Media & Entertainment

User delights with FireFox

Media & Entertainment, Zeitgeist

I know this is coming a little late in the day especially when FireFox 2.0 Beta has already made an appearance. Actually I had written this long ago, and wanted to make an academic research out of browser comparisons. But since that isn’t anywhere close to happening, here goes.

Top 10 user delights of Mozilla Firefox web browser (in my order of experiencing them):

1. Freedom from virus and spy-ware attacks

This is perhaps the single biggest reason for people wanting to shift from the hitherto ubiquitous Internet Explorer. And it is not only novice users who unwittingly get infested with these viruses and malicious spy programmes, even seasoned net users have become hapless victims and their browsers hijacked.

2. Installation relief – Download size, import bookmarks etc.

Having made up your mind to try out Firefox, you double-check with incredulity that the download size is a mere 4-6 Megabytes. Compare this with your status quo browsers at around 25-50 bloated Megabytes! Moreover one of the bigger inertia factors against changing browsers — existing bookmarks — can be imported very easily.

3. Tabbed browsing

Once you start using Firefox the first feature that catches your eye is tabbed browsing, which allows users to simultaneously open multiple sites within a single application window. Many people feel this is a new feature — which is not true. Tabbed browsing had been introduced by Neoplanet as far back as 1999-2000. However, given 5-6 more years of user-evolution tabbed browsing has become one of the most popular features of Firefox.

4. Open in new window/tab

This is a direct fall-out of the tabbed browsing feature. A very common online trait of information seekers (mostly when you want to check out multiple Google results) is the tendency to right-click and open link in a new window. And without fail the new browser window opens, but on top of the existing window you are working in – disrupting your flow of activities at the page you are on. You necessarily need to click back on the original window to resume and continue. With Firefox, you right-click and open link in a new tab. The new tab opens in the background while you continue your search through other links on the page.

5. Search engines

Over the last few years add-on toolbars from Yahoo, Google and MSN have become popular with users as it saves them the additional step of opening the parent sites in their browsers and then using the search feature. However if your activities involve an equal usage of these three popular searches you end up installing all three in your browser. Not only does that tend to mess with your default settings for home pages and search pages, it also drastically reduces the available screen area. Firefox on the other hand has very smartly used the real estate for menus and carved out a space for the search field along with the address input field. However, what follows next is a much bigger value-add. You can add a number of popular and specialized search engines to this field. For example, I have added Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Answers, Creative Commons, eBay, IMDB, Flickr Tags, Dictionary, Wikipedia. It takes not more than a few seconds to add a new search engine – no restart required!

6. Extensions/plug-ins

Firefox allows you to add on a series of extensions that have been written by the Firefox community. Typically these add-ons are not more than a few to several Kilobytes in size. I have yet to come across an extension that’s in the region of Megabytes in size. Two of my favourite extensions are ‘image zoom’ and ‘blog this’. Whenever Firefox comes across a page where you are missing a plug-in, it effortlessly helps you with downloading and auto-installing the missing plug-in.

7. Download manager

How do downloads work in I.E? You click on the file to be downloaded; a new dialog window opens asking you the location where you would want the file to be downloaded; and then a separate panel opens showing you the status of your download. For multiple files being downloaded simultaneously, multiple download status panels are there, adding to the clutter on your open windows bar. Once the file downloads fully a new dialog box appears letting you open the downloaded file. Sometimes you are not sure where the file has been downloaded, or what all files have you downloaded in the past. In Firefox, all such downloads are streamlined through the download manager, which does all the above activities in a single window, but also shows you the files you have downloaded previously. Additionally it lets you suspend/pause/resume specific downloads.

8. Clearing history selectively

Have you ever been faced with a situation where you have wanted to remove from the address bar history, a few of the recent URLs you have visited? Perhaps the only way available was clearing out the browser history. But with that all the other addresses would also be cleared out. Here again Firefox adds value by removing from the address bar as well, web addresses of the sites you remove from the browser history.

9. Closing window

Another fall out of the tabbed browsing feature is the safety of not closing browser windows accidentally. If you have multiple tabs opened within Firefox and you click the close window icon, Firefox prompts you that this would close all the tabs within the browser and not only the tabs currently being used.

10. It’s free

Free of cost, and free of obligations.

Also-rans:

Pop-up blocker

(This post would have served its purpose if even one person switches to FireFox)

I saw Philip Kotler in Chennai!

Humour, Media & Entertainment, Miscellaneous

I had first heard about Kotler from an employee of HCL, an ex-alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, who had said something to this effect: “…I wanted to join an FMCG marketing company a la Kotler… but something something… ended up joining HCL”.

This was as part of the multi-media pre-placement presentation for management school campuses that Supreet, Aarohi and I were making for HCL’s HR department. I remember, the three of us conferring and asking if any of us knew what she was saying. We were informed that Kotler was the bible of marketing.

This was 1997.

A year later I had my own freshly printed version of Kotler’s book on marketing management.

A much looked-forward-to book used in marketing management courses in the first year of management programmes across the globe, and then referred to several times over. One of my professors at IIM Indore, Anirban Ghosh, in fact said, “It’s one book, that should be unabashedly dog-eared, and the sooner you do it the better!”

And yesterday, I saw the guru of marketing in person, at a session organized by Great Lakes Management School, Chennai and Hindu Businessline. While I gather my notes and wits to summarize what he said, what’s my immediate take-back from the talk?

He writes much better than he talks. And while the former comes for a few hundred rupees, the latter costs several thousands!

 

Note:
My eagerness to share this with you, reminds me of an old incident where Aishwarya Rai danced in front of me for a couple of hours, while I sat smugly watching her every move.

So what if there were a few thousand more people sitting beside me in the stadium for that Bollywood show!

Krrish Case Study @ IIM Indore?

IIM, Media & Entertainment

Yay! My alma mater does it again!

IIM Indore is going to make a case-study out of Krrish on “successful promotion of Brand India”. Well whatever that means! In fact initially I had thought they were going to make a case-study on brand placements within Krrish — something that would have been of relevance to students of media, marketing and branding — perhaps looking at ways of measuring ROI from in-film brand placements.

“IIMs are in consensus for short-listing ‘Krrish’ as one of the first Indian movies which has a capability of an international-level case study. It is one of the few movies which has emerged from Third World countries to have a say in the world market,” said Prashant Salwan, professor of international business and marketing, IIM-Indore.

In the past also, IIM Indore had decided to ride the hype bandwagon when it had decided to use the film Lagaan as a teaching aid in its module on leadership. Well, I have nothing against using a film for putting across concepts, it’s the press release announcing this to the world that makes me feel a little ‘IIPM ish’, if you know what I mean.

In our time we had a case-study on the Uruguay football team survivors from an air crash in the Andes ranges. It talked of how, faced with survival issues, the team dynamics evolved — with various team members taking on different roles as they struggled for survival — leader, follower, supporter, fence-sitter etc. Some years later I saw the film Alive on the same crash, and I appreciated the concepts even more.

In the above quote I was most-intrigued by the “consensus on short-listing Krrish” part. My mind couldn’t help but imagine the directors of the 6 IIMs sitting in a screeing room deciding which film should be used as a case-study!

Hope Arjun Singh doesn’t get a whiff of this, lest…

Miss ‘Islet of Langerhans’ & the Fashion Trilogy

Humour, Media & Entertainment

That (minus ‘the Fashion Trilogy’) was the title of an article in The Times of India, some 10-12 years ago. It was a funny piece by Jug Suraiya, that was parodying the surfeit of beauty contests in the aftermath of Indian girls winning the Miss Universe and Miss World beauty titles.

It was but natural for the focus to shift then to the contest that sent these contestants to international paegants — the Miss India contest, which soon became a sell-able television show.

Then started the city-wide contests (which incidentally had no role to play in the Miss India selection/participation process) — Miss Bombay, Miss Delhi, Miss Chandigarh etc.

This trickled down to Miss Ghatkopar, Miss Janakpuri, and thereafter Miss Sector-39 and Miss M-Block kind of contests.

There was just one dimension to this trend — scale of space.

And on this, Jug Suraiya put a very simple premise: Since we can’t go bigger than the Universe, the only way to go was to breach the scale frontier by identifying smaller and smaller entities of space, that theoretically would end in cells, molecules and atoms. And somewhere on this continuum were the Islets of Langerhans!

So, where are the Islets of Langerhans?

Continue reading →

Utterly, headbutterly Zidane

Humour, Media & Entertainment, Sports

Many of us saw it live. Many of us saw it in the next day’s news. It has been the subject of many coffee-table discussions and a few national debates as well. All kinds of ‘lip-reading experts’ are now being called in to ‘speculate’ on what Materazzi could have said to provoke Zidane. The topic has also found its way into debates on masculinity, honour, religion, race, relationships, and many others.

Now that the shock and disappointment is settling down, how about seeing something that didn’t happen?

Sample:

Zidane headbutt

This site has around 10 pages of some imaginatively created animated renditions where the action has been juxtaposed in different contexts (caution: some of the humour is gory).