Slashdot Mirror

- Why isn't there more transparency about MoFo/Co's finances - why can't you publish where you get money from, how much, and what you do with it?
- Is it not in fact the case that the Mozilla project is now mostly controlled by Google, which provides the overwhelming majority of funds?
- How much money does Google make due to FF/SM's choice of Google as the default search engine, and how much of that money goes back into Mozilla development?
- It seems to an outsider that very little effort is devoted to Mail&News / TB compared to FF. Is this true?
- How do you see the future of Mail&News/ TB development, considering the conflicting interest Google has in the matter (GMail)?

And unrelated, technical questions:

- Why does Gecko continue not to support significant aspects of CSS2 properly? Example: bug 5016.
- How does FF2 / Geck trunk measure up in the W3C CSS testsuite?
- Why is Gecko, and FF/SM/TB, not multi-threaded (these are two questions!) ?
- Why does Firefox' memory footprint balloon up to hundreds of megabytes so often?
- Why don't Firefox and Thunderbird share most of their memory, the 'engine' part?

You don't have the Mac developers to fix-up Firefox? Do you guys even talk to the Camino team? Even if you just borrowed Keychain support from them, Firefox would be a huge improvement on the Mac.

Chris: Compatibility with IE is something we look very seriously at (in all areas, not just the DOM API) and in the obvious cases where there's no specification (de facto or "standard") that dictates what the right thing is -- we do our best to match IE's behavior.

This is one tool I really find useful for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/

If you can't stand flash, then its for you.

> An important feature currently missing from Firefox that I'm looking forward to is a way
> to load pre-compiled binary bytecode into Firefox

Actually, that feature exists and is used in Firefox at startup. See http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/js/src/jsx drapi.h#45 for the API.

Now you can't do it from inside the JavaScript language. But any consumer of the C JSAPI can do this.

for reporting spam in thunderbird just use the Okopipi extension

https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2672/

it's great for reporting spam that gets through the spam filters.

Can be used for reporting spam to SpamCop, the FTC, FDA, SEC, ACMA (Australia) and / or Knujon.com. It also allows you to put in your own custom addresses to report spam to such as your ISP or corporate abuse address.

What i like about it is that it bunches all the spam in a single report mail with all the spam messages as attachments.
Also, i filter my spam in separate junk folders for SEC / FDA / others and i report to them just the appropriate crappola.

Multithreading isn't on the table, but the ECMAScript 4 proposal (which will eventually be implemented in Tamarin) does include generators and iterators, which is a nice partial step to some easier coding techniques:

http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/proposals/iterato rs_and_generators.html

The file you linked to is an an ECMAScript parser. It's the bytecode parser -- Abc stands for ActionScript bytecode. Its the intermediate format that Adobe's compiler creates and stuffs into .swf files for execution. The virtual machien parses the bytecode and executes the instructions found.

The Tamarin project does not include Adobe's Java ECMAScript compiler used to create the abd block. Instead, it contains a "self hosting" compiler, located in this directory. Specifically, the ECMAScript parser, written in ActionScript, is here. This is explained in the FAQ.

The file you linked to is an an ECMAScript parser. It's the bytecode parser -- Abc stands for ActionScript bytecode. Its the intermediate format that Adobe's compiler creates and stuffs into .swf files for execution. The virtual machien parses the bytecode and executes the instructions found.

The Tamarin project does not include Adobe's Java ECMAScript compiler used to create the abd block. Instead, it contains a "self hosting" compiler, located in this directory. Specifically, the ECMAScript parser, written in ActionScript, is here. This is explained in the FAQ.

Here is the official Adobe Announcement:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressrel eases/200611/110706Mozilla.html

And here is a great blog post from Tinic, one of the Flash Player engineers:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-re lative-tamarin-joins.html

And the Tamarin FAQ:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

Please read these before you post FUD. Oh wait... This is /. FUD away. ;)

They are not offering flash but they are open sourcing the Verifier, JIT, core frameworks and the garbage collection engine http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-re lative-tamarin-joins.html. The the newest Adobe ECMAScript VM is small and very fast and further along than Spider Monkey. This is very good for everyone involved, I believe, and a nice step by Adobe. Mozilla/Firefox users get a better ECMAScript engine and Adobe can concentrate more on the flash side of the flash engine. Read more at the FAQ on Tamarin http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

...check out the Dojo project's JavaCC ECMAScript grammar.

It looks like they rolled their own parser for Tamarin - AbcParse.cpp looks hand coded to me. Maybe that was more efficient than yacc?

You may find Bug 277547 more palatable.

It was a good documentary, worth saving for the kids. Video Downloader Extention for Firefox.

Yeah, that sucks. But, in lack of a print option, the repagination plugin for Firefox is your friend.
Works really great for those multiple-pages forum discussions as well :)

Hey, no problem. Stick with FireFox if you can. Here are a couple other extensions I have installed (I'm not going to try to hunt down each link...just go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/):

Forecastfox - no need for Weatherbug or the like, if you keep your browser open all the time like I do.
AniDisable - stops annoying GIF animations...get it from http://www.siliconmethod.com/firefox/anidisable/ - the original developer quit updating the extension to allow installation on 1.5+.
Image Zoom - hold the right mouse button, then use the scroll wheel to zoom in on the image.
ShowIP - resolves the IP address of the site you are visiting.
Live HTTP Headers - allows you to see the headers being requested for any page.
SessionSaver - my favorite...if the browser crashes, it restores all of your tabs and their back lists. However, I guess FireFox 2 does this.
Add N Edit Cookies - sometimes it's nice to see exactly what your cookies have in them, and you can change them.
Web Developer - another favorite...allows you to change/display/validate anything in the DOM or CSS.
SubmitToTab - FireFox doesn't normally allow you to open a form submission into a new tab, but this will enable that.
Greasemonkey - inject JavaScript into any page...plus, there's a community out there dedicated to writing GM scripts.
User Agent Switcher - switch your UserAgent header to get around restrictions on some sites.
Plain Text to Link (PTTL) - allows you to select a text-only URL, and open it immediately in a new window/tab, rather than having to go through the old Select/Ctrl-C/New Tab/Ctrl-V/Enter.
Resize Search Box - change the size of the tiny search box in the upper right corner.

That's about all I have installed on this computer.

Link

Firefox 2.0 also popped up as update.

Here is an easy example, a segmentation violation by not specifying the namespace in xbl.

This is simple way to make people keep away from your site. OTOH I think I just had an idea for browser based minesweeper.

Nuke anything:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951/

works on some flash objects.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_for mat=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_ desc=&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file _loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whit eboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keyw ords_type=allwords&keywords=crash+testcase&resolut ion=---&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=exact&email 1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_co ntact2=1&emailtype2=exact&email2=&bugidtype=includ e&bug_id=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfiel dvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last +time&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59314

Opened: 2000-11-06

(Interestingly enough, firefox crashed when I was going to post this message...)

Install NoScript plug-in and allow Javascript only for the sites that you absolutely have to use. This solution also protects you against any future Javascript related security issues.

should be part of FF...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29871 7

I wrote a Thunderbird Extension for Sender Verification which implements SPF and DK on the client side, which may not be the best place to do it, but it's better than nothing at all. The extension is aimed at phishing, rather than spam. It also checks sender domains in several blacklists.

https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/345/
http://razor.occams.info/code/spf

I prefer Mouse Gestures to All-in-One Gestures. It provides the option to adjust the trail effect, which allows me to have a less processing-intensive trail on my slow laptop.

They may not be completely ignoring the massive memory leaks that Firefox 2.0 still has, but they sure as hell aren't communicating that they are actually looking into them and have any intention of fixing them.

What massive memory leaks? Can you point out a single, specific "massive memory leak" in Firefox 2? I don't see any except small, infrequent leaks.

As for communicating that they are actually looking into them, see this page about how to report memory leaks and this list of memory leaks fixed in 2006.

The problem with memory not being freed up might be bug 130157. It's particularly bad on Linux systems that do not have an mmap/munmap based allocator, but only a brk based one. The problem isn't that memory isn't being freed, but freed memory cannot be returned back to the operating system due to excessive memory fragmentation.

You think Thunderbird is under advertised?
What about MiniMo? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/
How about Sunbird? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
What about Chatzilla? (Most current users of Chatzilla in Firefox probably used it back when it was a standard part of the Mozilla suite.)

All of those are (somewhat) actively developed, and non have been officially abandoned (unlike Seamonkey which is no longer an official project.)
Although only Firefox and Thunderbird appear to be supported by MoCo. The rest appear to be supported by MoFo.

You think Thunderbird is under advertised?
What about MiniMo? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/
How about Sunbird? http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
What about Chatzilla? (Most current users of Chatzilla in Firefox probably used it back when it was a standard part of the Mozilla suite.)

All of those are (somewhat) actively developed, and non have been officially abandoned (unlike Seamonkey which is no longer an official project.)
Although only Firefox and Thunderbird appear to be supported by MoCo. The rest appear to be supported by MoFo.

• Clean up our APIs to be fewer, better, and "on the outside."
• Simplify the Mozilla codebase to make it smaller, faster,and easier to approach and maintain.
• Take advantage of standard language features and fast paths instead of XPCOM and ad hoc code.

We should instead focus on cleaning up things which are (broken, instead refering to RDF). Like removing all the XPCOM overhead, or why there are fifteen interfaces to desribe a window.
(Regarding undergoing API clean up:) Instead of writing twenty lines of code (...) use the WHATWG Drag and Drop API and just write two.

• Clean up our APIs to be fewer, better, and "on the outside."
• Simplify the Mozilla codebase to make it smaller, faster,and easier to approach and maintain.
• Take advantage of standard language features and fast paths instead of XPCOM and ad hoc code.

We should instead focus on cleaning up things which are (broken, instead refering to RDF). Like removing all the XPCOM overhead, or why there are fifteen interfaces to desribe a window.
(Regarding undergoing API clean up:) Instead of writing twenty lines of code (...) use the WHATWG Drag and Drop API and just write two.

"edit": I apologize for bad bad html editing and wrong link

just a few questions:

- Why don't you integrate Noia theme as default, since it is the most popular theme according to addons.mozilla.org - and lets face it your theme kinda sucks being spartan and all.. look at what Mark Shuttleworth wrote recently, and you know he is right

- How about investigating further into famous memory leak? Version 1.5.0.7 was far worse than 1.5.0.4 , 2.0 is alot better than 2.0, but it still hangs now and then - maybe just concentrate on one fully stable release without new features? I know it's hard being open source and all.. but ;)

- Will there be a lightweight version of Firefox for older computers and/or small devices? - How was the cake? heh

What is the future for XUL? Are there plans to allow XUL to perform over remote HTTP, fixing the current security problems?

It seems to me that a lot of work has already gone into XUL and so much was achieved in this area, yet few advancements have been made over the last few years. Many believe that there is a true opportunity here to provide a platform for networked application delivery, but will XUL be a true competitor to Flex and/or XAML?

/dave

The bug is not Mozilla's fault and was found to be corrected by a third party patch. What do you expect Mozilla to do? Write a special section of code to detect if you are running a specific motherboard, BIOS, and provide you with a download link for the BIOS update.

If the bug I mentioned in the previous post is not your issue. Then please file a bug at Mozilla's Bugzilla and reply to this post with the bug number. Please be as specific as possible and try and follow the bug writing guidelines

The bug is not Mozilla's fault and was found to be corrected by a third party patch. What do you expect Mozilla to do? Write a special section of code to detect if you are running a specific motherboard, BIOS, and provide you with a download link for the BIOS update.

If the bug I mentioned in the previous post is not your issue. Then please file a bug at Mozilla's Bugzilla and reply to this post with the bug number. Please be as specific as possible and try and follow the bug writing guidelines

That's one great question. There's really no way to verify an extension without walking through the source, and even then it's not impossible to obfuscate something nasty. And any extension that uses XMLHttpRequest can download its own code.

By "an add-on... promoted and distributed by FF team" you mean anything hosted on https://addons.mozilla.org/ I guess. There are a lot of extensions there, some of them quasi-commercial, and the review process required to have an extension hosted isn't (cannot be, in fairness) thorough.

Perhaps addons.mozilla.org need to be a bit more explicit that you can't _quite_ trust the extensions hosted there. Perhaps they could digitally sign 'popular' extensions that they 'trust'?

Imagine what a PR disaster a malicious extension would be.

Andy

You mean something like this?

Mozilla 1.0.x users will need to manually update their browser to a new major version.

Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 1.5.0.8 which contains a patch to the update system that allows Firefox 1.5 to offer an option to upgrade to Firefox 2. This upgrade will only be offered and not forced unlike the minor updates which download, install and update with little user input.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 quality assurance
Mozilla quality assurance blog

Slightly tangential Mozilla bugday info. Bugdays happen every Tuesday with three sessions a day for the different timezones

Mozilla 1.0.x users will need to manually update their browser to a new major version.

Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 1.5.0.8 which contains a patch to the update system that allows Firefox 1.5 to offer an option to upgrade to Firefox 2. This upgrade will only be offered and not forced unlike the minor updates which download, install and update with little user input.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 quality assurance
Mozilla quality assurance blog

Slightly tangential Mozilla bugday info. Bugdays happen every Tuesday with three sessions a day for the different timezones

This issue was found to be an issue that was solved by upgrading you motherboard's BIOS. See bug 282392. The bug also lists a few other options besides upgrading your BIOS.

Well, your statement is correct for HTTP/1.0 and also would be correct for HTTP/1.1 if:

• establishing (and also destroying) of TCP connection required 0 (read zero) packets
• HTTP Keep-Alive and HTTP Pipelining did not deploy the concept of "connection reuse" to speed up download

Please take a look for example at HTTP/1.1 Connections and HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ and also maybe some TCP/IP RFCs.

To sum the above: Keep-alive reuses one TCP connection to download multiple objects from the server thus saving you the time and resources to send extra packets needed to close current connection and establish new one.
Pipelining is helping you to reduce the latency by taking this concept a little bit further and issuing your next request before the response for previous request has been fully received.

I just installed this extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3497/ ) and restarted FF. The spelling thing just shows up as a red underline on misspells in a text box as you're typing. It doesn't, to my knowledge, offer any spelling alternatives.

Just found this...

Mozilla's HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ

If the user were to enable pipelining in his browser (such as setting Firefox's network.http.pipelining in about:config), the number of hostnames we use wouldn't matter, and he'd make even more effective use of his available bandwidth. But we can't control that server-side.

For those that don't know what that means: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipeli ning-faq.html

I've had it switched on for ages. I sometimes wonder why it's off by default.

No matter how interesting, I'll NEVER bear an ad before a small online video.

Understand what your saying... but there are some extensions such as SmartSearch which were written by Ben Goodger (and Chris Povirk), AND where updated 16th September that are not compatible. And according to the comments on "Firefox Addons", can simply be fixed by changing the version check code.

So its... a little tardy on some people's!

This was a response by "Critical Thinker" on the same blog with the list.

1- If you don't like the theme, you are completely free to switch to one of your choosing at http://addons.mozilla.org./

2- Marginal anti-phishing support is still safer than none at all, which is what users would have if they stuck with the 1.5 line.

3- The options dialog had to be redesigned in order to make room for all the new features. If you wish to give up anti-phishing, spell-checking, and session restore just to get the old options dialog back, so be it. Of course, real pros use about:config.

4- Extensions are third-party add-ons, and Mozilla has no obligation to ensure support for any of them. In fact, it's wiser for Mozilla to maintain the current setup, because automatically allowing extensions from earlier in Firefox history might cause bugs and even holes in newer versions. However, if you NEED those unsupported extensions, you are fully within your rights to unzip them yourself and make them compatible.

5- You are correct that the memory leak remains an issue, and it in fact will likely not be fixed until version 3.0. However, memory has actually been improved on the 2.0 branch, and you're only hurting your readers by making them stay on the 1.5 branch.

6- The Gecko engine is superior in standards compliance to the 1.5 branch. Any sites that don't work are a result of faulty designers designing them for compatibility with Internet Explorer. Since Microsoft has no desire to fix this issue, the only way to fight this is by encouraging further adoption of alternate browsers.

7, 8- These are actually valid concerns. Nice.

9- While the opinions of one blog is nice, the RSS support of 2.0 is fully functional as it is. In fact, more reputable sources (such as Wired) have noted that the RSS is actually superior to Internet Explorer 7 in that Firefox 2.0 offers even more options to the user for RSS than IE7.

Trivial concerns are no reason to avoid upgrading to superior security, memory management, and features. Have a nice day.

Why on Windows is there only Firefox and KMelion?