Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

Update: Yahoo mail with new layout renders this obsolete. The newer Yahoo mail beta (neo) really is a faster UI. However, The large header with room that is unused is a let down.  This one time, it appears that, Yahoo did not take into account the importance of real estate on top of the page, hitting User Experience. Reduce Yahoo mail neo header space for more room by installing SarathOnline's " Spacier Yahoo Neo " userscript below Install YNeo UserScript by SarathOnline Before: After: The user script is fairly simple. You could install it in Firefox as a Greasemonkey script. Or install it on chrome directly. If you are new to UserScripts, follow these instructions to install them on your browser. Be assured, it has no malicious code. All it does is install a correcting css to the document. The css file is located here .  And the script itself. (function(){ var d=document,sid='__sar__yneo', fn='http://www.sarathonline.com/dyn/sfs/userscripts/y...

Want to install a userscript on your browser. Go no further. Here are simple instructions and caveats for installing Userscripts in Firefox, Opera, Chrome. If you want to author your own scripts, here is a beginner's tutorial .

IE9 has some really cool tech upgrades .Here are a few errant UI features that makes IE9 less than perfect. It almost gives the impression that the UI engineers did not do a stellar job. or IE9 UI is a half baked cake.

Apparently, the recent long firefox context menu bug posted a few days ago, is not a niche bug after all. This looks like a consistent bug that happens to me on Windows XP. The Context menu is supposed to change with *context* invoked on. Looks like the logic around making it intelligent, is kind of buggy. I was able to reproduce the long menu bug on other websites, at random. However, one thing I was able to consistently reporduce is the inablilty to get context menu for text selection. See the difference in the menu. Firefox 3.6 Firefox 4.0b6

Obviously, this is just a bug. It happened only once. Not reproducible. Running Firefox 4.05 beta. On Windows XP. With Firefox 4, Canvas, Video Audio etc are all baked in. The list looks like the menu options are the exaustive options of all features on.The page however, upon refresh, does not show the same context menu. Click the Image to enlarge.

Firefox Panorama has a unique way of organizing tabs into groups so that you can work with a loot of tabs (really lot of them). While the Side Tabs experiment is totally disjunct concept, The effective use of screen real estate is key measure in both. With just screen real estate , its still Panorama that wins the battle. Side Tabs seems turned out to be a sore experiment. For one thing, it may be designed only for netbooks. There are other considerations for developers perspective. Many a time, the height is considered variable. The width, however is counted to be under standard 800, 1024, 1600 etc, those of the video resolutions. Many fixed layouts are drafted to work on these width numbers. Free flows however do not have this issue. Now, having Side tabs in picture, it creates two sets of fixed layouts to work with. Firefox Panorama not only tackles width issue in question, also provides a organising benefit. So Which one is it? Most probably Chrome will eventually mimic Pan...