Using Safari 5.1.2 in Mac OS X 10.6.8

I've long ago uninstalled Flash and didn't have any issues with YouTube due to being part of the HTML5 opt-in. However lately I'm noticing a lot of videos aren't playing claiming my browser doesn't recognize any of the video formats. Going to the HTML5 YouTube page shows it's active and that the browser supports H.264 and WebM (I have Perian installed).

So what's going on? I've also tried Firefox 6 and it claimed to need a plugin which it was subsequently unable to locate.

Even after turning off HTML opt-in I'm not being prompted to install Flash, so it doesn't appear the videos are flash-wrapped either.

Here's a random sample that gives me this error: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnxo0Ffp3KQ&feature=related

Damn, I don't hate many things, but I despise Google. They make Microsoft (at the worst points in the history) look like infallible angels.

I've noticed the same. And in a majority of the cases, the videos play just fine on an iPad, which is pulling an H.264 version from somewhere.

The FAQ page the video links to mentions the following:


I'm guessing it's some enforcement of ads, though if a much smaller shop like The Verge can do HTML 5 ads, I have to wonder why Google can't.

These videos all seem to play through Flash if it's installed. But if I have Flash installed, I also seem to get many more videos playing through it instead of HTML5 which is still actively "opted-in."

In searching for info on the subject I've seen reported that it's also affecting people using Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Opera, etc.. Basically all browsers for any number of reasons. Like with all other problems with anything Google, there's no way to contact anyone at Google about it and no one from Google ever responds to their own forums or seems to do anything to actively fix the issue.

Same for other problems like Gmail and Calendar no longer working properly in IE8 even though they claim it's a supported browser. This has been going on for some people since 2010 at least.

I really wish Apple hadn't screwed the pooch with their iCloud otherwise I would have already moved all online sync over that way. As it stands there's no way to use native clients in anything but the latest OS, which means my older systems are out of the loop.

I pinged someone I know, and they responded with the same FAQ page, pointing to number 1, the ads.

From what I understand, the uploader can specify if they want ads added to the video to then get part of the revenue generated. These videos will force Flash on a desktop OS, to ensure the potential ad is seen (due to Google not adding this to their HTML5 player yet). It's either going to be the popover ads, or the preroll kind. I'm assuming a cookie is being used to know when the last time was when you saw an ad, since preroll ads don't occur all the time, but tend to appear if you watch a few different videos in a short time span.

On mobile/non computer platforms where they can't force an ad due to the lack of Flash, they uploader can choose to just not show the video, but this is rare.

If I put on my Google conspiracy hat, I'd say that this is all due to the new focus Larry had brought to the company. An ex Google employee who was pretty far up the chain as one of their main testing engineers wrote about it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx

One choice quote from the article:

The odd thing is that after checking out a couple of those videos, I didn't spot any ads...

I read that blog post the other day. I still think the author was too apologetic on Google's behalf, especially early into the post. Apart from their initial foray into search, I can't think of any innovation out of Google. At least not anything home brewed. Even the examples given by the author were the product of acquisition, including GMail.

Google, IMO is simply like the Borg from Star Trek. With the same amount of creativity, passion and attention to detail.

It's no secret how you feel about Google. Even so, it's surprising to hear you claim no innovation from them. It's hard to look at all of the things they've done and see how you can take that stance. Also, I'm fairly certain GMail was not acquired and was in fact built in-house.

Sometimes I wonder if you're just trolling us.

Caleb has a point: Cite? Wikipedia (which I admit could be lying because it could have been edited by Google employees) says otherwise. It says the closest thing to an acquisition of GMail is when they bought the existing domain name from Garfield.

Another thing I'll admit is that Gmail wasn't innovation at all, it was merely copying other existing web-based mail services and trying to outdo them by being slightly better. For me, what made me switch to Gmail was the significantly improved spam filtering, nothing more.

Do you honestly want to compare the "innovation" at Google to Microsoft or Apple? Or even Facebook (shudder!) I'm sorry, they're a bureaucratic ad company with deep pockets.

They may be the most innovative ad company, but that's not what I meant, since I was looking at it from the perspective of a user of their services. ie. their livestock, aka "the product" - end-users are most certainly not their customers and the company and all its offerings are structured in such a way that should make that pretty obvious.

I read in a fairly definitive list recently that GMail was, at least in part, the product an acquisition. I'll try to find it, the list was quite large and impressive, and really surprised me. Nonetheless, it's freaking webmail.

http://www.scores.org/graphics/google/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google

I suppose it was "portions" of GMail were developed through acquisition. The GMail wikipedia article does say it was first developed as an internal tool.

That's not my fight. I just want to compare it to "no innovation" and see how it stands. In my opinion it doesn't match that.

I'll change the word "no" to "insignificant" -

Most of the innovation at Google isn't visible to the public, which is a shame. Their datacenters, management software, utilization of their network and servers is all very interesting stuff and shows where they have innovated. Unfortunately most of it remains very secret and closed off, with only bits of info slipping out here and there.

For me gmail and picasa are innovations. Before those I never thought I would pretty much have all my stuff on the internet. I always used a pop client before gmail because webmail sucked. Also the idea of keeping all my messages and not filing them seemed crazy. Now I archive every email and can easily find them if I need to with a search.

I've been archiving all my email since 1999 using IMAP, with some POP3 in the middle there and now using a combination of both, depending on the mail account since I have about a dozen.

GMail blew out the barn doors (back in the day) for one reason only: 1GB of storage that continued to grow. As far as web-mail implementation, it was never and is still not the best available. It swelled in usage because Google required a GMail account for many other of its free services.

Picasa was a third-party application acquired by Google, the same as they did with Google Earth, Maps and Sketchup.

IMO, Sketchup and Picasa stagnated under Google ownership. Maps developed quite nicely as did Earth, but really it's just stuff that already existed, and continued to exist, elsewhere.

Disagree. Tags + Archive (i.e. no folders) has significantly streamlined how I deal with my inbox. I want the same functionality in Outlook.

I'm curious: was GMail the first product to do conversation view? I hated that at first but now I can't imagine not having it...

As far as I can recall, yes. It was the first time I'd ever seen such a view anyway. I found it annoying and strange at first as well, but granted: it turned out to be very handy and useful.

GMail was most certainly not the first email implementation of a threaded view. It may have been novel from a WebUI at the time though. Nor was it the first email interface to support labels.

Threaded view and conversation view are not the same thing, unless all of your mail, including sent mail, are in the same folder in the threaded view.

Absolutely - I can not use Outlook as it still doesn't do things well. I use gmail where I can, then pine and thunderbird where I can't. At work I use Notes (which sucks, but still has better functionality than Outlook)

Gmail beats them all hands down!

Outlook is an abomination.

One area Outlook is way ahead of GMail, rules. I was really surprised by how limited GMail rules are.

Outlook is also ahead of GMail for HTML rendering, which considering Google is a web company really surprised me. Zero support for CSS, GMail forces inline styles.

I find GMail totally unusable - the web site UI that is. It's fine for my wife and friends who aren't really computer savvy, but I can't imagine that anyone else finds it that useful overall.

The rules, as Tom mentioned, are severely limiting. I can't imagine not using a local client with an industry-standard server. I just started using Sparrow for iOS and so far it's about 100x better than the default iOS Mail app (which I've always disliked immensely).

My computer "savvyness" is certainly not on a level with yours or most of the people here... but among the people I associate with outside of this bbs, I am regarded as a computer god.

That said, when it comes to email, messages appear in my inbox, I read them, and respond to them. Sometimes I get really bold and initiate an email exchange myself. For that, Gmail is perfectly satisfactory. That's all I do with email, and I would bet that at least 90% of all the people in the world who use email do no more. Your imagination must be limited if you "...can't imagine that anyone else finds it that useful overall."

Just what do you do with email that is so esoteric that Gmail can't handle it?

tanstaafl.

Doug, you proved my point precisely, in that I can't imagine that people who need more than what typical web mail offers would be very impressed by GMail. Most people as you've said would be happy with any decently functioning web mail client and there's plenty of evidence around since Yahoo and other still have relatively high usage numbers. Then there are those people that use Facebook exclusively.

I don't even keep a very significant number of rules in my local client, but many of the ones I do have are outside of the scope of gmail. I remember being extremely frustrated a few months ago when setting some rules for my parents' account, but I can't recall exactly what I was trying to do at the time. I did like the fact that I was able to set those rules up for them so they operated at google's servers before they would ever see the mail at their clients - I have set them up to fetch mail with the default Apple Mail app from gmail with IMAP, so they never use the web interface.

Gmail has instant and relevant search. I don't need rules.

Even though I'm partial to most of Google's products services (Voice, Music, Picasa, Android, Maps, etc.) I prefer to use a "fat" email client (Thunderbird) to read/respond to email. My @gmail.com address is basically just a forwarding address to me.

My reasons for this don't really have anything to do with any sort of esoteric usage patterns, or being particularly scared of what Google is doing with my email, or any particular hatred for Google's mail functionality, rather, I just find native user interfaces to be far superior to web UIs. Navigating with h/j/k/l keys is understandable when you're running "vi" on a limited terminal, but the arrow keys exist for a reason, which is that h/j/k/l have other uses as, you know, letters in the alphabet that you'll occasionally want to type into a text field.

For this reason, computers over time have added modifier keys (in addition to "Shift") that allow you to signal to the application that you want to do some special action other than typing some text. We all make use of these every day in other applications -- including in our web browsers!

Of course, because "Alt", "Ctrl", "Command", "Option" and friends often have meanings to the application you're running, they're generally off limits to most web applications. You can catch special keys like arrows with JavaScript these days, along with Control keys, but generally you're very limited in how you can do keyboard shortcuts compared to what you can do in native applications. This leads to the awkwardness of having to pay attention to whether you have a text field focused in order to know whether you're going to activate a keyboard shortcut or type some text.

There are other UI niceties we've come to know and love on the desktop aren't available. Using Tab or Ctrl-tab to switch between panes, common in fat clients, doesn't work in web apps. Tabbed interfaces in web apps are awkward because you probably won't have access to Command-[1,2,3...] or Ctrl-[1,2,3...] to select tabs by number. Some web apps will have a shortcut key to focus the search field, but again, you're usually having to figure out if you're already in a text field to know if you can use it or not, when you could just Ctrl-F or Cmd-F in a normal desktop application.

I know these sound like nits, and to some extent, they are, because we all have nice pointing devices on our computers. Still, using the mouse to navigate can be a serious impedement to productivity compared to using the keyboard, and when you use a computer as much as many of us do every day and night, it really does add up.

AJAX and improvements to modern web browsers has made up much of the distance between the speed and functionality of native applications, but when it comes to usability, web apps are much further behind. Surely they'll catch up, but as of right now, I can't imagine having to use Hotmail 9.0 instead of a real email client.

When I don't want every single message to hit my inbox, I need rules. This was important for me when I had e-mail being pushed to my phone along with being accessed online.

And one particular need I had that GMail couldn't do was the ability to apply a label, skip the inbox, but only if my exact e-mail address wasn't in the To or Cc fields. i.e., a message sent to a list should always have a label and skip the inbox. However, if I was also directly sent the message, I wanted it in the inbox.

I wouldn't complain much about this limitation if it was my personal free account, since I'm just the product being sold in that case. However, this limitation did hinder me when I actually was a customer, as part of a company paying them for hosted corporate e-mail. To me, it's a failure if your paid for, commercial service aimed even at enterprise can't match the features of the competitors in the space. Especially when one of those competitors is Microsoft with Exchange.

I do see GMail as being a decent webmail experience, and acceptable for a majority of users out there. Though much like Tony C, I prefer a native client. The rise of the modern free web clients came after I had already migrated to IMAP, and server side filtering, so none of it was particularly novel to me either. Prior to that, I did use a mix of local and webmail, with one of the first free webmail providers out there, USA.net (I worked for their sister company for a bit).

Filtering/searching the inbox in real-time... Ugh! I try to follow "Inbox-zero" for work email, especially since I'm accessing the same box from my phone and like to see it as close to that zero figure as possible.

My apologies, I'm certain I'm not understanding you properly, or I need clarification. To me, it sounds like you could create a very simple filter to do what you want: -to:me -from:me

Wouldn't that accomplish it? Maybe also add -cc:me ?


I completely agree with this. As a result, I never delete anything and it all gets labeled and archived, but I never even look at my labels. I basically just have the inbox and everything else, and a simple search can get me any email I'm looking for, far faster than drilling down through folders.

Mac OS Mail has had a deep search since 2004, integrated with the system-wide Spotlight, so you don't even need to be in Mail to find messages. It's a feature I expect in any modern mail client, so it's not something I see as a particular advantage for GMail.

Anyway, I just see GMail as I do every other piece of software from Google, as a half-baked implementation.