How much attention do pay to websites that you visit? Sometimes, if you look carefully on a high-resolution, high-contrast monitor or LCD you can pick out visual glitches, little artifacts that don’t belong. Mistakes the designers should have caught, but didn’t, or corruption and noise finding its way into the digital canvas. This post is a chronicle of such mistakes, from the high to the low of the online world.

Youtube Uploading Tool:

Youtube thinks my upload progress is “undefined” which is probably a javascript error somewhere.

IE7 Beta 2 Quick Tour:

The text of the IE 7 Beta 2 preview quick tour is littered with ugly black fuzzy outlines around white text which is increasingly noticeable in this screenshot as you gaze from left to right across the screen.

Digg digg a story page:

I have no idea what happened here–it seems like the digg menu is overlapping the page content. Since it’s in FF, I assume this is credible.

Ping-o-Matic pings page:

For some reason or another, something is NULL, but we don’t get more than that:

Grokster.com main page:

The RIAA/MPAA took over Grokster, and left a big gap in the graphics:

They’ve also replaced any content with the following threatening notice:

The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners.

There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them.

YOUR IP ADDRESS IS 71.38.102.159 AND HAS BEEN LOGGED. Don’t think you can’t get caught. You are not anonymous.

Wordpress.com main page footer:

There’s a weird : ) face on the bottom of all the official site pages:

Amazon.com Product Detail Pages:

There’s an ugly website bug that plagues all of the Amazon.com detail pages:

There’s a .083 inch section of the bottom of their header jutting out too far:

Firefox & the Mozilla Project’s online store:

If you look more closely, you will immediately notice that the edges of the image don’t fade to white, but abruptly cut off:

Morgan Stanley’s North-America recruiting and careers page:

You’ll notice the little blue rectangle in the background of the header is a little darker than its surroundings. Contrast enhancement brings this visual artifact out of the mix:

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