Google changed its favicon last year and many people said that the new one was ugly. Probably this the reason why Google decided to use another favicon starting from today. The new favicon uses all the colors from Google's logo, while keeping the same lowercase "g".

Marissa Mayer's description from last year is very appropriate. "We wanted something distinctive and noticeable (...). We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn't date itself." Adam Howard, a reader of this blog, thinks that the new favicon "looks like a mini paint-by-numbers".

Here are all the three Google favicons, starting with the new one, followed by the simple favicon added last year and the initial Google favicon, which is still my favorite:



Update: Marissa Mayer tells the story of the new favicon:

"Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon: . His placement of a white 'g' on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google."

{ Thanks, Daniel, John and Adam. }

Google Chrome's development is high-paced and version numbers are not very significant, but it's weird to see a pre-beta release of Chrome 2.0, four months after Chrome 0.2. There are many new things in Chrome 2.0:

* form autocomplete, one of the most obvious missing features from the initial release


* full-page zoom, which resizes images and embedded objects too, not just text. It's important to know the keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl - to zoom out, Ctrl + to zoom in and Ctrl 0 to go back to the normal view.


* autoscroll by middle-clicking on a page and indicating the direction


* profiles are a great way to separate Chrome's settings in different categories: you could create a work profile with its own homepage, bookmarks and browsing history and profile for your personal projects. The great thing about Chrome is that you don't have to close the browser to change your profile: just open a new window in a separate profile.


* support for Greasemonkey scripts (or user-scripts). To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add -enable-user-scripts in the Target field. For now, you'll need to place the scripts in c:\scripts, but the location will change in the next builds.


* other important improvements: updates to WebKit and the V8 JavaScript engine, a better implementation for SafeBrowsing (malware/phishing protection), new code for the HTTP network protocol.

How to get the new version?

1. If you don't have Google Chrome, install it from google.com/chrome
2. Subscribe to the developer preview channel. This is required even if you've previously subscribed to the channel.
3. Wait until the new version is downloaded (you may force the update by opening the "About Google Chrome" dialog).


"The Dev channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail). The Dev channel can be very unstable at times, and new features usually require some manual configuration to be enabled. Still, simply using Dev channel releases is an easy (practically zero-effort) way for anyone to help improve Google Chrome."

If you don't like the new version, you can always downgrade to the most recent stable version by reinstalling Chrome.

Spanish news site Expansión reports that Google plans to launch GrandCentral in Spain. GrandCentral is a service acquired by Google in 2007 and its main purpose is to centralize voice communications. "GrandCentral provides an innovative web-based voice communications platform that helps you manage all your phones and phone numbers through one simple interface. You get a single phone number that forwards to all of your phones, giving you one number for life."

Right now, GrandCentral works only in the US and you need to get an invitation to use it, but Spain is the first candidate for GrandCentral's international expansion. Here's a sightly improved automatic translation from Spanish:

"The company wants to offer international calls via the mobile phone and advanced voicemail, separately from the offers of other mobile operators. Google requires that users subscribe to voicemail, a service provided over the Internet. When a mobile user does not answer the call, the voicemail automatically activates. Once you have subscribed to this service, you can also make international calls through the voicemail number. (...) Google wants to avoid the legal hurdles and the investment required to get a carrier license, a model considered inflexible and incompatible with its approach, always based on open standards."

Apparently, voice calls are free, but they're linked to the voicemail service. The more calls you receive, the more you can call other people for free.

Some related articles:
* Google can be a mobile phone operator in Spain
* GrandCentral comes to Spain

{ Thanks, John K. }

Picasa borrowed a lot from Mac's elegance and simplicity, but it was only available for Windows (and emulated in Linux). Mac users can now finally install a native version of Picasa from picasa.google.com/mac/ and enjoy one of the most easier to use software for photo management.

From the press release:

Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

* A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
* A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes - and repair old photos
* A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
* Smart auto-cropping that guides users on how to zoom in on their subject
* And, auto red-eye removal.

Many of us take pictures so that we can show them to the people we care about. Picasa for Mac integrates seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, which offers features like name tags - the ability for users to automatically organize and share their photos based on the faces in each picture.

If you have a Mac and you manage to install Picasa, tell what you think in the comments.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum and Tony }

Google Mobile Search started to display short text ads in the middle of the search results page. The mobile interface mixes web search results, news, images and local businesses, but Google displays the ads after the list of regular web results. Google separates the ads using a different background, but it's weird to see the ads mixed with search results.

Here's an example for the query [love] as displayed in Opera Mini:


Sergey Brin said in an interview from 2004: "One thing that's important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There's a clear, large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence."

Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who created Gmail, remembers how difficult was to convince people that Gmail has the potential to become successful.

We starting working on Gmail in August (or September?) 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot" it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 (two and a half years after starting work on it), many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users.

Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as "niche", and "not used by real people outside of silicon valley".

Financial Times reports that Gmail has about 100 million users and the growth rate is still significant: "[Gmail] has been gaining ground in the US over the past year, with users growing by more than 40 per cent, compared to 2 per cent for Yahoo and a 7 per cent fall in users of Microsoft's webmail."

Even though the competing mail services improved their offerings and storage is no longer an important differentiator, Gmail still offers an unmatched user experience. After using Gmail, you'll no longer understand why Yahoo Mail places the "Send button" above the message, why Yahoo Mail thinks it's more important to show news and weather information instead of your inbox, why Yahoo Mail still charges for features that are available for free in Gmail, why Hotmail shows a large banner at the top of the page or why you can't auto-forward mail to a non-Hotmail account. Gmail made so many right choices that it's easy to ignore some of its quirks, downtimes or bugs.

As David Pogue said back in 2004, "Even in its current, early state, available only to a few thousand testers, Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself. Gmail is infinitely cleaner, faster, more useful, more efficient, less commercial and less limiting than other Web-based e-mail services."

The perception about Gmail changed a lot over the years, even though Gmail didn't remove controversial features like contextual ads or conversations. From the paranoid "Google reads your mail" or the cool factor of having a Gmail invite, Gmail became successful by continuing to improve and to exceed people's expectations.

Android is not just an operating system for mobile phones and it's likely that it will be used for netbooks, ultra-portable laptops which started to become popular last year. Daniel Hartmann managed to install Android on an Asus EEEPC 1000H "with nearly all of the necessary hardware you'd want (including graphics, sound and the wireless card for internet) running". It's also interesting to see that some Android code references Asus Eee 701, the first Asus netbook.

VentureBeat speculates that we could see the first netbooks preloaded with Android in less than a year, but Android could become a general-purpose operating system for any kind of devices. Installing apps for your car or TV is not too far fetched.

This post details how to install Android on a netbook, but you shouldn't try it unless you understand the process.

Last month, I mentioned that Gmail links to a new viewer for PDF attachments, powered by Google Docs. It turns out that Google's viewer doesn't work only for PDF files and Google intends to replace the outdated "view as HTML" option with a proper application.

Right now, you can use Google Viewer for PDF, DOC and PPT attachments, but the option is enabled by default only for PDF files. Here's to open Word documents and PowerPoint presentations in Google Viewer:

1. Find an email that includes a DOC or PPT attachment, for example by searching for [has:attachment filename:doc OR filename:ppt].

2. Click on "view as HTML" next to the attachement:


3. Edit the URL by replacing view=att with view=gvatt.


4. Open the page.


You'll be redirected to a page that has the following address:
http://docs.google.com/gview?attid=0.X&thid=THREADID&a=v
(X is the number of the attachment, while THREADID is a value that identifies a Gmail thread).

Google Viewer automatically generates images for each page of your document, you can zoom in/out, there's a basic search feature and you can select text.

Why would you choose this instead of opening the attachment in Google Docs? It loads faster, the document doesn't clutter your Google Docs dashboard and it looks much better. The viewer doesn't inherit any limitation from Google Docs: it includes pagination and it uses the original fonts and layout settings.

Secunia is a respected security service provider that tracks vulnerabilities in more than 20,000 applications and operating systems. To find information about the latest vulnerabilities, you could subscribe to Secunia's mailing lists, but if you want to know whether there are known security issues for the software installed in your computer, install Secunia Personal Security Inspector.

The Windows application scans your computer and it lists the insecure programs, information about vulnerabilities and links to the patches. In most cases, Secunia provides direct links to the latest updates, so they are easy to download and install. To find more information about security problems and to list all the software from your computer that needs to be updated, switch to the advanced interface.


Secunia collected data from 20,000 users of the software and found at least one vulnerability in 98.09% of the cases. "By insecure program it is understood, that there is a newer version of the program available from the vendor that corrects one or more vulnerabilities, but the user has yet to install the secure version. A vulnerability in a program can be exploited by hackers to anything from compromising a PC, to automatically install trojans/viruses, to sniff out private information (passwords, credit cards information, etc)."

Not all applications include auto-update and users have to manually update to the latest versions. Google is one of the companies that thinks it's important to update software without any user intervention, that's why most Google software has an auto-update feature or is integrated with Google Update.

Secunia's software focuses on updates that solve security problems. More comprehensive solutions for updating your software include UpdateStar, FileHippo Update Checker and Appget, but none of them is very reliable.

"Every so often, people ask me why they should upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, the newest version of the venerable Microsoft web browser. They're happy with Internet Explorer 6—it does what they want it to do and they're comfortable using it. Some are nervous about upgrading because they feel they don't have time to learn a new way of doing things. Others believe that because they only use their computers to check their e‑mail and visit "safe" sites, they don't need to upgrade. (...) For me, the most compelling reason to upgrade is the improved security. The Internet of today is not the Internet of five years ago. There are dangers that simply didn't exist back in 2001, when Internet Explorer 6 was released to the world." (Sandi Hardmeier, Microsoft MVP)

According to HitsLink, Internet Explorer lost about 8% of market share to Firefox and Safari in 2008 and IE6's market share decreased from 32% in January to 20% in December.


There's a big opportunity to provide an alternative to IE6 users and many websites recommend users to update their browsers for a better experience. For example, Gmail showed a message which informed users that Firefox and Chrome load Gmail twice as fast as IE6. "Browsers are getting faster and better at running web applications like Google Mail that use browser technology to its limits. In order to get the best experience possible and make Google Mail run an average of twice as fast, we suggest that you upgrade your browser to one of the fastest Google Mail supported browsers that work on Windows," says a Gmail help page.


Internet Explorer 6 users miss the most important Gmail features launched in 2008: themes and Gmail Labs, while the new version of Gmail has been launched for IE6 in September 2008.

"The newest version of Gmail pushes modern browser technology to the limit, so initially we weren't able to make it available to those of you who use IE6. Because it was released way back in 2001, IE6 wasn't able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals," explained Gmail's team in September. Microsoft released an updated for IE's JavaScript engine and Google simplified the interface to make it work in Internet Explorer 6.

Google uses this opportunity to promote its browser and it also links to Firefox. Some suggest that Google is "playing favorites" by not including Internet Explorer 7 in the list of alternatives, but JavaScript benchmarks clearly show that Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera (and many other browsers) are much faster than IE. Hand-picking Firefox and Chrome is certainly debatable, but Opera is not fully supported by Gmail and Safari's Windows version is not very good.

As Matt Cutts says, "Chrome has already encouraged lots more people (both browser makers and website owners) to pay attention to things like browser speed, overall user experience, and cross-platform/validated HTML code that works on most browsers". Firefox attracted Internet Explorer by offering better security, maybe it's time to make performance a good reason to switch.

Top 10 reasons to switch from Internet Explorer 6:
1. Switch to a more secure browser.
2. Get a faster browser.
3. Web pages will look better.
4. Use a browser that it's not closely integrated with your operating system.
5. Try a browser that has native support for Ajax.
6. Open less windows by using tabs.
7. Get a search box without installing toolbars.
8. Get anti-phishing protection.
9. Web developers will thank you.
10. If IE6 is no longer a popular browser, developers will spend more time releasing new features.