Hacking for Christ

It Makes You Want To Weep...

On PayPal, with my URL bar looking like this:

I saw a banner ad for "Can You Spot Phishing?". Intrigued, I clicked it and, after a short interstitial screen, ended up with my URL bar looking like this:

<facepalm> Which country is SG? Why doesn't that match the ".co.uk" TLD? And is PayPal, Inc. the same company as PayPal Pte Ltd? And surely anyone could register a "paypal-marketing" domain?

Can I spot phishing? Well, my current well-tuned phishing detector is already flashing orange...

Mobile Browsing UX

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes browsing the web on the new touchscreen Blackberry Storm.

The rendering was passable but from a UI perspective, it was the most painful browsing session I've ever had the misfortune to experience. The phone seemed to interpret every action I made as requiring it to do the thing I was least likely to want. I have a reasonably high threshold for poor usability (and several shipping apps on my current Android phone fall into that category) when I need to get something done but after only a few minutes I was close to tearing my hair out. I'm so glad we have Top Men working on mobile browsing UI. I can't wait to get Fennec on my Android phone...

Committing Rules and Responsibilities

I hereby declare version 1 of "Committing Rules and Responsibilities", a document which attempts to draw together in one place all the rules which are common to the core product trees. If you check in to one or more of those trees, please make sure you are familiar with it - and let me know if you think it's wrong or incomplete.

Now it's done, we will try and use it and other reorganizations to simplify the top of the tinderboxes.

CVS Poetry (Part 5)

It's been 18 months in the making, and now here it is - the newest piece of CVS checkin comment poetry. It's "I Wish I Could Believe" by Steve Turner, a thought-provoking commentary on some things I have heard people say. Have you ever said any of them?

Money and User Experience

I want to briefly draw to wider attention a very insightful thing that Pejman Pour-Moezzi, one of the Mozilla interns, said during his show-and-tell presentation at the end of the weekly Mozilla Status Update broadcast on Air Mozilla (starting 28:50 in). It went something like this:

"Google, Apple and Microsoft provide good user experience as a means to the end of making money. Mozilla uses money as the means to the end of giving people a good user experience."

I think some variant of this should be a key part of our explanations to our friends about why and how Mozilla is different.