Gmail’s web interface was inaccesible for nearly two hours today, causing the internet to explode.

If you set up an email client (e.g. on your phone or mozilla thunderbird) to use gmail, that continued to work during the downtime, though that’s not necessarily always the case during downtime. If you want to be able to keep working with email during downtime (of any sort), I recommend setting up Gmail’s offline features. If you have offline enabled, the gmail interface lives on your computer (still in the browser, like usual) and it keeps a copy of your recent messages. If Gmail goes down, it’ll look just like you went offline, so you’ll be able to continue to compose, read and search emails. You can re-sync when gmail comes back online. Certainly not idea, but it’s better than nothing!

Also, if you’d like to see the status of Gmail and other google apps, check out the Google Apps Status page. That’s where they post information about outages.

The dust seems to have settled, and the Gmail team has posted an interesting postmortem to their blog. Operating a huge service like that without forcing development to grind to a halt is an amazingly difficult task that I’m glad I don’t have to deal with.

Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS generated a lot of press, not surprisingly. As usual with the tech press, a lot it consisted of mindless hype or knee-jerk contrarianism, but several blog posts I read seemed to have a thoughtful, skeptical (in a good way) outlook.

Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context
Discussing the relative failure of iphone web apps to native apps”:

Mediati was right that not just developers but users wanted native third party apps for the iPhone. The difference from what Google is promising with Chrome, however, is that web apps will be the native apps on the system. Presumably all of the default applications from Google itself will themselves be the Google web apps we already know. It’s an eating-your-own-dog-food issue. What irked about Apple’s endorsement of iPhone-optimized web apps as a “really sweet solution” was that, of course, none of the iPhone’s built-in apps were web apps. They were all written in Objective-C with Cocoa Touch. Apple’s own iPhone apps set a high bar for user experience — a height that could not (and still can’t) be reached with web apps running in MobileSafari.

and countering the “oh, it’s another linux distro” meme:

Whatever Chrome OS turns out to be, it isn’t going to be that kind of “Linux”. They’re using the Linux kernel, yes, but they’re building something new and original on top of that. Linux is to Chrome OS what BSD is to Apple’s iPhone OS — which is to say something that users will never see, smell, or notice.

Google’s Microsoft Moment
On Google’s public perception:

when Google evokes Apple or Microsoft or Oracle in its style of communicating ideas, and when cell phone ads on TV say “Powered by Google”, an average consumer’s conception of Google essentially shifts to seeing this company not as “those guys who do the search engine” but instead as another consumer electronics company, like Samsung or Sony, but a little more hip.
This would be okay, except that I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we’re just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!” And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company’s internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google’s messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes.

On taking criticism:

Worse, because most of the dedicated detractors of Google have been either competing companies or nutjobs, it’s been hard for Googlers to take criticisms seriously. That makes it easy to have defensiveness or dismissal of criticisms become a default response.

Why Googlers should read Anil Dash’s post
Matt discusses Anil’s post (above), and how our internal concept of Google can differ drastically from how people see us from the outside:

Many Googlers, especially old-timers, still think of Google from early days, when we were the underdogs in search. But many people outside the company perceive Google as a huge company with an outsized shadow. We can scare people, even when we’re trying not to.

Lots of good advice there, and some of the comments on that post are worth reading.

Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t run Photoshop on ChromeOS today
Abe counters the surprisingly common argument I saw in some of the crappier articles on the subject:

“I’m not interested in ChromeOS, since it won’t be able to handle heavy-duty programs like Photoshop.”
That might be true today, but it won’t be true forever (or even for long).

I read one article that said that nobody would use ChromeOS because it can’t run Office (can’t find the link right now). Then just last week, Microsoft announces plans to extend Office to the browser. Heh!

A NY Googler goes to Times Square and asks people what a browser is. 8% of them knew:

It’s easy to forget that I live in a bubble.

While I believe that Obama shouldn’t be doing much to “help” the Iranian demonstrators, there are plenty of meaningful things that have been done:

• Foreign embassies in Tehran (Australia, UK, and others) are providing care for demonstrators. It’s been widely reported that demonstrators going to hospitals have been arrested by the Basij EDIT: the part about the embassies is a rumor, and has been denied by the UK and possibly others.
• As was widely reported, Twitter rescheduled its downtime to avoid being down while Iranians were awake (at the request of the state department, too)
• Facebook released a Farsi translation of the site.
• Google added Farsi to its translation tools.
• YouTube relaxed its guidelines for violence in videos coming from Iran in recognition of the media situation

We now have goats in Mountain View.

We rented them to keep the grass under control on one of the fields adjacent to main campus. I like them. They don’t smell, and I think it’s kinda cool to have animals around.

The weird thing was, most people didn’t know about this before it happened, so it was quite confusing at first, and I thought people were kidding when they said it was to maintain the lawn.

I didn’t notice this earlier, but apparently Google’s C++ Style Guide is now public. I think it’s quite good.. acclimating to it wasn’t very hard when I started. Some of the rationales (when you expand the rule on that page) have good food for thought for programmers.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, this video is worth a look if you’re interested in what datacenters look like:

It’s quite an amazing operation.

Some Googlers in Santa Monica bought a big lens and burned a bunch of stuff.

It’s about 400x stronger than a magnifying glass you might use to burn ants, making it 400x more awesome. Looking at the output of their experiments, it’s not very good at cooking.

(This post consists of biased personal opinions, as always)

Chrome Experiments has some pretty cool stuff. The idea of the site was to create some javascript demos to show off Chrome‘s speed. Some of them also run in firefox (and maybe safari), though I wasn’t able to find any that ran in IE, mostly because IE doesn’t support <canvas>.

I’m running beta 3 of firefox 3.1 on all my computers now. Its javascript execution is definitely faster than 3.0. It didn’t perform too well on a some of the chrome experiments, though. Unlike IE, it could typically run them, it just wouldn’t be as smooth as Chrome (for example, 3D rendering). My favorite experiments are all among the top-rated, so try some of those out if you have a chance. Some of them are really clever.

I installed IE8 on my windows partition tonight. I haven’t used it enough to do a full review or anything. I don’t expect IE to return to the Mac any time soon, so I don’t really have incentive to try it. I stumbled upon this video on Microsoft’s site regarding browser speed. The video consists of a lot of flashes and text flying around to techno music, so I’ll save you some time and summarize:

Everyone talking about browser speed seems to think that micro-benchmarks are important, but those benchmarks are just made up and regular people have never heard of them anyway. The real way to test is in the load times of popular websites.

They then show load times from IE8, Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0 on popular sites. As you might expect, IE8 did pretty well. They conclude that “IE8 is fast just like other browsers”

The type of speed Microsoft is talking about here is important, but it’s not what most of the browser speed discussion has been about. Their analysis is on the top 25 most visited sites, e.g. google.com. To time the rendering of google.com has a high ratio of time spent rendering HTML to time spent running javascript. The same is true for most of the top 25: these aren’t javascript applications, they’re web pages. Rendering these quickly definitely has value, and I’m glad that the IE team has worked on rendering speed, but the claims of this video are a bit simplistic. Although IE does well on these simple pages, it can’t keep up on the javascript-heavy applications used on the web (e.g. Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Google Docs, etc). When the ratio of HTML rendering time to javascript execution time goes down, javascript benchmarks become more important.

I ran Firefox 3.1b3, Chrome 1.0 and IE 8 through the Sunspider javascript benchmark test. From the description:

This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

I’m not asserting that this is a perfect test (it doesn’t test DOM manipulation, for example), but it’s not a bad way to get a rough idea about how a javascript engine is performing. Here are my results on an Intel 2.33GHz quad-core with 8GB RAM:
Chrome: 1193ms
Firefox: 2033ms
Internet Explorer: 5753ms
(click the links for a more detailed breakdown)

This speed difference doesn’t make mainstream web apps unusable today, but I worry that it inhibits the web apps of the future. Chrome Experiments is a good showcase for the types of things that are doable in javascript with a fast interpreter. If you showed me these a year or two ago, I’d think that they were implemented in Flash. Speeding up javascript and enhancing multimedia APIs (canvas, video, SVG) will expand the range of things possible in web applications, and I’m really looking forward to this faster generation of browsers becoming mainstream.

Google Voice, the successor, to Grand Central. I’ve been using it for a while and have been very pleased with it. The most important feature for me is voicemail transcription:

Since I get the transcribed voicemail in my email, I generally don’t have to listen the the voicemail itself- the transcription is good enough for me to figure out how important the call is. I haven’t actually listened to a voicemail in months.

Additionally, I find it useful to be able to SMS from the web interface. I’ve had times where I’ve been at a computer (surprise!) when receiving a text message. Instead of typing out the reply on my phone, I just open up Google Voice and type it with a real keyboard. For non-trivial conversations, it can make a big difference.

Lifehacker has a good screenshot tour, if you’d like to learn more.