spugbrap’s blog

Hey, check it out! The funny Gmail Web Clips phenomenon I blogged about a couple years ago was the subject of a recent entry in the Official Gmail Blog.

Yes, Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google, went through the same steps I did, when I first saw “Spam Hashbrown Bake” at the top of my gmail window:

1. disbelief: Is that really a context-sensitive ad for Spam-related products, appearing at the top of my Spam folder view? Maybe it’s just a funny coincidence.

2. confirmation: [refresh page a couple times] Hey, it’s another recipe involving Spam, and another one! There’s something funny going on here!

3. research: Ms. Schneider one-upped me on this one. When I encountered this Spam folder Easter egg, all I had available to me was the Gmail help system (which seemed to imply that this context-sensitive Web Clip thing should not be happening). She has the benefit of being a Google insider, so she actually went and talked with a Gmail Product Manager about it.

Here’s what Ms. Schneider found out, regarding the origin of the Spam recipe Web Clips:

At first I was told that these recipes “were placed there by elves when we weren’t looking” (real cute), but Keith, one of Gmail’s Product Managers, eventually divulged the real story. Turns out that when they came up with the idea for Web Clips, they didn’t think it made sense to show these RSS feeds and ads in the spam folder. After all, these clips should be useful and fun, but spam (of the email variety) is neither of these things. Not knowing what to put here, Keith searched for “spam recipes” and decided to make a feed out of the results. As he said, “it was just one of those late night ideas” — probably a consequence of too many said [sic] energy drinks.

One thing that she may not have noticed, though, is that a similar behavior occurs when viewing your Trash folder in Gmail. guess she didn’t notice (or just didn’t mention) that the Trash folder also has trash-related Web Clips (see screenshot in my original blog entry about this).

It was nice to finally read an explanation about this mysterious Gmail behavior, after all this time. I didn’t even have to seek out the explanation–it came to me in a feed! :)

This has been going on for way too long. It definitely started after Google released the new interface for gmail, but it didn’t happen immediately. Now, I’m not blaming Firefox, and I’m not blaming Google. I’m 95% certain that it’s the result of conflicts between one or more of my extensions. I’m always changing up my extensive (hehe) lineup of extensions, and many of those extensions dramatically impact the way the browser works. I love web development extensions, debugging tools, power toys, etc.

Thankfully, I recently read an entry on Mishoo’s blog, which started out describing some [presumably completely unrelated] Firefox performance issues, and ended with a short, positive review of Safari. I decided to give it a try, for curiosity’s sake. I tried Safari when the Windows version was first released, and I remember not being impressed, to say the least. I don’t remember what I didn’t like, but I do remember uninstalling it immediately, so it must have been pretty bad. I don’t use Opera every day, but I do respect it enough to keep it installed and reasonably up-to-date.

Anyways, I tried the newest version of Safari, version 3.0.4, and was pretty impressed. The interface was attractive, simple, and fairly intuitive. Just what one might expect from Apple, I guess. I’m not a big Apple fan; I do not own an iPod or an iPhone, I don’t use iTunes, and have never owned a Mac. But even I know that Apple has a reputation for attractive, simple, and intuitive products.

Using Safari hardly felt different from using Firefox, to me. Almost all I do miss my Firefox extensions, though, and Safari’s Bookmarks menu leaves a lot to be desired. But it is fast, and I almost all the websites I’ve been to have looked and acted just fine. Best of all, it doesn’t crash when I close gmail!

So, where I had been using Firefox for 99% of my personal browsing and Internet Explorer for 1%, I now find myself splitting that 99% pretty equally between Safari and Firefox (and IE for 1%, since some sites just demand it).

One of these days I’ll probably try running Firefox in Safe Mode, and if closing gmail doesn’t crash it, I’ll start disabling one extension after another, until I find the culprit. For now, though, I’m content using Safari part of the time.

I love the Firebug extension for Firefox. It’s one of those few extensions that I actually use every day. I raved about it when I first found out about it, last year, and I still love it now.

I’ve been noticing that Gmail has been pretty slow, recently, but I assumed it was just related to their recent rollout of IMAP support, or their recent UI improvements.

Then, this morning, I saw this message at the top of my Gmail page (image has been scaled to fit blog content area width):

The “Fix this” link took me to a Gmail Help page: Firebug can make Gmail slow

Google offers two suggestions:
- just disable Firebug for mail.google.com
OR
- turn off XMLHttpRequest logging and network monitoring

A little while later, I was reading Ben Simon’s blog, and saw that he ran into the slow Gmail problem a couple days ago, as well. It appears that he figured out that Firebug was the culprit, even before Google started showing the warning message that I saw. Ben’s solution was simple:

A quick right mouse click on the green checkmark in the bottom right hand corner of my browser, and selecting Disable Firebug is all it took to get reclaim my browsing speed.

I can’t decide which solution I prefer–Gmail’s selective-disabling approaches or Ben’s total-disabling of Firebug. At first, I thought disabling Firebug completely was just crazy talk. But then I started thinking about it, and realized that it would probably speed up my web browsing in general. I could just enable Firebug on those specific occasions when I’m actively debugging webapps.

But, I often find myself using Firebug on sites that I did not specifically go to for debugging purposes, and it’s nice to have Firebug already loaded and ready to let me hack away. So, I think I’ll start with Google’s first suggestion, and try disabling it specifically for the gmail site. While I’m at it, I think I will disable Firebug on iGoogle, too, since it seems to be very Javascript-intensive.

**Update**:
I just noticed that Firebug lets you specifically set which sites you DO want to use it on, as well as the ones you DO NOT want to use it on. Just right click the little green check mark in the bottom right corner of your browser window, and select ‘Allowed Sites’. That pops up a little dialog, which lets you specify whether to Allow or Block Firebug for each site in the list. Neat.

When looking through my gmail Spam folder today, I saw several titles that stood out from the rest. About two thirds of them were about online pharmacies selling cheap Cialis. The rest were mostly about debt reduction; cheap replica watches; and people pretending to be someone I know, wishing to contact me. Some even included my email username in the title, which caught my eye. But, I still didn’t need their Cialis, so I didn’t click on them.

A few others actually made me click for a closer look–just for curiosity’s sake–because they used technical terms. Before deleting them, I decided they deserved publishing, because this was a relatively clever way to send spam to a geek. Here they are:

• Output iterators do not have a value type, because it is impossible to obtain a value from an output iterator but only to write a value through it.
• To launch and access an out-of-process server across the network in a COM application, both client and server must fulfill certain security requirements.
• The statistical engine makes use of the kernel-level packet filter to efficiently classify the incoming packet.

The messages, themselves, were actually another ad for cheap Cialis; an “insider” stock tip; and a collection of various mostly-geeky sentences–clearly collected from many different sources–and randomly strung together. The latter was somewhat amusing to read, so I’m including it here:

Paths in this manual may not reflect those compiled into httpd. A string representing the culture name.
Oh, wake up, Arthur. He knew there were heavy catapults there, and some fast boats in the island harbor.
Broken Cross Disk Manager 3. It will never be found, because I could never possibly describe where it is and how to find it.
Then the Ghost Not component kicked in, and the map got chopped up and stuck together again with the dark bits now completely missing.
Is especially effective in recovering digital images in JPEG format.
Utilities for Windows 95. Checked links to see if they work, and added an article for each red (unlinked) link.
The texture of his writing as a whole is undistinguished, at times fumbling. Chris looks askance at him.
There are no such rules. Look, pretend you’re injured real early.
Spanish Reversers might care to download the entire WKT Site (837k).
The 10Base-T Ethernet system uses this approach.
One advantage of fighting monsters was not having to worry about identification and who-goes-there games. LTM has been improved and simplified. It does not explain how to break into the E911 system. You may go no further.
You can normally use these modems by loading the program under DOS and doing a warm boot. I want you to listen to it.
For information on this, please see. Changes to Support Conditional Compilation Based on Build Environment.

Oh, and that last one also had an image attached, which was, of course, another advertisement for cheap Cialis from some overseas pharmacy. :)

I was looking through my Gmail Spam folder today, as I do once in a while, to make sure nothing is in there that doesn’t belong. Among the actual spam, there were a couple of legitimate messages (nothing important though), including the official Google Earth newsletter (Yes, Google automatically marked one of its own newsletters as spam. I went ahead and clicked “Not Spam” on that one, since Google Earth is a cool program), and the MySpace newsletter.

My focus today is on the latter. After taking one look at it, I agreed with Gmail’s determination that the damn thing was spam. It consisted almost entirely of images (49 IMG tags!)! None of the images had alt tags, and 26 of them were linked to myspace pages (the rest were spacers/decoration).

It also included one little line of text at the very bottom:

Unable to view this newsletter? Click here to view the MySpace Newsletter profile page! :)

Gmail does not display images in messages marked as Spam, so what I saw was 3 browser-window pages of image placeholders. On the left side of this post, you can see 3 screenshots of the message, scrolled one page at a time. The screenshots are linked to their full-size versions, but I think the miniature versions and my explanation make it clear enough: This is utter garbage!

I wasn’t even the slightest bit compelled to view the images, or to click the link at the very bottom to view it on their website. Gmail was right to mark this crap as Spam!