox tribe (The early adopters) will hesitate to switch to Chrome because of this one single drawback.

6. Regional language support is poor. I still cannot not find out how to render some regional language web pages correctly in Chrome. Especially the option to change the font representing a regional language is missing.

7. There are many other smaller glitches like the absence of Full-Screen, absence of option to restart downloads etc.

So what is there to be excited about Chrome? The multi-threading capability and ability to isolate tabs are not a big innovation either. The IE team have been experimenting with this for IE8.

A much loved feature would have been the support for JavaScript multithreading. But Chrome does not support that also. There is no real innovation in the rendering engine front also. Chrome if just reusing the webkit rendering engine which is powering the Safari browser.

The only big thing about Chrome is the new fast V8 JavaScript engine and it capabilities. I am not sure if we can bank on that for creating wonders in the web.

As of now, I will go back to my much loved Firefox3. The Beta 2 version of IE8 also looks promising. It does have a lot of new features. It will make many Microsoft fans very happy. I will wait until Google comes up with some thing really different, something really game-changing.

Seth Godin says in his post this Friday:

If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.

Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet.

If every time you read a blog post or bit of online content you enjoyed you clicked on an ad to say thanks, the economics of the web would change immediately. You don’t have to buy anything (though it’s fine if you do). You just have to honor the writer by giving them a click.

The idea is good, except that it won’t work.

There is an economy behind ads. If the value of a click decreases (it decreases when you click for giving a thank you), the click generates less revenue for the advertiser, and in turn the publisher is paid less. This means that the revenue of the publisher remains the same if you click genuinely or otherwise.

You can cheat for some days (may be), but then the numbers adjust themselves.

Voidy is in beta now.

The basic chatting functionality is working fine.

The good news is that 50+ of my friends are already using it and giving feedback.

The bad news is that since I have not done any PR stunt and since voidy is not featured in any of the techcrunch like sites, I don’t expect many users to know about it and use it. But that is fine; I primarily developed this for a very small group of people who wanted this exact functionality.

Thank you all for your support. If you have’nt registered already, sign-up and help me test the application.