How secure is Facebook extension for Chrome?

 

I recently installed the facebook extension for Google Chrome. But how secure is it? Look at the 2 screenshots below.

Screenshot with the extension

Screenshot after uninstalling the extension

When the extension was installed, my facebook home page was appearing in place of the Techcrunch on facebook badge. What if this happened on a public computer, say at an internet cafe?

Needless to say, I uninstalled the extension immediately. And to end, I wanted to share an article I read sometime this past week but I can’t find it right now. It came down heavily on Chrome for still having some basic loopholes, which other browsers learned long back. Kinda like you put some laws in place after the Great Depression of 1930 to prevent a recession in the future. But some smart people repealed the law (or gave exceptions to some firms) and voila – we have the recession of 2008! Lessons learned in the past have to be applied.

An example of Bad Design

 

Looking at the screenshot below, you will be wondering why is this post titled “An example of Bad Design”. After all the design looks fine and elegant.

A wise man once said, “looks can be deceiving” and rightly so in this particular case. While the visual design of this page from the site gojiyo.com seems nice, it is the interaction design which fails. You are asked to choose you username, fill your email address and select a password, which you do. But post that you are asked to install the unity3D plugin and are given a button to download the plugin. Clicking on the button takes you away from this page and into a unity page where you can download the plugin. But what happened to the sign up process. Was that completed? NO!

If you are engaging the user in a flow, you should ensure that the flow is completed. What if I start downloading the plugin and then completely forget about why I was downloading it. It is, after all, an era of short attention spans. In this case the download link should have opened in a new window or perhaps better still it should have appeared after the sign up process.

 

What do you think?

What is wrong with Google?

The header certainly got your attention, didn't it? What can be wrong with Google? Almost for a decade now Google has been there for us, searching the internet and finding us what we want. Apart from search, Google has brought us services which are part of our daily lives now, services like Gmail, Orkut, YouTube, Blogger and Google News. I use most of these services and as I said earlier you would hardly ever get any disruptions in these services. So reliable is the Google brand that one of my friends said they dont need any error pages. Except Orkut of course, where we abuse the Orkut server for refusing us donuts!!

But in the past two weeks I feel things are starting to come apart. Firstly, with Google News there have been almost five instances when the service failed its service levels. These were disruptions that I myself experienced being an avid Google News visitor. Then the Gmail spam filter, has started detecting genuine mails as spam. The ironical thing was the mails sent to spam were from ZDnet and I have a filter in place to divert them from the inbox to archive folders under the label ZDnet. But i found my spam folder filled with six such messages today!!

Of course these are just minor errors, but given my nature to speculate and the fact that such disruptions and mistakes have happened in a very short span of time, I thought I write about it.