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[Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard

Artem Russakovskii — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:13:00 +0000

There used to be a time when you couldn't imagine your life without Microsoft's Outlook – web email clients were pathetic and non-functional, Internet access was scarce, and access to certain advanced features was only possible with a desktop application like Outlook.

Then, Gmail arrived and exploded the whole notion of desktop email clients forever, almost overnight. It was fast, robust, logical, and integrated – many things Outlook still isn't to this day (Outlook 2010 + IMAP is pure hell).

Slowly, Google brought out more and more features that made the fine line between web and desktop emailing thinner and thinner, and today, it finally disappeared, at least for me.

The final nail in the coffin turned out to be something I'd desired for a very long time – taking screenshots and pasting them directly into Gmail in the browser window. Inline image pasting from the clipboard if you will.

Update #1: Hrm, I may have jumped the gun here. While the image appears perfectly fine in the Create interface and can be resized, moved, etc, it seems to be sent out with formatting errors that prevent it from showing up properly on the recipient's side.

Essentially, what happens is the image is encoded inline, but for some reason the encoding is done wrong.

Here is what Gmail shows this image was encoded as (via "Show original"). I don't know if it's Gmail adding these or not, but there are a ton of =\r\n characters along with "3D" in there that break everything.

Here is what this image is supposed to look like with those things stripped (it works in Chrome and Firefox just fine).

We're close, really close.

Update #2: HowToGeek investigated this new capability with Chrome and found that while it doesn't work with the clipboard, it does work if you copy and paste images within Chrome itself, and it doesn't suffer from the bug above.

After digging into it, I found that it only works because rather than create the image inline, like Firefox does, Chrome just makes an tag with the src parameter pointing to the original url.

This means the image in the email will disappear if it's deleted and simply won't show up if you tried to copy something that requires a login.

Update #3 (6/13/11): According to the Gmail blog, you can finally paste images directly into your emails, albeit in Chrome only at this time!

I take a lot of screenshots of my desktop or certain parts of it when doing reviews or reporting bugs (with OneNote or SnagIt), and having to save the image, find it on the disk, and drop it into Gmail, while relatively easy, was still too cumbersome. In that regard, Outlook was great – I could quickly pump out a few screenshots and send off an email with all of them inline with text in only a few seconds. If I attempted to do that in Gmail, I either got nothing or a little image basically saying how full of fail I was.

It all changed with Firefox 4 (at least that's my theory) – I am now able to take screenshots and paste them straight into Gmail, right in the browser. Let's take a look:

Amazing, isn't it? This does not work for me in Chrome 12 or IE 9 – only Firefox 4 at the moment. I'm not sure how it works or why it started working only now, but I'm sure one of you will eventually come here and provide a sensible explanation.

Goodbye Outlook, I hardly knew ye.

P.S. I'm using Windows 7 in case it matters.

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[Web Dev] Browser Breakdown Stats+Charts From Plaxo.com For December 2009 And Thoughts

Artem Russakovskii — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0000

It's always important to know for developers what browsers they are developing for, who dominates the market, and what the current trends are.

I have gotten my hands on the Plaxo.com visitors' browser stats for December of 2009.

This information is valuable because Plaxo has a relatively general demographics, as it's not a site only geeks or only moms visit, and the statistics tends to not be skewed. Therefore, as you can see, Firefox doesn't occupy the same share as you might see on a techy site (on this site, more than 50% of users visit in Firefox).

Also, since Plaxo has a couple million monthly visitors and therefore a couple million data points, statistically speaking these numbers are relatively accurate.

Without further ado, here is the data, with some spiffy charts.

Overall Browser Breakdown For December 2009

Internet Explorer	64.00%
Firefox	23.60%
Safari	6.20%
Chrome	4.60%
Opera	0.60%
Mozilla	0.30%
Mozilla Compatible Agent	0.10%
Opera Mini	0.10%
BlackBerry9530	0.10%
BlackBerry9000	0.10%

Internet Explorer Version Breakdown For December 2009

Some numbers here have a value of 0.00% which means they've been rounded down and have really low numbers. The order is still correct though.

IE Version	%
7	65.90%
6	17.20%
8	16.90%
5.5	0.00%
999.1	0.00%
5.01	0.00%
5	0.00%
4.01	0.00%
6.1	0.00%
6.5	0.00%

Firefox Version Breakdown For December 2009

3.5.5	37.30%
3.5.6	27.00%
3.0.15	12.80%
3.0.16	7.70%
3.5.3	1.80%
3.5.2	1.30%
2.0.0.20	1.50%
3.6	0.80%
3.0.13	0.60%
3.0.10	0.80%

Thoughts

Internet Explorer is doing remarkably well – it is still most definitely the primary browser, so testing it should be planned accordingly.
Internet Explorer 7 is by far the most popular version with 65.9% of all IE versions, followed by IE6 at 17.2% (wtf??), and only then IE8 at 16.9%. This definitely came as a surprise to me – both in how popular IE7 still is and how pathetic Microsoft's efforts to upgrade Windows users up from IE6 have been.
Safari and Chrome are neck and neck at 6.20% and 4.6% respectively, with Chrome gaining rapidly.
Opera is doing undeservedly badly – 0.6%. That makes me sad.
IE 999.1? Interesting. I wonder if it's some sort of an uber hacked version.
And, instead of conclusion: damn you, IE6! Why can't you die already?

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Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]

Artem Russakovskii — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:47:21 +0000

When I visited Mozilla's offices about 6 months ago, I saw a mobile testing station which included about 20-30 different phones lounging around, with their chargers plugged in. I knew something serious was coming soon. There were rumors about Firefox for Mobile for a while but nothing to really show for it. That was then…

Today, however, we know a lot more. Firefox for Mobile, codenamed Fennec, is coming next month (see More Info below) and looks very promising.

Here is a recent video of the Firefox's mobile and design teams discussing and showing the features of Mobile Firefox:

Feature Highlights

For the busy folks, here are the highlights from the video:

Mobile Firefox uses as much screen real estate as possible to show the page
swipe screen left to see the open tab list
swipe right to see navigation buttons
awesome bar knows what you're looking for as you start typing, just like in your desktop Firefox
sync using Mozilla Weave – seamless sync desktop and mobile, including history and open tabs
location based browsing – allows sharing your location with websites automatically (obviously, with your approval only – excellent!)
security and privacy are the #1 priority
mobile add-ons – they're trying to create the same development platform that the desktop Firefox already uses. Yup, that means AdBlock is coming.
HTML 5 support

And some more from Mozilla and GigaOM's interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly:

support for Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video, and audio
based on Firefox 3.6 engine which is not even available for desktops yet
Firefox for Mobile will initially support Windows Mobile and Maemo, followed by Android and Symbian

surely, iPhone owners are out of luck as Apple will never allow a competing browser app on their market. Great – another reason to switch to Android
Blackberry users are also out of luck as BB uses Java
Android also uses Java and initially Mozilla ignored it. However, later the Android NDK came out, which allows building of applications in C/C++ and this fact changed everything

the first public releases should be available in December 2009, according to this article.

Some useful linkage:

Mozilla's own Mobile wiki page
Mobile features
Supported platforms (looks slightly out of date)
GigaOM: On Mobile Phones, Firefox’s Big Bet Is Nokia & Android
Firefox Headed to Android Phones

Conclusion

Firefox for Mobile is going to be a serious contender in the mobile web space – we know how serious these guys can get, don't we? After all, they've turned a barely known browser into a #2 in the last few years (soon to be #1, right?). Surely, they can do it again, this time in mobile.

I will be trying out Mobile Firefox (for Android) as soon as I get my hands on it, so expect a detailed review then. I have little doubt that it will replace my plain mobile browser.

What do you guys think?

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Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:31:06 +0000

Introduction

Dear Skype,

you are great. You have the convenience of a nearby, well, convenience store and the UI that is acceptable to even an Apple fanboy (I'm not one, I'm just saying).

Skype also has a Firefox extension which finds all pieces of text that resemble phone numbers on web pages you are visiting and converts them into clickable Skype buttons . One click and you're dialing the number. The premise is great but the execution… When it comes to your Firefox extension, Skype – you suck. You really suck.

The Problem Bullshit

So what makes me say these mean things? Is it the fact that when simply searching Google for "skype firefox", one finds mostly blog posts and references to major fail? Or is it the fact that MozillaZine's Problematic Extensions page lists Skype as one of the buggiest?

Well, yes. Those are great, aren't they? However, what really prompted me to write this post is my own experience with this extension.

As I am getting into Android development nowadays, I read the Android dev guide quite a lot. Thus, it was no surprise that yesterday I was happily reading the page about Handling UI Events. What was a surprise, however, is that when I clicked over to the View API reference page (in case that page ever changes for documentation reasons, I also saved it here), my Firefox went into a painful agony and exploded in a few minutes.

What the fudgemonkeys? Let's do this again and watch the Process Explorer.

This is what we call a memory leak – a prime example at that. In the screenshot above, the CPU usage spikes to 100% (shown as 50% because it's a dual core CPU), Firefox's memory usage jumps to around 2GB from 100MB, in 500MB/s increments. Finally, at 5GB total system memory consumption, either the OS kicks in or some major swapping starts to occur – I'm not sure which of the two is happening exactly but you can see it when the green CPU marker gets overtaken by the red one.

As I have a large number of extensions installed, I was dreading the next step: disabling them until the culprit was found. Ugh…

Sure enough, after about half an hour of starting Firefox, observing the memory leak, killing, and restarting it, I narrowed it down to the Skype extension. Somebody at Skype needs to fess up. And here's the kicker – it only exposes the memory leak in the following configuration:

If you turn number highlighting on – it's fine. If you turn name highlighting off – it's fine. But if you turn number highlighting off but leave name highlighting on – major fail.

The Conclusion

So where am I going with all this? Here is the summary:

somebody at Skype doesn't know how to program
this is the worst memory leak in a Firefox extension I've ever seen
this extension is notorious for its crashes, bugs, and memory leaks
keep using this extension if you're
- a masochist
- need to perform burn-in tests for your CPU or RAM

Have you had problems with the Skype extension? If so, share in the comments.

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