Google's New Favicon

I noticed a while ago that Google changed its favicon on most of its pages (that little icon that shows up to the left of the URL in the address bar and in the bookmarks list if you bookmark the page), but I didn't know why until a few minutes ago. It used to look like this:



but now it looks like this:



So, you ask, why did they change the icon? I thought it was fine before. Apparently, their reason was that they wanted icons that "would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices." Okay, fair enough. But was all this really necessary?



Stop screwing around with all these little 16 by 16 pixel images: just pick one that you like and move on to bigger and better things, Google!

Firefox 3 Download Day

Mozilla will soon be releasing version 3 of their award-winning web browser, Firefox. Although the official release date has not been published yet, that day will be "Download Day", in which Mozilla wants to set a world record for most software downloaded in 24 hours. They also have a pledge button at the download day page, for people to pledge that they will download Firefox 3 when it is released. When you enter your email address with your pledge, they'll let you know when version 3 is released so you can be sure not to miss Download Day!

In the spirit of Download Day, I will now post this button at the bottom of my sidebar on the right.

Gmail Labs

Google introduced a new feature for Gmail today called Gmail Labs. It's not really a feature in the traditional sense; instead, it's a new area for Gmail engineers to put their own experimental add-ons for Gmail, which haven't gone through design reviews, product analysis or thorough testing, and the Gmail team is still deciding whether to introduce them as official features. In Gmail under the settings, there is now a new Labs tab, where you can enable or disable the experimental features (by default they're all disabled). The ones that get a lot of usage may eventually be implemented as real Gmail features, and of course there is a feedback link for each one.

Right now there are 13 experimental features, only 4 of which I have enabled (Quick Links, Superstars, Signature Tweaks and of course, Old Snakey -- that game is so addictive!).

Read more about Gmail Labs at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-gmail-labs.html