YouTube has gone widescreen (note: this link currently breaks if your YouTube preference is for a non-US locale, eg for Aussies you end up here, which currently displays nothing).

The only catch of course is that 4:3 videos now appear letterboxed… or whatever the vertical term for letterboxed is.

My question is: why? Why not just make the player (at least on the YouTube web site) the aspect ratio of the video that it’s playing?

In fact at the moment, embedded 16:9 videos still appear letterboxed; 4:3 videos “full screen” … what should happen is that the embedding code should define the player size and so match the video’s aspect ratio.

Surely it can’t be that hard to avoid those black bands?

You’ve probably heard this already, but you may be able to tell Youtube to display higher quality video by adding &fmt=22 onto the URL… that is, if higher-quality video was uploaded by the content creator.

It’s not widely publicised, but Youtube publishes RSS feeds so you can track the latest uploaded videos from your favourite users.

They take the form: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USER/uploads

Quite handy at times.

Lifehacker has an updated set of Windows web browser speed test results: Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE and Firefox.

Seems Safari and Opera are the fastest, though they also note Firefox uses the least memory.

Initial impressions of Chrome.

Don’t mind the interface, but did we really need another non-OS-standard Close button?

Seems to periodically pause, doing something under the hood. At first I thought half my tabs had crashed.

Renders nicely.

Has problems playing YouTube videos. Embedded clips don’t display. On Youtube itself, it says “Video not available”, even when it is. Umm, this is owned by Google. Odd.

OK with other Flash stuff though.

I kinda like the status bar which vanishes when you don’t need it.

Like the Home (most frequently visited pages) view, but how do I get back to it?!

Will keep playing as time allows.

Larry Dignan on ZDNet — Chrome first impressions

4:15pm. I was having trouble with both Youtube and Facebook claiming not to be available. Right now, www.youtube.com works (but only with the www), but claims every video is unavailable. www.facebook.com works (again, with the www), but fails during the logon process. Surely it can’t be some scheme to stop me wasting time?

For some reason it installs the application just for one user, into C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application … which means I’m going to have to jump through some hoops to get it installed for the kids on their user accounts.

Google launches its own web browser, Chrome, sometime today. Beta for Windows initially. Sounds good though.

Google blog announcement.

Amusing comic explaining what it is.

(thanks for the prompt, Tony)

Separate tabs in separate processes? Love it. (I’m still having problems with The Age’s video player; even after a remove/re-install of Firefox and Flash. Weird.)

Trying to make location descriptions parseable in Google Maps (eg for putting in Google Calendar)?

Include the state and country, even abbreviated, so it doesn’t default to DefaultTown, USA. And put the human-descriptive bit of it in parenthesis. After the computer-parseable bit of the address works okay.

So even though the locals will know exactly what you mean, don’t use: Parliament House, Melbourne

Instead do something more like this: Corner Bourke and Spring Street, Melbourne, Vic, AU (Parliament House), which GMaps can accurately map and point to — and nicely puts your (Title) in a big font.

Google Maps has launched Streetview for some Australian cities.

Flinders Street Station, Melbourne

View Larger Map

Age story

PS. Japan just launched too

Looks like the Citylink tunnels caused some GPS glitches — it thinks there are little bits of road way in the middle of The Domain.

Google blog announcement

Do we need to bookmark web sites anymore? Can Google do the job?

With Firefox 3, you can just type a keyword into the address bar and it’ll usually take you to the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” first choice. Most of the time it seems to work, though in some cases (I guess where it’s not sure it’s what you really want, the first result isn’t dominating the rankings) it takes you to the Google search results instead.

I tried a few. These all went straight to the place I was thinking of.

Age — www.theage.com.au
SMH — www.smh.com.au
NYT — www.nytimes.com
Connex — www.connexmelbourne.com.au
Wikipedia — www.wikipedia.org
Metlink — www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au
toxic custard — www.toxiccustard.com
apple — www.apple.com
herald sun — www.news.com.au/heraldsun
bbc news — news.bbc.co.uk
twitter — twitter.com/home

Even, to my surprise, “drive” got me to www.drive.com.au… I suppose me bring being in Australia ensures I get an AU-skewed result. Or maybe drive.com.au really does dominate that search term.

The only one that landed off the mark was TPN. I wanted The Podcast Network, but it took me to the Wikipedia entry for Total parenteral nutrition.

Searching for my name, and some others terms (eg cameron reilly, geekrant), took me to the Google search results instead.

Some don’t work at all. Don’t try searching for localhost, for instance! (Not that you’d normally need to.)

And we’ll always need bookmarks for private pages, and shortcuts to pages away from the beaten homepage track.

[I think Cameron Reilly wrote on this topic a couple of years ago. Perhaps ironically given the subject, I can’t find that posting.]

If you’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 and are wondering when Google will update Browser Sync to work with it, you’d better find an alternative product.

Google has decided to dump the product.

It appears that for now, Mozilla’s Weave might be the best substitute (though it’s in beta at present). Or Foxmarks, though apparently it doesn’t play well with the Web Developer Toolbar.

Is it just me that’s been getting a lot more of this recently?

It’s not just on slow connections, or even on fast connections when there’s a lot of activity going on. It’s even happening to me on connections where everything is fast, and from a variety of computers (so I doubt it’s a cache problem).

And the Basic HTML view is fast, but missing too many features to be practical most of the time.

Is it Gmail getting too many users per server?

Or is it feature-creep getting into the Javascript? I can think of a few things I’d dearly love to “uninstall” from my personal Gmail experience if I could. I never use the Chat. I turned off the Web Clips. I know the adverts pay for it, so I guess I’ll put up with them. I have turned contacts’ pictures. Perhaps the recent upgrades to speed up the response on the interface is to blame?

I don’t know what it is, but Gmail, especially the initial load, is definitely slowing down for me.

• A bunch of tips of varying usefulness
• This worked: bookmark and use the “old version” link… but how long until the new, slow version becomes the “old version”?

PS. heh. After I ranted, I tried clearing the browser cache. After that it loads up like a dream, very fast. I’ll try it on the other affected machines’ Firefoxen. Maybe some combination of Ajaxy library version clashes did something funny.

I’ve often thought spam was demonic.