Firefox still wants to be the ‘Anti-Chrome.’ Can it beat Edge, too?

With a major redesign, Mozilla Firefox is back but no longer in black. The most obvious change in Firefox 89, which arrived on Tuesday morning, is the toolbar atop the browser: It now comes in a shade of pale gray instead of black, so it fits in much better with other Mac or Windows apps. Below that, the new release of the open-source browser—which has also been updated for Linux, with a corresponding iOS and iPadOS update—shows considerable pruning of its interface. The address bar has lost the traditional home button and condensed the raft of buttons at the top right, while the menu available there is no longer festooned with the icons that made Firefox look even more like a stranger on a Mac or PC. A June 1 blog post calls this “a modern new look designed to streamline and calm things down.” But the face-lift also represents a recognition that this privacy-focused browser continues to get squeezed between Google’s dominant Chrome, Apple’s equally privacy-minded Safari, and Microsoft’s reinvented Edge . So while past Firefox updates have emphasized its protection against online tracking —it blocks third-party ad trackers and the Facebook widgets that let that firm follow us across the web, displays a privacy report card for each page, and even encrypts your domain lookups—this one sells a less-is-more design. That was the right call for Firefox, a browser that broke Microsoft Internet Explorer’s lock on the market by offering tools Microsoft wouldn’t—starting with pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing—but then grew to suffer from a certain amount of feature-itis. For example, the previous release featured two rectangular toolbar buttons, one with mostly vertical lines and the other with a mix of horizontal and vertical lines. The former, Library, provides access to your bookmarks and history, while the latter, Sidebar, offers a different way to view your bookmarks and history while adding the ability to see tabs synced from other copies of Firefox. Updating my Mac and Windows installations of Firefox expunged the Sidebar button and with it the chance that I’d once again confuse it for the Library button. You can undo that in the Customize Toolbar screen or choose the latest Firefox defaults—which remove the Library button as well but add a button for Mozilla’s  Pocket page-saving service . Read More …

Inside YouTube’s 5-year program to help creators that you’re just now hearing about

For the past five years, there’s been a cadre of YouTubers working closely with the company to shape the tools and features creators are using. And it’s not until now that YouTube is pulling back the curtain on its findings and on the program itself. YouTube’s Creator in Residence launched in 2016 as a way for a select group of creators to stress test new additions to the platform and give feedback on the user experience directly to engineers, designers, and product managers. Ten creators are handpicked by the Creator in Residence team for six-month terms that include weekly meetings and, at times, team members visiting creators in their homes and studios to see how being a YouTuber affects their lives on and off camera. Renato Verdugo, a user experience researcher at YouTube an co-lead of Creator in Residence, says typical UX research stops after a week or two with a specific focus on workshopping a product, website, or app. “The more time we started spending with creators without a product agenda, the more we learned [about] their everyday life in a way that allows us to better understand the role that the platform plays in a specific creator’s success, in a specific creator’s business,” Verdugo says. “The residency came from the spirit of, how do we spend time with creators beyond one research session? ” Part of the reason the Creator in Residence program stayed under wraps for five years was to ensure that time with creators was as unfiltered as possible. Renato Verdugo [Photo: courtesy of YouTube] “For this to be effective, the creator needs to know that they’re not here to be a spokesperson, that they’re here to be honest and raw,” Verdugo says. “Giving time to work without the public spotlight and [creators not having] people put pressure on them like, ‘You’re talking to YouTube? Can you also raise this other thing?’ It just creates space to breathe.” Verdugo and his team select creators based on who they deem are doing something “unique or cool” and “really creative” with their channels, regardless of the size of their following Read More …

Inside YouTube’s 5-year program to help creators that you’re just now hearing about

For the past five years, there’s been a cadre of YouTubers working closely with the company to shape the tools and features creators are using. And it’s not until now that YouTube is pulling back the curtain on its findings and on the program itself. YouTube’s Creator in Residence launched in 2016 as a way for a select group of creators to stress test new additions to the platform and give feedback on the user experience directly to engineers, designers, and product managers. Ten creators are handpicked by the Creator in Residence team for six-month terms that include weekly meetings and, at times, team members visiting creators in their homes and studios to see how being a YouTuber affects their lives on and off camera. Renato Verdugo, a user experience researcher at YouTube an co-lead of Creator in Residence, says typical UX research stops after a week or two with a specific focus on workshopping a product, website, or app. “The more time we started spending with creators without a product agenda, the more we learned [about] their everyday life in a way that allows us to better understand the role that the platform plays in a specific creator’s success, in a specific creator’s business,” Verdugo says. “The residency came from the spirit of, how do we spend time with creators beyond one research session? ” Part of the reason the Creator in Residence program stayed under wraps for five years was to ensure that time with creators was as unfiltered as possible. Renato Verdugo [Photo: courtesy of YouTube] “For this to be effective, the creator needs to know that they’re not here to be a spokesperson, that they’re here to be honest and raw,” Verdugo says. “Giving time to work without the public spotlight and [creators not having] people put pressure on them like, ‘You’re talking to YouTube? Can you also raise this other thing?’ It just creates space to breathe.” Verdugo and his team select creators based on who they deem are doing something “unique or cool” and “really creative” with their channels, regardless of the size of their following. “We have no hard requirements,” he says. “We’ve reached out to people who have a couple hundred thousand all the way to the well into the millions. It’s much more about doing interesting things on the platform.” For example, Anisha Dixit, a creator based in Mumbai whose aim is empowering women, particularly in India, in approachable and comedic ways. “She talks about things that could be considered taboo, like menstruation,” Verdugo says. “She mixes her own experience of growing up as a woman in India with the experience that her younger audience is going through.” To get a better sense of Dixit’s workflow and life, Verdugo spent a week in Mumbai shadowing her creating content, doing press, and so forth. “That ethnographic research is really not necessarily about any specific feature of the platform. I don’t show up with like a suitcase full of prototypes like, let’s try new things,” Verdugo says. “It’s an opportunity to open that window into what is everyday life. What is it like to wake up in the morning and be a YouTube creator and go to bed and still be a YouTube creator?” That said, there are occasions where Verdugo gives creators the opportunity to test, and ultimately shape, new features on the platform, such as the revamped YouTube Studio, the hub for creators to manage their accounts; and YouTube Stories, which originally launched as Reels in 2017 but not without some necessary guidance from creators in the program who were flown to New York City to participate in a scavenger hunt as a fun way to test the feature Read More …

Amazon’s Halo wearable adds a fresh approach to personalized workouts

Amazon is getting into personalized fitness with a new feature for Halo, its fitness tracker and app, Called Movement, it measures how a person moves, identifies areas of improvement, and offers up curated exercises. Amazon introduced its Halo fitness tracker at the end of 2020. It was a notable departure from other wearables such as Apple Watch and Fitbit, with features for tracking body fat percentage, body temperature during sleep, and tone of voice. Overall, it focuses on tracking aspects of a person’s health that are simple to understand, such as body fat percentage instead of BMI and a weekly activity score instead of daily one. The new Movement feature is consistent with that approach. Inside Halo’s smartphone app, the Movement assessment directs users to record themselves performing various exercises using their phone’s camera. The test takes roughly five minutes and assesses for 20 potential physical limitations relating to issues such as range of motion and strength. Once complete, it serves up 5-7 routines based on a person’s specific problem areas that will improve exercise form and ultimately mobility. Through the app, users can record every time they do these exercises and track their improvement. What this feature is really about is preventing future injury. The goal of Movement is to build muscle memory around correct movements. When you do a squat, is your back straight or are you tucking your pelvis at the bottom of the squat? Are your knees over toes? The app aims to let you know for sure. [Image: courtesy of Amazon] There are a total of 35 possible corrective exercises—roughly ten minutes or less each. Read More …