Want to know if your website can stand up to a sudden, massive deluge of traffic? Sure, you could use some of the available tools like Flood, JMeter or The Ginder. But none of those options have bees with machine guns.

The news applications team at the Chicago Tribune, has released a new tool it calls Bees with Machine Guns that uses Amazon EC2 servers to launch what amounts to a distributed DoS attack against your site.

Now only is it an incredibly handy way to load test a website under arguably more realistic conditions than you’d get with other load testing tools, Bees with Machine Guns has awesome print statements that will turn your terminal session into a war zone.

For example:

$ fab -f bees.py attack:http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/,1000,100
Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 500 rounds, 50 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
[localhost] run: curl http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/ >> /dev/null
Organizing the swarm.
Bee 0 is joining the swarm.
Bee 1 is joining the swarm.
Bee 0 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 1 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 0 is out of ammo.
Bee 1 lost sight of the target (connection timed out).
Offensive complete.
     Target failed to fully respond to 1 bees.
     Complete requests:     500
     Requests per second:   81.670000 [#/sec] (mean)
     Time per request:      612.188000 [ms] (mean)
     50% response time:     358.000000 [ms] (mean)
     90% response time:     1541.000000 [ms] (mean)
Mission Assessment: Target successfully fended off the swarm.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.
Done.

Keep in mind that this is essentially a DoS attack. Launch it against a site that isn’t yours and very bad things will happen to you. But for testing your own site’s performance, Bees with Machine Guns is awesome — all you need is an EC2 account and the script.

Major bonus points if your site can fend off the bees with miniature pies:

See Also:

• Development Tips to Improve Your Code Quality
• Write Your README Before Your Code
• Google’s New Cloud Storage Service Takes on Amazon S3

Are you one of those hyper-multitaskers (aka insane weirdos) who keeps a bazillion browser tabs open at once?

Here’s something for you, and for the tab-curious: Tab Candy, a new experimental feature in Firefox that groups tabs into topical clusters to improve your workflow. It’s made entirely with JavaScript and HTML.

Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin offers this synopsis:

With one keystroke Tab Candy shows an overview of all tabs to allow you to quickly locate and switch between them. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites, however it makes sense to you to group tabs. When you switch to a grouped tab only the relevant tabs are shown in the tab bar, which helps you focus on what you want.

Here’s a video of Tab Candy in action.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Tab Candy has been kicking around as a pre-release for a while, but it’s just now getting to the point where the Mozilla folks feel it’s ready to be tested by a wider audience.

If you want to try it out, head to Raskin’s site where you can download a TabCandy-enabled build of Firefox. Note that this isn’t an extension, it’s a bleeding-edge build of Firefox with Tab Candy built in, so plan accordingly.

There’s also an FAQ, and a feedback forum you can use to get answers or submit requests.

See Also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4

Back at the beginning of July, we saw the release of Firefox 4 beta 1. The first beta version of Mozilla’s next browser shipped with some important user interface changes — most notably, Windows users got tabs-on-top and the new Firefox Button. It’s a button that sits at the top of the browser window and contains all of the most-used menu options, neatly nested in hierarchical menus and accessible via one click.

The final browser isn’t expected until October, but the team is still experimenting. The picture above is one such experiment, a rough first draft at “flattening” the new Firefox Button, which turns it into something less of a “Greatest Hits” menu and more of a browser dashboard.

Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin, who really did this to satisfy his own curiosity, writes:

Hierarchical menus are almost always slower to use than flattened menus. This is a first-draft pass at flattening the Firefox Button’s menu. For things like accessing bookmarks, I’ve left the menu as a secondary action. In truth, I ran out of time while doing the bottom left hand corner of the mockup and so it is still very raw and not right. I’ve also moved more rich interactions to the right side pane. Letting us bubble up interesting add-ons and extension points inside the Firefox menu, as well as give real indication and controls to Sync.

Keep in mind that this design is just an idea and most likely will not be part of the next Firefox. But Raskin’s design could push the button in interesting directions.

See Also:

• Firefox Home Syncs Your Faves to Your iPhone
• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download

Mozilla hopes to deliver the second beta version of Firefox 4 to users before the end of next week, according to the minutes from its recent developer’s meeting.

Tuesday’s meeting notes show the team has picked next Thursday, July 22 as the proposed ship date for Firefox 4 beta 2.

There are several enhancements on the way in beta 2, but the one sure to raise the most interest (or the biggest stink) is the new tabs-on-top interface for Mac OS X users. Windows users got the tabs-on-top look as the default interface in Beta 1 earlier this month. With beta 2, the rollout continues to other OSes.

The tabs-on-top interface is a growing trend among browser vendors. It was popularized by Google Chrome, which shipped with top-tabs as the default within its initial release. Reaction was mostly positive — Opera now puts the tabs on top, and Safari tried the same thing in a beta release thing before abandoning it. But there are some within the Firefox user community who don’t want to see Mozilla’s browser make the switch just to chase the latest design fad.

Mozilla’s lead user experience designer Alex Faaborg defends the decision, saying it has nothing to do with fashion. By putting the tabs on top, he argues, Firefox 4 will be better suited to running web applications that sit in their own tab. It turns the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar — a fitting change, since the browser is becoming something much closer to a GUI for an operating system.

Here’s a mock-up showing several web apps running in top-placed tabs in Firefox. The browser may not end up with this design, but it nicely illustrates Faaborg’s idea.

Here’s a seven-minute video his team produced that furthers the debate:

Of course, if you don’t like your tabs up top, you can always revert to the old look in the browser’s View menu.

Some other stuff due in Firefox 4 Beta 2: CSS transitions, better handling of retained layers on pages and a new feature in the add-ons manager that confirms when an add-on has been installed.

As always, Mozilla’s ship dates and feature lists (especially for beta releases) aren’t final. The team usually sticks to the proposed plan, but don’t be angry or surprised if the release slips to the following Monday.

The final browser is expected within a few months, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.

Illustration at the top courtesy of Mozilla. Firefox mock-up by Stephen Horlander and Alex Faaborg/Mozilla/CC.

See Also:

• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 Now Available for Download
• Firefox Sync Graduates From Labs, Ready for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

Safari 5′s seemingly innocuous new Reader feature, which isolates the text on a webpage making it easier to read, has sparked a surprising amount of outrage from web publishers who think Apple is trying to squash online advertisements and attack their livelihood.

But there’s been an equally distinctive and vocal reaction from readers, one that can be summed up quite simply: “Thank you.”

Similar tools have been around for eons, starting with the “Print this page” link of the last century, all the way up to tools like Readability, whose code Apple borrowed for its browser. But the advent of Safari Reader seems to have galvanized a point of view that’s been brewing for a while: Webpages are too cluttered and difficult to read.

So publishers, listen up. Your readers, the people you depend on to reach your bottom line, have something to say. It’s a pretty simple message: Your webpages are hostile to reading. It’s time to start paying much closer attention to the design of your pages — not just to reduce clutter and make everything easier to read, but to make sure your text maintains that readability across the broad range of screen sizes, devices and browser configurations people are using today.

It’s telling that Apple, a company with a history of only adding the most-needed features to its products, decided its browser would benefit from a tool that strips away the clutter on a page. Of course, one could make the argument that Reader is simply a subtle attempt to drive publishers toward Apple’s iOS platform, where you can create apps filled with iAds that can’t be removed. However, it would be a shame if that’s the only message publishers took from Safari’s Reader. After all, Reader is not an ad blocker, and given that there are ad blockers available for every browser, Reader is hardly a new threat. Reader is only presented as an option after the page has loaded, the ads have been displayed and impressions (i.e., the money part) have been registered.

The message of Reader (and tools of its ilk) isn’t that the online publishing model is doomed, but that it desperately needs a reboot to get rid of all the junk that’s clogging up the whole point of the system: connecting readers with the information they want.

Savvy publishers have an inkling that something is wrong. The popular British news site The Guardian, for one. The Guardian notes in its review of Safari 5′s Reader feature, “technologies like Safari Reader sound a salutary warning to media companies and advertisers…. From now on, we must love our readers or die.”

But The Guardian is putting its money where it’s mouth is. The site recently launched its Open Content Platform, complete with a Content API which allows anyone to grab an article from The Guardian and use it how they see fit — within the guidelines of The Guardian‘s terms of service.

One of the best creations to come out of The Guardian‘s new API is Phil Gyford’s Today’s Guardian.

The primary purpose of Today’s Guardian is to make reading news articles easier. For Gyford, that means eliminating distractions — sidebars are gone, comments zapped, menus pared down and page navigation radically simplified. We take issue with the removal of comments, but in short, it’s The Guardian redesigned with ease of reading as the primary goal.

As Gyford notes in his overview, it’s “a shame that such tools are even necessary … if you were creating a site whose purpose is to provide articles to read, wouldn’t you want to make it perform that task really well?”

If you’re wondering what makes a more readable design, read through Gyford’s post first. Also check out Mandy Brown’s In Defense of Readers on A List Apart. It’s filled with excellent advice on what to think about when designing a reader-friendly layout. (She’s the creative director at Etsy.)

“Limit distractions to the full extent possible,” Brown writes. Pull quotes are great, she says, as long as they’re near the top of an article where they can draw a reader in. But they become distracting farther down. She also advises on white space, typographic treatments, and where best to place your visual distractions so you don’t foul up the reading experience (the top and the bottom).

Brown’s own site, A Working Library is an exemplar of usability. Load it in Safari Reader and the only things that are removed are the header and footer.

A clean page layout falls apart when the proper attention isn’t paid to typography, and in that department, Blaine Cook has some homework for you. He gives you a way to calculate the proper text size mathematically by sizing all of your text in ems. This makes it much easier to find the proper pairing of column width and text size, giving your readers an easier time no matter what resolution, browser, or device they’re using.

He points to two useful tools: his own RePublish, which helps solve font-size issues across multiple screen resolutions, and Mathias Nater’s Hyphenator.js, a JavaScript library that intelligently reflows your text with clean hyphenation so you can run justified columns.

Cook’s methods will “make your site look amazing on the shiny new devices,” he says, but they will also improve readability in a good old-fashioned desktop web browser. On that note, he warns against the common practice of designing different layouts and serving different stylesheets for different-size screens.

“You shouldn’t be optimizing for iPads,” Cook writes. “Or iPhones. Or iPhone 4Gs. Or Nexus Ones. Or 30-inch 90ppi screens, or 30-inch 300ppi screens. You should be optimizing for reading experience, and you should be using the best techniques available to do so.”

Advice? Links we should see? Put them in the comments below.

See Also:

• Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Simplifies the Web
• Review: New Features Bring Safari 5 Up to Speed
• Designers, Step Away From the Photoshop
• Where on the Web Is HTML5?

Photo: Vlasta2/Flickr/CC

Steve Jobs hates your website’s design.

That’s the impression we’re left with after playing with Safari 5′s new feature, Reader. It takes a web page and, in Apple’s words, “removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles,” presenting a clean, uncluttered version of the page content.

To try it out — head the Safari download page and grab a copy of Safari 5, which was made available Monday for Mac OS X and Windows. Click the Reader button (located in the URL bar once a page loads) and Safari 5 will overlay the current page with a black shade. You can also launch it with a keyboard shortcut (Command-Shift-R on a Mac, Esc to exit). The main article on the page is shown against a plain white background, stripping away ads, sidebars, headers and footers. Also, Reader pulls multiple-page articles into the window, so once you hit the first page, you don’t have to click anything to read more. Just scroll down, and the extra pages are tacked on at the end automatically.

The result is a clear message to web designers: Your designs are failing your readers. In contrast to what we all see everyday, Reader’s vision of the web is a very clean and more readable place — there are no distractions, nothing competes for your attention, the web page is suddenly simple and elegant.

It’s no secret that most people spend very little time on a web page; sites have mere seconds to capture a reader’s attention. With so many sidebars, gadgets, animated ads and other confusion, is it any wonder that most people just move on?

Reader’s vision of the web doesn’t make sense on every site, but for long articles in particular, it’s a godsend.

Read our full walk-through of Safari 5 here on Webmonkey.

Of course, Reader isn’t an entirely new idea. Browser add-ons and bookmark scripts like Readability have long offered the same feature (with customization options even), but this is the first time we’ve seen a browser ship with the feature. In that sense, Reader could be a signal of the tides changing.

On one level, Reader seems like it could hurt publishers by subtracting ad revenue, and it could hurt ad networks like Google’s. But Safari loads the entire page — ads and all — before it presents the Reader button in the URL bar. So, by the time the person clicks on the button and launches the Reader view, the ad impressions have already been counted. Reader also has the ability to string multiple pages together, and it appears as though Safari is loading all of the information (including the ads) from the next pages, but only displaying the text. Ad impression numbers should be unaffected by Safari Reader, but click-through numbers will no doubt go down. Also, we noticed some ads served within the text body made it through into the Reader view, so it’s not perfect at stripping out ads.

The message that ads are distracting is nothing new — ad blockers are as old as sin — but the the more interesting implicit message is that the web is currently a cluttered confusing mess. Or at least Apple thinks it is and, having used Reader all morning, we’re inclined to agree.

Apple’s vision of the web does not include Twitter sidebars, recently popular article links, fancy headers or sharing widgets. In short, Reader cuts through the distractions to the actual content. Of course, that’s exactly what good design should do in the first place — focus your attention on what’s important. If every web page were well-designed, there would be no need for Reader. Clearly, that’s not the case.

As web developers ourselves, we appreciate experimental page layout designs. But when it comes to actually reading things on the web, less is far more. In short, we’re hooked. Well, technically, we installed Readability in Chrome and Firefox, but conceptually, the idea of a cleaner, simpler, more readable web is a step forward.

What remains to be seen is how designer’s react to Reader. Some backlash seems inevitable; some sites may even go so far as to block Safari — though that would an extreme move given that just because you’re using Safari does not mean you’re using Reader. In fact, most users may not even notice or use the feature.

However, we’re hoping that not only will something similar appear in other browsers, but that web designers will focus on simplifying their designs. Reader takes things to an extreme. There are ways to give content focus without eliminating nearly everything, and we look forward to seeing that idea gain more currency.

We’re also looking forward to an iPhone version of Reader that eliminates iAds.

See Also:

• Apple (Almost) Releases Safari 5
• Designers, Step Away From the Photoshop
• Where on the Web Is HTML5?