Yesterday saw the biggest change to the Google homepage since 1998. They replaced the minimal, functional and revolutionary design of the original – which has remained largely unchanged for 12 years – by adding a Bing-like background image that you could change, but not remove.

Now, a few hours later, Google normality is restored; the ‘Change background image’ link is there, but it’s something you opt into rather than not being able opt out of.

So it turns out this was a ’24 hour experiment’ to publicise the feature which, when you think about it, had to be the case otherwise Google’s famous themed logos would have become redundant, and that would seem very odd given their popularity.

Still, it’s surprising that Google appears to be so afraid of the growth of Microsoft’s search engine that they decided to do this.


This isn’t an issue for many. But it is if you’re using a development build of a browser, or you’re using a Linux distribution with a modified version of Firefox that, due to licensing restrictions, can’t use the Firefox branding. In this case, the user-agent string will contain the development name of the browser, such as ‘Shiretoko’ or ‘Namoroka’.

In Firefox, changing the user-agent string in about:config to ‘Firefox’ will solve this problem. In Chromium (the development build of Google Chrome), you’ll need to launch the browser with a command something like this:

chromium-browser --user-agent="Firefox/3.5.5" --enable-remote-fonts

Recent builds of Chromium now support @font-face, so you might not need the -enable-remote-fonts option.

Hopefully, Typekit will improve their browser detection by checking the rendering engine in the user-agent string, rather than simply the browser name.

Yesterday, Twitter user Brumplum criticised Stephen Fry by calling his tweets boring, and Stephen Fry reacted by threatening to quit Twitter. We’ll look back on this and see how silly it all is, and in future BBC editors with publish more important news.

I found HTML5 to be a bit odd at first, but as I started experimenting with it, the simplicity and meaningfulness of HTML5 mark-up started to sink in. The best way to think of the new elements is something like this:

• use <header> and <footer> in the obvious places, this negates the need for <div id=”header”> and <div id=”footer”>
• use <section> for the main sections of the page eg. <div id=”content”>
• use <article> where you would have <div class=”post”>
• use <aside> where you would have information related to an article, eg. <div class=”date”>
• use <nav> for your navigation links

Then, instead of using IDs and classes, you use CSS selectors to select parts of the document tree to style. I found the W3C’s table of CSS3 selectors invaluable for this. I’ve mainly used CSS2 selectors for compatibility with IE and older versions of Firefox.

I’ve also made use of the @font-face selector to embed Museo font for the heading styles. There’s a good list of free fonts available for embedding on the Web Fonts Wiki.

I must give credit to Croc Camen and Alex Gibson for their inspiring work with HTML5. I haven’t had this much fun with web design in years.

Whatever happened to PNG? [Webmonkey]
The Story of PNG [slashdot]

*OK… so Netscape 6 is particularly bug-ridden, but in my opinion, it is the second best browser out there after IE5/Mac.