It's time for web developers to break out the champagne

It is somewhat amusing to realize that Google is not playing the same game as the other browser vendors. Its incentives are very different, and that makes all the difference. Google is not directly interested in increasing adoption of Chrome; it actually benefits from increased use of the web on any browser. Sundar Pichai, the Google VP in charge of Chrome, has said as much:

"We were all very clear that if the outcome was that somehow Mozilla [Firefox] lost share to Google [Chrome], and everything else remained the same, internally, we would have been seen as having failed," Mr. Pichai says.

So, journalists who are fixated on market share, like JR Raphael of PC World (not to pick on him), are missing the point:

Can Chrome Shake Up the Browser Market? ... As it stands now, Chrome holds about 3 percent of the global browsing market ... Google's hope ... is to double that share by next September—then triple it by 2011.

Chrome has already shaken up the browser market. In the year that Chrome has been out, speed has become one of the primary selling points for every major browser. The performance of every browser (and hence, every web app) has improved dramatically, and more improvements are in the pipeline. That fact—not Chrome's who-even-cares percentage market share—is the story of this year.

And the folks at Google are probably pretty happy with that. If people use a fast browser and load more web pages and use more Google products and see more advertisements, who cares if it says "Firefox" or "Chrome" in the title bar? Google doesn't.

Hell, who cares if it says "Internet Explorer"? Google doesn't. Which brings me to Chrome Frame, a plugin that runs a Chrome renderer in IE:

I wept tears of joy when I first saw this. For comparison, see IE8's native rendering of Acid3.

The Chrome renderer is activated on an opt-in basis from web developers, using a special META tag.

It remains to be seen how all this will pan out, but this is a very clever move on Google's part. It changes the economics both for IT departments and for developers:

  • Many if not most IE users are unwilling or unable to change their browser for legacy/lockdown reasons; I suspect that is the most important reason why Firefox, after all these years, is only at around 23% market share. It's not that IT departments are inherently against installing new software. They'd love to be able to deploy spiffy HTML5 apps too. But their hands are tied because they must make sure existing apps keep working. Now that they can use HTML5 apps without breaking any legacy apps, they may be a lot more open to deploying Chrome Frame than to changing browsers entirely.
  • Installing a plugin is a lot easier for end users than installing a new browser. In fact, it's a routine enough operation that I suspect many web developers will soon choose to take the Chrome Frame route rather than continue to expend time, money, blood, sweat, and tears working on hacks for native IE support. When users are presented with a dialog saying "In order to use This App You Really Want you must install the mumble mumble plugin," most of them will do it. (Flash has upwards of 90% market penetration!)

Because it was willing to sneak in the side door, ship as a plugin, and strip the chrome from Chrome, Google may be the first to have a real shot at bringing fast and standards-compliant browsing to a majority of web users.

New external Thinkpad keyboard

I ordered one of the new external Thinkpad keyboards and have been using it for a few days now.

Specs in brief: USB, no touchpad, no numpad, feels exactly like a Thinkpad T400s keyboard, and the price is right ($60).

For my own purposes, the design decisions that Lenovo made here are pretty much spot-on. This thing is fantastic; in particular:

  • TrackPoint scrolling on my desktop machine! No exaggeration, this alone is worth the price. Scrolling any other way is just… uncivilized. I look forward to using the mouse a lot less.
  • I was at first skeptical of Lenovo's decision to make a small keyboard, but I think it really turned out well:
    1. It significantly reduces the distance I have to reach to press keys like PgUp, PgDn, and the arrow keys. Alas, there are still a bunch of apps that have the poor sense to bind commonly used commands to keys like Ctrl+PgDn. I'm looking at you, web browsers. (If you wish, read more ranting about poorly chosen keyboard shortcuts.)
    2. I don't use the numpad often enough to justify having one.
    3. I like having the free desk space. And not having to reach as far for the mouse when I want to use it.
  • I like how thin the keyboard is (it's sort of wedge-shaped, and only about half an inch thick at the home row). At first I didn't think this would matter, but I definitely end up contorting my wrists much less than with my old keyboard.

And, to boot, it looks very classy— the picture above doesn't really do it justice.

Thinkpad keyboards do have some quirks (e.g. Fn key placement). I don't mind these anymore, but I know some people do. So perhaps the most useful thing that I can say in this review is that there are no surprises, as far as I can tell. If you've used a Thinkpad, you probably already know whether you want one of these Thinkpad keyboards.

The only reservation I have is that the keys seem to be spaced a little further apart than I'm used to (having become acclimated to the X series keyboards). I'm presuming that this is something I'll get used to over time, so I'm not worrying yet.

Kudos to David Hill and his team for a job well done.

ThinkPad Keyboard at the Lenovo Store

Additional notes on GNU/Linux support:

  • All the special keys (that I tried, anyway— volume, mute, and media player control) work out of the box on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.04.
  • TrackPoint scrolling works, too. Follow the instructions here, except in mouse-wheel.fdi, use "Lite-On Technology Corp. ThinkPad USB Keyboard with TrackPoint" instead of "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint". (In general, it looks like you can figure out the right info.product string to use by running xinput list and finding the right device from the list.)

Getting more "flow" from your window manager

Working on a Thinkpad keyboard is pure bliss. The Trackpoint lets me point (and scroll!) without moving my wrists; within Emacs/screen, even it is superfluous. Being able to immediately act on one's intentions is an important factor in attaining a state of flow, and there is a huge psychological difference between being able to do something "now" and "wait, hang on for 500ms so I can reach the touchpad." When I'm really in the zone, I can actually notice my concentration dissipating if I need to reach for the arrow keys, or worse, the mouse or touchpad (this is hard to explain to people who don't use Emacs or Vim!).

But window managers are still awful

Yet, even if I'm using Emacs and/or a web browser 90% of the time, and even supposing they left nothing to be desired, there's another program I have to interact with near 100% of the time: the window manager.

It's a shame, but few of the usability lessons we learned over the years made it to any of the common window managers— Windows, Mac, or Metacity. The window manager acts an intermediary sitting between the user and every single app, but WM functions are often marginalized and too hard to activate. This is especially unfortunate, because now that huge monitors are commonplace, we actually need better WMs to help us effectively use that screen space— maximize and minimize alone don't cut it anymore! (Jeff Atwood pointed this out all the way back in 2007.)

How can we do better? Well, what does "better" even mean? Here are the assumptions I'm operating under, about what kinds of operations are easy or hard to perform:

  • "Reaching is hard": reaching touch-typeable keys is easier than reaching the function keys (F1 … F12), the arrow keys, or the numpad.
  • "Pointing is hard": typing a small number of keystrokes is easier than using the mouse (or any other pointing device).
  • "Fitts's law": pointing at a large target with the mouse (e.g. a window) is easier than pointing at a small target (e.g. an icon, menu, button, border, or title bar).

You may be able to see where the problems are. Windows and Metacity map a bunch of window management functions to far-away placed keys like Alt+F4 and Alt+F10. Mac OS has better bindings for some functions, but doesn't map Maximize at all by default, instead providing access via itty-bitty buttons on each window. On both Windows and Mac OS, the fastest way to move (or resize) a window is by dragging it by its title bar (or resize handle). It doesn't get any worse than that.

Dragging resize handles… seriously? Fitts's law, anyone? This is nonsense.

This is the main reason that I can only use Windows or Mac OS for about 30 seconds before my blood pressure starts to go up. They are not usable. Having to fish around with the pointer every time you want to do something is also a great way to develop RSI.

Building a better WM

I've played around with a few scattered ideas with the goal of making a better WM for myself. I've implemented these in my Openbox config, although any reasonably configurable WM will do.

But, I would like to stress here, the details are unimportant. If you can find the parts of your workflow that are unnecessarily slow, and eliminate them, more power to you.

1. Manage windows and workspaces with shortcuts that don't require function keys or arrow keys. For example, Alt+F10 (maximize a window) and Ctrl+Alt+LeftArrow (switch workspaces) are out. In my setup they are replaced by Win+1 and Win+j, respectively.

2. Move and resize windows with alt-dragging (actually, Win-key dragging). When you want to move or resize the window, the entire window is your drag target. No need to aim for the title bar, or the resize handle, or the window border. Fitts's law, suckers.

To move windows: point at the window, hold down Win, and drag with the left mouse button. To resize windows: point at the window anywhere near the corner you want to move, hold down Win, and drag with the right mouse button.

Kudos to Metacity (and most other X WMs) for shipping with something similar by default.

3. Arrange windows using the keyboard.

It took me the longest time to realize that this was something that would actually be useful.

Most people only have a couple of common ways they like to arrange windows on the screen— for example, one window filling the entire screen, or two half-width windows side by side. What this means is that in the common case, you are really not asking for windows to be placed at specific pixel positions on your screen. Hence, the mouse isn't actually needed.

I use a couple of different window management "idioms," which are probably best illustrated by example:

  • Win+s i j k RET, for example expands the current window until it meets the nearest edge to the north, west, and south. Before and after:

    Win+s activates window-expanding and i, j, k, and l indicate north, west, south, and east, respectively.

  • Win+s Win+s means "expand the current window as much as possible without covering anything else," which seems like a common thing to want. Before and after:

    Openbox's smart window placement policy attempts to place a second window within the space left by the first one. So a quick Win+s Win+s makes a second window neatly fill up all the space left unused by the first one!

    For more complex arrangements, it's very fast to drag a window to an approximate location (see alt-dragging, above), then use Win+s Win+s to make it neatly fill the available space.

  • Win+w is analagous to Win+s except that it moves a window to the nearest edge to the north/west/south/east instead of resizing it.

An alternative strategy is to bind keys to move windows to a small number of fixed "slots," such as the two halves of a screen. Jeff Atwood mentions this strategy and its implementation in WinSplit Revolution.

4. Configure single-key shortcuts for launching common apps. For example, Win+b for a web browser. Not always a window-manager responsibility, but it can really streamline one's work.

Conclusion

Although I am still experimenting with some aspects of this setup, I am fairly happy with it. For better or for worse it does feel a lot like a "normal" window manager, just one that is highly streamlined (and doesn't give me hypertension). I'd be curious to see what additional improvements can be gained by giving up some of the associated flexibility and moving to a more restrictive model (e.g. something like a tiling WM).

For the curious, I've posted Openbox configuration recipes for tips 2 and 3 here.