There’s a small grey box rendered in an iFrame in the top left hand corner of Gmail, and TechCrunchIT is trying to figure out what it is. The icon is a ten by ten pixel graphic with a diagonal line across it, with one half in black and the other in gray. It isn’t an inline image, as you can not highlite it or select it in your browser, nor right-click on it. There is also no reference to the image within the style sheet for Gmail.
So what is it? Since it’s being rendered in an iFrame it’s difficult to say. We’ve been emailing back and forth with Google since Wednesday but so far they haven’t said what it is. What’s your best conspiracy theory? The most elaborate/entertaining or most accurate comment (on TechCrunchIT) gets a free TechCrunch Tshirt.
1.) Google’s representation of the dichotomy of good and evil…or maybe evil and not-so-evil.
2.) It’s Google’s weak spot. Blast it with your snowspeeder!
3.) Ultimately, it is the only reason GMail is still in Beta.
If you inject “border:0px” into the css class named invfr, the page curl goes away. Its an iframe without boarders and without body content issue.
Obviously since it’s only on FF its a way for Google to send secret messages to the open source users while keeping the hedonists that use proprietary software. Soon it will command everyone using FF to launch a massive attack on the headquarters at Microsoft and then take the attack to Apple.
Isn’t it obvious?
who cares if there is a litten dot?
Ok, after some very thorough investigation we know what it is and we have video proof. The video is going to come up here in a few.
It’s an attempt by the communist government of Canada at spying on the world, stealing information so they can pay for the welfare of the uneducated French Canadians. That and 53% taxes on gas.
Never invest there because none of their women like me.
It’s a T Frame
I’ve just posted a video but it doesn’t show up. Another one will follow that brings the resolution to this issue
It’s T Frame part 2
There we go, we solved the mystery. It was a little harder then I thought and the final video is still in moderation. But we definitely uncovered the truth. You can hire us for any other private investigation services
Sorry the second video that reveals the mystery is still in moderation… Hopefully it will be up soon.
It’s actually just a couple iframes that they forgot to set border:0 on. If you have firebug, select one of the iframes that has class .invfr, set border to 0, and they’ll disappear.
I think it belongs to Pandora. She called and would like it back now…
come on guys, the second video is still in moderation…
omg! don´t look at that grey box more than 25s. google could read your mind. fetch, retrieve and index every word, memory and feeling and stores the resulting in a huge database
Google Engineer 1 to Google Engineer 2. I bet I can get 264 comments in 32 hours by putting a little box on Gmail. Google Engineer 2 your on!
Techcrunch sucks when it comes to allowing their video posts. I have some way back that are still in moderation. Yes, seesmic is so useful.
Why do I come to techcrunch anymore?? This isn’t news, it’s an error. It’s pretty bad that Michael can’t even come up with more interesting things to talk about. Then again, I post this knowing they don’t give a shit because people continue to visit techcrunch in hope of those rare ‘decent’ articles.
It’s an extraneous nipple, a sign of communion with Satan. That explains why Google’s stuff is always so cool.
DHS
If you look closely, it looks like a page turned … something similar to this http://www.borisfx.com/images/bcc3/pageTurn.jpg
Possibly a brand new version (possibly a black theme) could be releasing within a few weeks and this is Google’s viral campaign
Just my thoughts
Interesting discovery
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Obviously, this is the world’s tiniest page peel advertisement.
its a spy camera for viacom
It is an infinitely complex replica of the universe, as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake. However, it is compressed to such a size that it appears to be a gray box.
I wonder if this is related to the new privacy feature that’s currently being rolled out. It lets users to monitor their account access. It will show how many computers the account is open on. It will show it at the footer:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....l-account/
Darn, you’r all geeks indeed. #21 deserves a T-Shirt and numbers 1 thru 276 need a day off away from their computers.
******************************************
CSS ERROR
******************************************
Its a CSS error people. See how it has re-generated with Very Simple HTML Page.
http://www.48g.net/gmail/test.html
******************************************
It’s the flag of the country of Google
Thats a secretive camera of the Ministry of Truth watching us.
It’s just the iframe default browser style. They “forgot” to reset the iframe border to “none” deafult is 2px wide. it very easy to reproduce take a look here http://oncemade.com/google/
I have 4 iframes with different border width and color the last iframe has been reset to “border: none;”
I hate to tell eveyone this, buy I’m afraid I must come clean.
We at google have been working on a technology so advanced…
*sigh
We think the world may be in danger.
These small, 10px by 10px boxes may begin to turn up in every day searches. They will spread out of the internet and into daily life. Soon the world will be infected by these seemingly insignificant boxes.
What are they exactly? No one is sure, but we do know that it is said that the chosen one will be able to right click (or command click on a Mac) and banish the box back to the world it came from.
Rising day care costs limit the length of this message,
please… be safe…
hold your loved ones, pray…
the boxes are coming.
– Anonymous Google representative.
P.S.
“Are you feeling lucky?”
我也在好奇这个东西
There are 5 Iframes actually!
1. For the javascript files loading (the JS is obfuscated so I’m not entirely sure what all they do. But there are over 50 JS scripts being loaded by that IFrame)
2. To maintain your action history or navigation history. (Not sure which at this time)
3. One for the sound playing (I believe for the GMail chat)
4. The main canvas frame which contains the GMail UI
5. One more IFrame whose use I’ve been unable to determine so far.
That’s about it for the mystery of the IFrame
Oops. Sorry for posting that here. Should read the post more carefully!
a small folded corner? who knows? i just want a t-shirt.
Dont want the tee.
And I think it serves a dual purpose.
For us, its a page curl and for them it might be a better version of the red square that they used to have when they were loading something on the page.
the gray box is the key for the world energy saving and a clean future
It’s the first part of a new feature:
You can click that corner and drag it, like a normal paper page.
And on the next page, there’s …
they forgot to set border thickness of the frames to zero !
to solve this problem they should add border:none; to .invfr class in their css file!
.invfr
{
position: absolute;
left: 0pt;
top: 0pt;
z-index: -1;
width: 0pt;
height: 0pt;
border:none;
}
I think that this is google’s first step towards making gmail “iPhone” like. It makes the page feel a little more as page and less as internet html. This is my guess.
Praetorians
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(film)
I heard a rumor that someone was gmailing a video clip of a big Liza Minnelli number and a piece of glitter came off and got stuck on the page.
This is a nail that holds the page to the browser so it wont fall from its own weight.
In the basic HTML this is gone.
no needs for nails there!
+1 for Pooya…
Their invfr class (”invisible frame”) doesn’t have the border set to none. This techincally shouldn’t be an issue because all borders should render inside the zero width. This is a FF3 bug that is caused by
width:0
height:0
border-style:inset;
border-width:2px;
Make a div with this style and you will get the Gmail “page curl”
It’s obviously a page curl that only opens if you’re inside the Google firewall (i.e. in the Googleplex) to reveal a multi-user flash based game called Googolopoly. Us mere mortals can only get a paper copy here: http://www.box.net/shared/dguu2bfy88
Its actually 3 iframes in 1 and it looks like it all tracking stuff. One of them has a flash component in it and the other seems to have some UI version information.
@Pooya I wonder if they left it this way intentionally so that it wouldn’t look like they were trying to hide something.
I looks like the first of the 3 iframes are used to load all the JavaScript libs so that they aren’t loaded in the main html content.
The last one loads a flash file that appears to provide sounds for the in gmail chat faetures.
The last one is called hist_frame so it probably is used to store some inforation used between pages since the whole page is an iframe you never leave the initial page.
It’s actually the border of 3 iframes. They’re all absolutely positioned at the upper left corner, so you only see 1 iframe border. Change the styling for .invfr to position:relative and you’ll see 3 of those boxes, not just one. Add border:0 and the boxes disappear.
you can find what I said by using web developer Toolbar for firefox :
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
when you install this add-on on your firefox, go to Miscellaneous menu and Linearize Page and now you can see there are 3 “mysterious-grey-box”es, after that go to CSS menu and use View Style Information, to find the style of the selected element - and you will see they are 3 iframes - , now by moving mouse over them and click you can view the style of the “mysterious-grey-box”es !
Now go to CSS menu and push Edit CSS and add these lines of code to current CSS :
.invfr
{
position: absolute;
left: 0pt;
top: 0pt;
z-index: -1;
width: 0pt;
height: 0pt;
border:none;
}
hooray ! there is no gray boxes in page !