Google's Experimental Black Navigation Bar

A while ago, I spotted a black navigation bar in a Google page and wondered if it's a bug or a new Google experiment. It turns out that it's yet another experiment.

At least three readers of this blog saw the black navigation bar on Google's homepage today.



YouTube also tests a black player, so the two experiments could be connected.

Update: A lot of people see the new design, so it's hard to say if it's a test or a gradual roll-out. If you clear Google's cookies, do you still see the black bar?

{ Thanks, David, Francesc and Don. }

Enable Google Toolbar in Firefox 5

If you've installed Firefox 5 and noticed that Google Toolbar wasn't updated to support the new Firefox release, there's a simple way to enable the extension: install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter. "After installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, your incompatible extensions will become enabled for you to test whether they still work with the version of Firefox or Thunderbird that you're using." This should only be a temporary solution until Google Toolbar and other extensions update their compatibility list.



Google Toolbar 7 works well in Firefox 5, especially considering that the new Firefox version didn't make too many important extension-related changes.

Firefox's faster release cycle, inspired by Google Chrome, has an important downside: extension developers need to update their extensions more frequently and update the list of Firefox versions that are supported. Mozilla alleviated this problem by automatically marking almost 4,000 extensions as compatible with Firefox 5, but Google Toolbar is not hosted by Mozilla and it's downloaded from Google's servers.

YouTube Tests a Black Player

A few readers spotted a new YouTube player with a redesigned control bar that uses a black background. The current control bar doesn't stand out so that you can focus on the video you are watching.


A YouTube user says that he "would really appreciate a way to go back to the normal player, with its more obvious progress bar and less ugly/hyperactive popup controls". I really like the bigger pause button, but YouTube should also change the action buttons below the player to better integrate in the new design.

{ Thanks, Josh and Jon. }

How to Use Google Music on an iPad or iPhone

I mentioned in a previous post that you can use Google Music Beta on an iPad and even on an iPhone or iPod Touch, but some users complained that it didn't work for them. Google Music loads well, but after clicking the "play" button nothing happens.

Here's a trick to make Google Music work every time: start playing a song, pause and play again. It's unfortunate that you have to use a workaround, but Google Music doesn't officially support Safari for iOS. The system requirements page says that it only supports "Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7 and above" and that you need Adobe Flash.


It's interesting that this trick lets you play music on more than one device simultaneously. For example, I was able to play music on my iPad and iPhone at the same time, even if Google says that "music from your library cannot be played simultaneously on more than one device". The unofficial non-Flash interface is an unexpected loophole.

A Chrome Extension for Google Music

While there's no official extension for Google Music and not even an app in the Chrome Web Store, you can install a really cool third-party extension called "Better Music Beta". The extension adds a button that shows information about the currently playing song, lets you pause the song, go to the next song, add a thumbs up or a thumbs down. There's also a notification that shows up every time the song changes.

My favorite feature is the Last.fm integration: if you enable it, Better Music Beta scrobbles your songs and lets you publicly show that you love a song by clicking the "heart" icon.

The downside is that you still have to open Google Music in a tab, since the music stops playing if you close the tab. Converting the extension into a "background app" would solve this problem.


Google Music requires an invitation and it's supposed to be US-only, but it works even if you're not in the US. Google only checks your location when you request an invitation and you can always use a US proxy for this one-time action. Another interesting thing is that, even though Google Music lists Flash as a requirement, the service works pretty well on an iPad.

Box.net Integrates with Google Docs

Box.net, a popular online storage service, added an option that allows its users to create and edit documents and spreadsheets using Google Docs, but without leaving Box.net. The files are stored by Box.net, but they can be edited using the regular Google Docs interface.



"Beginning today, Box's 6 million users can easily create and collaborate on Google Docs and Spreadsheets from within Box, as well as edit the existing 50M+ Word and Excel files already stored on our platform. Google Docs enable entirely new forms of collaboration – like concurrent editing – that are impossible within desktop applications, and now these capabilities are easily available to Box users. We believe that the combination of Google Docs' collaborative editing and Box's content management will transform the way people work," suggests Box's blog.

The integration has a lot of quirks: Google Docs still displays the navigational bar and some options that only makes sense for Google's services. When you edit a document from Box.net, the file is temporarily added to the Google Docs list, but it's quickly removed after the editing window is closed. At some point, Google Docs will also add support for third-party apps, so it will be interesting to see if this feature will be better implemented.

{ via Read Write Web }

Chrome 14 Blocks Insecure JavaScript

Chrome 14, only available in the Dev and Canary channels right now, adds a security feature that could affect a lot of sites. If you're visiting an SSL site that loads some scripts using unencrypted connections, Chrome will refuse to load the scripts.

When a website is secured via HTTPS, the web site designer must also ensure that all of the scripts used by the page will be delivered in the same secure manner as the main page itself. The same requirements also apply to the plugins and external CSS stylesheets used by the page, as these have the same considerations as javascript. When this is not the case (sometimes called a 'mixed script' situation), visitors to the site run the risk that attackers can interfere with the website and change the script so as to serve their own purposes.

Traditionally, browsers have run the mixed script, genuine or not, and notified you after-the-fact by a broken lock icon, a dialog box, or a red https:// in the location bar (in the case of Google Chrome). The problem with this approach is that by the time the script has run, it is already too late, because the script has had access to all of the data on the page. Google Chrome now protects you by refusing up-front to run any script on a secure page unless it is also being delivered over HTTPS.

You can bypass this feature by clicking "Load anyway" in the infobar displayed at the top of the page, but Chrome doesn't remember your preference. Unfortunately, you can't whitelist a domain or a subdomain, so you'll have to click "Load anyway" and wait until the page is reloaded. There's a command-line flag that lets you disable this feature: --allow-running-insecure-content, but Google says that it should only be used by "users and admins who have internal applications without immediate fixes for these errors".

Chrome has recently added many other security features, including a function for generating strong random numbers, a way to force HTTPS for any domain you want, an initial implementation of Content Security Policy that helps protect against Cross Site Scripting and a more secure Gmail that uses HTTPS for all connections, even when you type "gmail.com" in the address bar.

Mobile Gmail Adds "Pull Down to Refresh"

Gmail's mobile Web app for iOS added a feature first available in Tweetie, which is now the official Twitter client for iPhone and iPad. Instead of clicking a button to refresh the list of messages, you simply pull down the list and wait to see the new messages. It's a really intuitive way to update a list and many mobile apps started to use it.


"One thing that's cool about Tweetie 2 is the fresh paradigm to refreshing the contents of a table view. Up until now we had been looking for space to mount a reload button on, sometimes having to resort to adding an extra tool bar for just one view so that you can have enough space. Now if you have a tableview that it sorted reverse chronologically, then you have a natural urge to make new items appear at the top by pulling down the table with extra force," suggested Oliver Drobnik back in 2009, when Tweetie added this feature, which is now available in mobile Gmail.

Google Translate Supports 5 Indic Languages

Google Translate has improved a lot in the past 3 years and it's now the most powerful machine translation service that's available for free. Google Translate is the only machine translation service which supports languages that have less than one million speakers (Maltese, Welsh) and languages that are underrepresented on the Web (Galician).

Google added 5 new languages to Google Translate and they're some of the most popular languages in the world, with more than 600 million speakers: Bengali (300 million speakers), Gujarati (46 million), Kannada (51 million), Tamil (65 million), Telugu (130 million).

"Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages. (...) You can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of our more mature languages—like Spanish or Chinese — which have much more of the web content that powers our statistical machine translation approach. (...) Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we've enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards," informs Google.


Google Translate now supports 63 languages and 9 of the 10 languages that have more than 100 million native speakers. The only missing language is Punjabi.

Google's New Currency Converter

Google updated the OneBox for currency conversion. Until recently, when you searched for [1 usd in eur] or [200 gbp to peso], Google displayed the result and that was it. The new OneBox includes a graph for historical exchange rates and an interactive tool that lets you select a different currency from a long list or change the value you want to covert and instantly get the result.




A similar tool is available at Google Finance, but it's more convenient to access it from Google Search and you don't need to search for USDEUR to convert US dollars to euros. For some reason, when you search for [currency converter] from the US, Google tries to be helpful and shows that 1 US dollar = 0.6957 euros.

{ Thanks, Aahan. }