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 But some smart people repealed the law (or gave exceptions to some firms) and voila – we have the recession of 2008!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?

Firefox 3 launch Goof up?

Many a times when techies talk about goof ups and product launches, they remember the OS crashing at the launch of Microsoft Windows 98, the video of which I have included just in case you forgot about it.

While that certainly is something which will probably rank first in the list of product launches and goof-ups, we have another one today.

Yes, today is Download Day. I did get the mail on time reminding me about the download. But there has been a goof up in this all hyped Guinness style product launch.

As you can see in the above screen shot, I have showed you the mail which I got informing of the download time. There when I hover above the link download Firefox 3, I get the url on the status bar of the browser which I have encircled.

Now, when I go to the same url what do I get?

Firefox 2?? You got to be kidding me!! And all we get is a sneak peek into Firefox 3, to test drive the latest version.

Probably, the guys at Mozilla were so busy counting the numbers pledged for the download that they forgot to make the to do list, or worse they made the to do list and forgot to update the page that the url redirects to.

I dont know what was the mistake and who made it, but you sure dont want to this to happen when you are publicizing the event with the Guinness tag attached to it!

So what do you guys think went wrong?