Google Browser Size: Drawn By Five-Year-Olds
By Chris Cardinal
On December 16th, 2009
Google announced a new Labs product called Browser Size. At first I thought this might be a useful tool to complement their recent spate of great developer-oriented releases. Instead, I was assaulted by a hideous overlay that requires a left-aligned design. (Though they’re ostensibly working on that.)
Browser Size allows you to enter any URL and see an overlay of visible browser space broken up by user demographics. Specifically, you can see what percentage of the Google-using populous would be able to see what portion of your screen on an initial page load. Apparently, this is based on typical browser dimensions for users, and not screen resolutions outright. (Taking into account non-maximized browsers.)
I understand that Labs products are by their nature not fully baked, but this one lands on the other extreme: half-assed. Perhaps the overlay is a rough attempt at being cheeky, but to me, it’s ugly, and its jagged, hand-drawn lines reduce its utility, rather than amping up its “cute” factor. The percentages aren’t even consistently rendered—it’s like My First Photoshop session here.
This isn’t to say that the concept isn’t a good one. I just wish they let this one cook a bit more before releasing it.
Browser Size | Google Labs via TechCrunch
Popularity: 9% [?]
Tagged with: browser size, Design, google, google labs, half-baked, screen resolution, tools, usability
Posted in: Design
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You’re right, that is completely terrible. If it wasn’t for the wonderful display of translucent colors keeping me complacent, I would have cried.
Yeah, horrible…
How dare Google release a free semi-working tool to help people understand the differences in monitor resolutions/bowser sizes. Google should be ashamed of themselves for letting something like this out.
Dude, you should probably chill out a bit. I doubt the overlay image was drawn for accuracy. Considering it’s a labs product, the first go around is buggy. Remember the first version of Gmail? I believe the general idea for this was to give web developers/designers a rough estimate of how the rest of the world views their site.
If you’re looking for precision data on user bowser sizes, go to the next SES conference, there are plenty of vendors to SELL you products that do just that.
It’s a clear and conscious decision to draw ugly, hand-rendered lines instead of just making them rectangular. I was critiquing the style and utility, since it would’ve required just as much effort to deliver a proper, useful tool. “Labs” and “Beta” shouldn’t be a free pass for terrible software, and it’s usually not—they do a damn good job keeping up the aesthetic and the functionality of even their beta releases.
There was no compelling reason to make this functionally ugly, which was my primary issue.
How do you know the lines are hand-rendered? The level sets of the data may actually look like that.
You know, that’s something we were just discussing in the office, and it’s actually likely the case. I still disagree with this presentation as a way of demonstrating those sizes—if you’re going to group screen resolutions into percentiles, why not group very similar resolutions to smooth out the curve and generate usable lines?
I’m fairly certain those lines aren’t “hand-drawn”. These are contour lines, breaking down page areas into the percentage of users that will see this part of the page without scrolling. Since there’s a lot of variation in sizes of things like scrollbars and toolbars, it’s not surprising at all that these contours are not rectangular. Think about all the users that have a slightly thinner or slightly shorter browser window, the bottom right corner is not going to be visible for as many people, since either a too narrow window or a too short window will hide it. This is a key aspect of the data, and straightening out the lines for aesthetic reasons would be misrepresenting it.