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This is hinted at in the HTML5 spec. Vladimir Vukicevic has already created a 3D Firefox Add-on that extends <canvas> with an OpenGL ES context; and others are working on a javascript library that aims to make make Canvas 3D development easier.

How does this relate to the canvas:3d project and related addon?

How does this relate to the canvas:3d project and related addon?

I assume you're talking about winmail.dat files? Try the LookOut addon for Thunderbird. I think this is what I have installed at home to deal with those occasional annoyances.

So he wants prominent display of licensing for the client-side code on websites, and something like Greasemonkey built into OSS browsers?.

You mean the Download Statusbar addon?

He just wants a couple of technical features built into the OSS browsers to support loading custom client-side code and for you to more easily know which license the code is under.

Well, we already have a bunch of popular open source web browsers. How about he use his open source ideals and implement it himself.

I think his problem is with the obfuscation of said javascript and HTML code. His example points to the google code which is supplied with no comments and method naming which has been intentionally obfuscated. A normal web developer has no need to obfuscate the code.

Are you sure that the intent is to obfuscate? There's no other possibility? Maybe shrinking the size of the file transferred to increase performance?

Think of it like modding. Customizing something to fit what the user wants is an incredibly powerful thing and can actually increase the usage of your web app. Think of greasemonkey plugin, which allows you to add some pretty cool functions to certain sites that don't already come with that site. Just because you can't imagine the possibilities doesn't mean someone else won't.

Fine. I'll buy that. But that's a "functionality" thing, not really a "proprietary vs open" thing. Your average user doesn't know or care about that stuff. All they care about is whether or not the website works the way its supposed to.

Most website developers use java script to get some functionality working, and java script is the easiest to do so. There is (usually) no intent to do harm, or take over your computer, or lie to you, or stalk your grandmother.

I think his problem is with the obfuscation of said javascript and HTML code. His example points to the google code which is supplied with no comments and method naming which has been intentionally obfuscated. A normal web developer has no need to obfuscate the code.

The developer just wants to deliver the site to its users complete with certain functionality. Why would you want to run your own version of its java script?

Think of it like modding. Customizing something to fit what the user wants is an incredibly powerful thing and can actually increase the usage of your web app. Think of greasemonkey plugin, which allows you to add some pretty cool functions to certain sites that don't already come with that site. Just because you can't imagine the possibilities doesn't mean someone else won't.

WARNING: The following post is spazzy, and also a huge wall of text. Don't get flattened.

Linux has an annoying security model, for one reason - it's not very unified between cmdline and GUI.

I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.

1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?

2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?

3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.

These fail:

cd etc/X11/

cd etc/X11

cd /etc/X11/

cd /etc/X11

cd etc
cd /X11

cd etc
cd X11

This doesn't:

cd /etc
cd X11

Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...

4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.

5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.

6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and copy stuff around...

And btw, this only takes 1-3 seconds on Windows, because I have a modified run box that opens the correct folder based on the name and some simple heuristics. Why can't linux have a decent find feature? And for that matter, why can't Microsoft create one for Windows? Bleh. They both fail at finding - but at least I can navigate quicker under Windows thanks to brilliant third party coders.

And now some more subjective personal peeves...

7) I hate bash. I really really hate it. A misplaced space, and the whole script breaks down. It's actually simpler for me to script stuff in java than in bash - perhaps because of the more lenient syntax of java. O_o

8) What is up with all that MIME handling rather than extention handling? I have some folders that take a second to display on Windows, but literally take 25-40 seconds in Ubuntu, because of all the identifying of file types.

9) I love the desktop security. Just about everything I try to run off the desktop fails. I tried running a java jar that loads and displays a PNG file from the same folder. It failed - no read permissions! Then I tried un-taring something, and that failed too! (tar -xvvf blah.tar?) I tried to copy it to my NTFS partition, but that also failed, so I re-downloaded it. After verifying they had identical MD5's, I deleted the one on the desktop and un-tar'd it successfully from the NTFS partition. Very cool desktop security. I'll make a note not to download stuff there. That's not really a peeve, to be honest - it was more fascinating to me than anything else.

Final Note: Right now I'm happy and a bit annoyed.

I got systester to compile a little while ago. After that, I installed Fennec, which I had to manually un-tar into /usr/share/, then set up privs so th

I agree about having portable software, which is why I love checking out the portable freeware collection since they always seems to have something new. Being in PC repair I have also found having the computer repair utility toolkit on a flash to be invaluable.

Now as for how many read/writes you are going to get with your apps, why use your main drive for apps? When there is places like surplus computers where you can pick up multipacks of sticks so cheap, and the things are so small on your keyring, it just doesn't make much sense to me to waste read/write cycles on my large flash when I can just pick up a pack cheap. That way if the one I am using for an app on a stick dies, who cares? Just reach in the drawer and grab another one. Slap the apps on and I'm good to go. I just use FEBE to keep my FF bookmarks synced with my Netbox once a day and I'm good.

But with multipacks being so cheap and the things being so handy it just doesn't make sense to me to wear out my big drive using it for apps when I can have a handful of new drives in a drawer ready to go. After all, portable apps aren't bloated. Plus having spare means that I can try different things like Live USB OSes without risking screwing up the ones I use for work. Better safe than sorry.

> The respective companies should offer a running bounty on exploits on their browsers.

You mean like http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html ?

The problem is that browser exploits sell for about $10,000 at the moment (that's how much various "security" companies will pay for them). The bug bounty above is $500...

It looks to me as though IE 8 does just this. The matched part of the url is in a bolder face than the rest of the address. Cool!

I've been using Locationbar for Firefox 3 to get that functionality, plus it makes it easy to navigate to other directories in the URL (moving up a level, etc). I didn't write it but I'd definitely recommend it.

Webchunks - does what webslices does, but works on any part of any page.

Activities - before IE changed the name to "Accelerators".

If you're ever in doubt about the validity of the certificate or security of a transaction, however, DON'T DO IT!

Can't agree more. See this example of a MITM attack.

I'm just allergic to bullshit so I try to combat it wherever and whenever I see it.

Which is to say that you're unwilling to see the other side of the issue. You'd rather find some way to slip an argument through the needle?

Whether or not IE's addins are good or completely suck, whether or not there exists an ad-blocker addin for IE, the simple fact of the matter is that IE *does* have addins, and *has* had addins for longer than Firefox has existed.

Only if you're nitpicking language. Firefox add-ins are technologically similar in principle to what IE is capable of, but not the same at all from a user's perspective. From a user's perspective, they open the add-on manager, search for something cool, install it, and get new features in their browser that are embedded deep into its function. With IE, they can get a toolbar installed with various software (often whether intended to install it or not) that adds more useless buttons for them to click. How is the experience even remotely comparable? And some functionality is presented as an ActiveX control or ActiveX plugin. Which is yet another different thing that the user doesn't associate.

Basically, Internet Explorer has nothing like this catalog: https://addons.mozilla.org/

That's what a user believes. And they're more or less correct from the perspective they're looking at it.

Except perhaps for "3D bookmark management", what does that even mean?

Slight misspeak on my part. It's 3D Tab Management I was thinking of.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8879

3D bookmark management is a different browser. ;-)

I'm just allergic to bullshit so I try to combat it wherever and whenever I see it.

Which is to say that you're unwilling to see the other side of the issue. You'd rather find some way to slip an argument through the needle?

Whether or not IE's addins are good or completely suck, whether or not there exists an ad-blocker addin for IE, the simple fact of the matter is that IE *does* have addins, and *has* had addins for longer than Firefox has existed.

Only if you're nitpicking language. Firefox add-ins are technologically similar in principle to what IE is capable of, but not the same at all from a user's perspective. From a user's perspective, they open the add-on manager, search for something cool, install it, and get new features in their browser that are embedded deep into its function. With IE, they can get a toolbar installed with various software (often whether intended to install it or not) that adds more useless buttons for them to click. How is the experience even remotely comparable? And some functionality is presented as an ActiveX control or ActiveX plugin. Which is yet another different thing that the user doesn't associate.

Basically, Internet Explorer has nothing like this catalog: https://addons.mozilla.org/

That's what a user believes. And they're more or less correct from the perspective they're looking at it.

Except perhaps for "3D bookmark management", what does that even mean?

Slight misspeak on my part. It's 3D Tab Management I was thinking of.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8879

3D bookmark management is a different browser. ;-)

If you have Firefox 3.1:

http://tinyvid.tv/

Real time Chroma-Key replacement: https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

(Let's see you do THAT in Flash!)

Please be gentle with my server, but here's my own Chroma-Key experiments for Firefox 3.1b3:

http://iambatman.homeip.net/html5/index.xhtml

Click "Play", then mess with the "Chroma Key", "Invert", and "Mute" buttons to your heart's delight.

(The video is a random green screen video pulled off of Youtube.)

Note that this should work in Safari 4 with the OGG plugin. Unfortunately, the OGG plugin is out of date for Windows. It would be easy to configure MP4 as a fallback for Safari, but I haven't gotten that far yet. :P

I looked up the Firefox 3.1b3 experiments in case anyone is interested. Here's the experiment itself:

https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

Here's the page explaining the experiment:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas

Don't let the small video size fool you. I've managed much larger videos thanks to TraceMonkey's high performance. In doing my own experiments, I realized that they shrunk the final product so that areas where the color wasn't being properly replaced (or worse yet, reflections from poor camera technique) wouldn't be as visible.

I looked up the Firefox 3.1b3 experiments in case anyone is interested. Here's the experiment itself:

https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

Here's the page explaining the experiment:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas

Don't let the small video size fool you. I've managed much larger videos thanks to TraceMonkey's high performance. In doing my own experiments, I realized that they shrunk the final product so that areas where the color wasn't being properly replaced (or worse yet, reflections from poor camera technique) wouldn't be as visible.

The calendar plugin is Lightning. I do not believe it handles Exchange calendars. It will pull in your Google calendars though.

Except it's not accurate, as threads!=processes. Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, but Firefox has to be multithreaded. Here, a random search on bugzilla turns up this bug which is directly related to multithreading - there's no reason a program would lock on a semaphore if it wasn't multithreaded. Or this one, race conditions are solely a problem with multithreaded applications.

Except it's not accurate, as threads!=processes. Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, but Firefox has to be multithreaded. Here, a random search on bugzilla turns up this bug which is directly related to multithreading - there's no reason a program would lock on a semaphore if it wasn't multithreaded. Or this one, race conditions are solely a problem with multithreaded applications.

Collaborative filter plugin for Firefox... lots of dads working together to repel the barbarians at the gates, so to speak.

It says for children under 12; I'm not sure when girls start talking about "hot guys"...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5881

If FF3 is pulling from your past browsing history, you need to use whatever beta has the 'porn mode' or the Distrust add-on.

Foxfilter is a password protected firefox content filter. So unless you have another browser installed it should do the job. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4351

I went through all of the motions in TFA (downloading this plugin and then using its option to save the target of this link and got a very high speed download (it read 1.3M/sec), but what surprised me more is that I was actually able to download the .wmv file at all! (note, I don't use NetFlix) Of course it wouldn't play because of the DRM and the fact that my lazy-man's searches for cracking have led to dead-ends.

Oh well, back to TPB!

They have an app publication platform already,why not build an app store?

We think this is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480975 Do you have javascript.options.jit.chrome set to true in about:config?

If you are using Firefox you can get the slashdotter addon, amongst other things it gives you cache links in case the page gets slashdotted.

If you aren't using Firefox, you can get it here

If you aren't using Firefox and don't want to get it, you should go here

As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.

NO. The about:config setting got removed on purpose so that you'd have to jump through hoops if you didn't want to use awesomebar. THIS is the kind of BS that is starting to turn people off Firefox.

To get back your old behaviour you either need these extensions:

Option 1) Hideunivisted AND oldbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

OR

2) Old Location BAR (but you'll need to create an account and log in because it's experimental
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637

Even then
A) your behaviour won't be exactly the same as pre-FF 3.0
B) You'll have to wait for updated versions of the extension to work with FF 3.1 beta or 3.5 or whatever they release it as. Currently they work with 3.0.x.

So please stop spreading lies.

Showing people who walk by everything in your bookmarks every time you type something into the location bar and taking up twice the screen realestate is not awesome. It's retarded.

As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.

NO. The about:config setting got removed on purpose so that you'd have to jump through hoops if you didn't want to use awesomebar. THIS is the kind of BS that is starting to turn people off Firefox.

To get back your old behaviour you either need these extensions:

Option 1) Hideunivisted AND oldbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

OR

2) Old Location BAR (but you'll need to create an account and log in because it's experimental
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637

Even then
A) your behaviour won't be exactly the same as pre-FF 3.0
B) You'll have to wait for updated versions of the extension to work with FF 3.1 beta or 3.5 or whatever they release it as. Currently they work with 3.0.x.

So please stop spreading lies.

Showing people who walk by everything in your bookmarks every time you type something into the location bar and taking up twice the screen realestate is not awesome. It's retarded.

As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.

NO. The about:config setting got removed on purpose so that you'd have to jump through hoops if you didn't want to use awesomebar. THIS is the kind of BS that is starting to turn people off Firefox.

To get back your old behaviour you either need these extensions:

Option 1) Hideunivisted AND oldbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

OR

2) Old Location BAR (but you'll need to create an account and log in because it's experimental
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637

Even then
A) your behaviour won't be exactly the same as pre-FF 3.0
B) You'll have to wait for updated versions of the extension to work with FF 3.1 beta or 3.5 or whatever they release it as. Currently they work with 3.0.x.

So please stop spreading lies.

Showing people who walk by everything in your bookmarks every time you type something into the location bar and taking up twice the screen realestate is not awesome. It's retarded.

In case you use firefox, try this extension (for example): Ghostery. It pops up a list of all the tracking scripts found on the web page you're browsing. Try leaving his on for a week and count how many websites track you. If your friends or family use firefox, install it for them, too.

I did. It brought up nothing interesting. Perhaps you've been browsing pr0n without using Distrust or some similar add-on?

I believe the FF beta introduces a 'porn mode', so this add-on should be obsolete very soon. Clearly that and the AwesomeBar should have been introduced concurrently.

Check this out:

https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

You can now dump the video to a Canvas for manipulation! Which means that you can now do real-time video effects in Firefox! The example above demonstrates Chroma-Key background replacement. An impressive feat for a web browser, wouldn't you say? :-)

Source and explanation are here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas

Check this out:

https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

You can now dump the video to a Canvas for manipulation! Which means that you can now do real-time video effects in Firefox! The example above demonstrates Chroma-Key background replacement. An impressive feat for a web browser, wouldn't you say? :-)

Source and explanation are here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas

Whoa there, guess you didn't see the news...
The upcoming release of 3.1 is going to be named 3.5.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/3.5

My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.

It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.

I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.

The old location bar addon is MUCH closer to FF2 style bar wrt functionality as well as looks but since the dev's don't like the idea of people reverting the functionality they have left it in "experimental" status since June of last year forcing you to signup for a (free) account.

I personally use Old Location Bar. It works better for me than oldbar did.

I prefer Tree Style Tab with the tabs down the left. Only problems I have with it are (1) closing a tab which is hiding other tabs closes them all (a feature), but Undo Close Tab only brings them back one at a time, and if it contained a lot, you can't get them all back, and (2) it occasionally locks up for me trying to drag tabs to new positions, but which I don't do very often.

This might tide you over.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/mozilla-1.9.1-linux/1236876773/firefox-3.1b4pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

It looks like they did. Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is still not available on the All Betas page, and when you click on the Download Now link on the Release Notes page, you get Firefox 3.1 beta 2.

if you really wanted firefox 3.1 beta 3 then you'd be using it like i do since march 6th, since build2 of this beta release candidate has been published onto the ftp server (fx3.1b3 is really _that_ folder):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.1b3-candidates/build2/

You might look at the tab mix plus extension. It allows for a multi-level tab bar, among other handy features, like duplicating tabs and breaking a tab off into its own window.

See bug 273310 (not that there's much there to help)

That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.

Firefox 3.5 won't have support for other codecs than those that are built in (various Xiph codecs (Vorbis, Theora) and Wav). Since it won't be possible to install extra codecs for use in Firefox Firefox won't contribute to "normal people" installing random codecs from the net. If/when support for system codecs land (probably after 3.5) you may get the problem you describe.

That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.

Firefox 3.5 won't have support for other codecs than those that are built in (various Xiph codecs (Vorbis, Theora) and Wav). Since it won't be possible to install extra codecs for use in Firefox Firefox won't contribute to "normal people" installing random codecs from the net. If/when support for system codecs land (probably after 3.5) you may get the problem you describe.

That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.

Firefox 3.5 won't have support for other codecs than those that are built in (various Xiph codecs (Vorbis, Theora) and Wav). Since it won't be possible to install extra codecs for use in Firefox Firefox won't contribute to "normal people" installing random codecs from the net. If/when support for system codecs land (probably after 3.5) you may get the problem you describe.

>So after shoving a freaking DATABASE into Firefox 2,

yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.

>they're now adding a freaking VIDEO playback feature?!

Yes. The web is a different place than it was even 5 years ago. Video is the norm, and once the video tag takes off, this will be very valuable to most users. Those that may not need or want video are probably smart enough to find a different browser that is more suitable to their needs.

>On the upside, it's nice to see Firefox is finally supporting JSON.

JSON has been supported in FF since 3.0. FF 3.1 drops JSON.jsm for native JSON. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JSON