Slashdot Mirror

Or, for that matter, this one. Admittedly, that's not a UI design bug, but it's a very good example of the arrogance that some Mozilla users unfortunately show at times.

It's been open for six years, there's more than 750 votes (IIRC, it's the single most voted-for bug in Mozilla's bugzilla), and patches have been provided and kept in sync for a long, long time.

Still, it's not implemented because it might cause the default installer to grow by 50 KB. Sad.

Amen! Mozilla devs are completely pigheaded when it comes to making changes requested by users. Take this one, for example -- 299466, breaking the update.mozilla.org service not just for installing software, but even for viewing plain HTML content. Arrogant and stubborn.

Will they be able to take criticism on interface decisions they have taken years ago and argued for many times since then? Many open source projects have these really stupid things hanging over them because developers can't admit they have been wrong all this time. Take this one in Firefox as a prime example.

I had some problems when configured Mozilla to use HTTP 1.1 pipeline, many firewalls blocked my connection and the log was filled with DDoS alerts.
It's user lucky that Mozilla don't come with pipeline enabled

The Firefox bookmark all tabs feature is a breakthrough, since you can close your browser, and reopen it to the same set of tabs as before, which is great when installing extensions and you're forced to restart.

SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase it. Windows, tabs, even things you were typing -- they're all saved. Use the menu to add + remove sessions; right, shift, or middle-clicking will delete. "Simple mode" for peace of mind, or "Expert mode" for advanced flexibility. Just Click. Install. Rad.

Mark

Scroll wheel? Thanks, that is a major helper.

What I've begun doing is using the "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" for all of my bookmarks. I've got "Essentials" with links to Gmail, Adsense, my website, Distributed.net stats and so forth, basically all of the sites that I try to visit daily. Then I've got "Favorite sites" that holds Slashdot (even though now it's "home"), Woot, Craigslist, Free6.com (hehe), Assambassador.com, Myspleen, demonoid, you get the point.

Then I've got the essential one: "Functions" - that holds mostly Javascript links but other things like TinyURL, @nonymous, Wordpress Press-It, BlogThis!, post to del.icio.us, Ping-o-matic, Send SMS message, mailto: and whatever. Then there is "Junk" which isn't really used any more because del.icio.us is so sweet. I generally dump something I might want to read later there and categorize it later (like every 8 months). Then of course I've got a few drop-down RSS feeds, but since they are torrent sites I'll keep them to myself. (Oh, I almost forgot - a huge drop down of del.icio.us bookmarks with the help of Foxylicious)

This works well, and generally reminds me of a filing system. Since I'm never using the File, Edit, and etc menus this has become my new menu.

I've always used the SessionSaver extension to get this functionality. I don't have to go to the trouble of acutally setting anything this way. I can close my browser any time and it will be in the same state the next time I open it. Or, I can save a specific session to load later.

I changed my Firefox to Firefly quite easily ->

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=31

Is MS necessarily the fox? It seems to me that open source projects target MS products, not the other way around. Consider Firefox. Take a look at Firefox's lineage and you'll find Netscape Navigator, once upon a time a commercial product. To keep up with IE, NN became free and open source in 1998. The descendants of NN have been playing market share catch-up ever since, even taking out large ads in major newspapers.

I think in this case it's the hen opening a dialog with the fox.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.h tml

Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock

It may sound at first like this would make the web unusable, but it's not really all that bad. It takes two clicks to add a domain to NoScript's whitelist and one click to re-enable a Flash. AdBlock is good for removing the most offensively annoying ads with two clicks.

Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock

It may sound at first like this would make the web unusable, but it's not really all that bad. It takes two clicks to add a domain to NoScript's whitelist and one click to re-enable a Flash. AdBlock is good for removing the most offensively annoying ads with two clicks.

Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock

It may sound at first like this would make the web unusable, but it's not really all that bad. It takes two clicks to add a domain to NoScript's whitelist and one click to re-enable a Flash. AdBlock is good for removing the most offensively annoying ads with two clicks.

Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock

It may sound at first like this would make the web unusable, but it's not really all that bad. It takes two clicks to add a domain to NoScript's whitelist and one click to re-enable a Flash. AdBlock is good for removing the most offensively annoying ads with two clicks.

I've been playing with coLinux today (I run Windows, but the SeaMonkey Project needs nightly Linux builds for users to test, and our resources are pretty limited) and I have to say, it's pretty cool. I recompiled gcc in less than 30 minutes, and it doesn't feel slow at all to use. It's significantly faster than the cygwin process that's used to build Windows versions of SeaMonkey (and Firefox).

I was thinking it might be possible to set up some sort of coLinux-based package which lets people run gnome, openoffice.org, gaim, etc. You can access your host system's data, which means the "where are my mp3s?" type things won't be a problem. You are running native binaries (I'm running an ordinary debian setup), so you get the exact look and feel you'd get if you were running linux. You can install packages just like you would.

At this point, there are some challenges with sound, and you need an X server or vnc client on the Windows host for GUI apps, but the package could take care of all that stuff so users don't have to worry about it.

You could have various levels of transition - ranging from launching apps from the start menu (I can think of easy ways to get that sort of integration), all the way to hiding explorer and using gnome full time, with Windows skinned to look like GNOME for any Windows apps the person still uses. The end result should be users who aren't afraid just because Linux desktops look different, and aren't worried they'll have to hack text files or learn the commandline (things you shouldn't have to do in any decent end-user-oriented distro).

Just a thought.

We are seeing a very socialist-corporate trend developing in the open source world. Projects that were developed by the community for the shared, collective benefit of the community are now getting involved with corporate shenanigans. Between this Mambo spat and the recently announced Mozilla Corporation, and Linus' trademark licensing of Linux, we are seeing a very real trend developing.

Now, the real question is: is this good for the community? At this point, it is difficult to tell. What may be benign at this point may become very chilling in the near future, especially if intellectual property rights start geting involved.

Not with the easily obtained and third most popular extension NoScript .

For many data and information retrevial apps, do we really need Ajax everywhere? Or should it be used lightly only when rich functionality is really needed?

What he's complaining about is that the AJAX world sounds cool on the surface but is very fragile just below - Javascript really is not all that standard, even across versions of IE. And witness the post about AJAX style leaks in the current IE that will chew up memory left and right. Do you really want to be answering support calls about user browser crashes? Because if you go to fast, too soon down the AJAX road that's where you are headed to.

Years ago I was doing XSLT to HTML transformation on the server instead of in the browser to avoid exactly these issues, even though I could have done the transformations client side saving expense on the server.

Perhaps the answer is, oddly enough, to simply have users run applets whose only job is to really run Rhino, the Javascript engine for Java. Then at least the conatiner AJAX runs in is standardized...

Mozilla is working on a calendar program called Sunbird. It's still in a beta stage at this point, but it's fairly interesting so far. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

A couple of weeks ago I attended a SkyWarn class and noticed that the NOAA trainer was using FireFox on their NOAA issued laptop.

I'd rip and reinstall Adobe, but if that doesn't help - FireFox has a PDF extension that will popup every time you click on one. PDF Extension Details

And fact that the Google add killer CustomizeGoogle is one of hottest Firefox extensions tells a lot about prospects of their ad business...

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php ?application=firefox&category=Popular

Are you saying the Mozilla "Foundation" has some kind of "weird stench" to it??? Foundations aren't good or bad, the reasons they are formed are.

The aim of most OSS projects forming "Foundations" is to make their projects more appealing to corporate interests. The Mozilla Foundation has been nothing but good for Mozilla and Firefox. As a matter of fact, Firefox gained its current popularity after the "split" from Netscape/AOL...

What is so cool about SVG is talked about in this keynote. SVG, is vector graphics AND text, AND placed raster images, AND animation described in an open, easy to read format.

One advantage is that you can design a webpage the same way you design a printed piece. Where you have just as much control over it. MS explorer requires an adobe plugin to display it, similarly to how it displays flash. Firefox is going to display SVG natively in the 1.1 browser (actually already does with the deerpark alphas.

The code is easily visible like HTML. The desktops that use SVG for the gui, I don't know much about, but it's fantastic. Nice icons, or buttons or any visual element that is smaller in file size, breaks out of the square we are used to, and the elements can be enlarged or reduced and still be rendered beautifully.

check out inkscape if you want to experiment with svg, or the open clipart library to see some cool examples. of SVG.

http://inkscape.org/
http://openclipart.org/

Here's what mozilla is doing with SVG:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

Sorry, Mozilla XForms Project.

> It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.

XForms had as exit criteria for becoming a recommendation one complete and two interoperable implementations . One of the complete implementations that served to meet this goal was X-Smiles, a GPL implementation of XForms (and co-indcidentally SVG, XHTML 1.0, CSS of various levels, SMIL, etc.).

The Mozilla XForms project also aims to provide a complete XForms 1.0 implementation under the Mozilla license, and it's quite far along, and is included as an XPI with each nightly build. The last Linux build I looked at was a 141KB, and about 200KB for Windows, and is a single-click install, just like the bugreport tool.

> It seems to me that any W3C standard needs a complete and free reference implementation before it should be ratified as a W3C standard.

XForms had as exit criteria for becoming a recommendation one complete and two interoperable implementations . One of the complete implementations that served to meet this goal was X-Smiles, a GPL implementation of XForms (and co-indcidentally SVG, XHTML 1.0, CSS of various levels, SMIL, etc.).

The Mozilla XForms project also aims to provide a complete XForms 1.0 implementation under the Mozilla license, and it's quite far along, and is included as an XPI with each nightly build. The last Linux build I looked at was a 141KB, and about 200KB for Windows, and is a single-click install, just like the bugreport tool.

Does this mean you will stop using firefox/mozilla since the MPL is similar to CDDL

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html/

To rid of the ads, consider Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/ with AdBlock http://adblock.mozdev.org/.

When I get a "this website works only in IE version X", I will try to change the user agent string in Firefox (User Agent Switcher). If it still doesn't work I usually write an email to the webmaster complaining about the problem with his site, and ask him for notification when he will have it fixed. If that notification never arrives, bad for the site, it just lost a visitor.

Cookie management in Firefox is a little bothersome, thats why i installed Permit Cookies extension, so you can easily whitelist sites by pressing ctrl-c. Then you can choose: allow, session, block, or remove the cookie for the site you are currently viewing.

Permit Cookies would be a little more user friendly if it worked just like NoScript extension (which does the same, but for javascript).

In my opinion both tools should be integrated into Firefox.

And when we're on the topic of FF extensions, be sure to also check out this subtle one: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=413
Sure, it's not hilarious, but it put a big smile on my (stoner) face.

I wrote the code but I have no karma on slashdot so you probably won't see this. Web developers should take a look at http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml for more info on the new techniques, with examples. The actual C++ code is in CVS. The assistive technology support is in the mozilla/accessible directory: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/accessible / The keyboard navigation code is distributed throughout Gecko.

I wrote the code but I have no karma on slashdot so you probably won't see this. Web developers should take a look at http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml for more info on the new techniques, with examples. The actual C++ code is in CVS. The assistive technology support is in the mozilla/accessible directory: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/accessible / The keyboard navigation code is distributed throughout Gecko.

Au contraire -- you can opt to see almost no ads at all, and keep your surfing habits private to boot. Much to the marketers' chagrin, users can control what content they see while browsing the web. And sure enough, if you annoy someone enough with your ads, they'll try and figure out a way not to be subjected to them -- whence cometh Adblock, Flashblock, and NoScript, amongst others.

The message to marketers is loud and clear. Will they listen? By and large, they haven't yet.

Au contraire -- you can opt to see almost no ads at all, and keep your surfing habits private to boot. Much to the marketers' chagrin, users can control what content they see while browsing the web. And sure enough, if you annoy someone enough with your ads, they'll try and figure out a way not to be subjected to them -- whence cometh Adblock, Flashblock, and NoScript, amongst others.

The message to marketers is loud and clear. Will they listen? By and large, they haven't yet.

Au contraire -- you can opt to see almost no ads at all, and keep your surfing habits private to boot. Much to the marketers' chagrin, users can control what content they see while browsing the web. And sure enough, if you annoy someone enough with your ads, they'll try and figure out a way not to be subjected to them -- whence cometh Adblock, Flashblock, and NoScript, amongst others.

The message to marketers is loud and clear. Will they listen? By and large, they haven't yet.

Does anyone know of a spyware removal program that kills shared object files?

not a program per say, but this works great as a Firefox extension, works on all the main platforms too.

The author states the reason such an extension exists and provides links to marketeers bragging about how they can beat cookie deleters by using the capability, of course if you combine this extension with the Flashblock extension they rarely get the chance to abuse the localstore

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml

1.5 is a major update in the mozilla world. 1.1 is a minor update.

But since this summer, developer.mozilla.org has gone live. They've got instructions for Building an extension. And a Javascript reference. There's also the Embedding API Reference with documentation on all the nsI* interfaces. And while not from mozilla.org, there's XULPlanet, which documents XUL.

The documentation has been lacking historically, but things are quite a bit better now.

But since this summer, developer.mozilla.org has gone live. They've got instructions for Building an extension. And a Javascript reference. There's also the Embedding API Reference with documentation on all the nsI* interfaces. And while not from mozilla.org, there's XULPlanet, which documents XUL.

The documentation has been lacking historically, but things are quite a bit better now.

But since this summer, developer.mozilla.org has gone live. They've got instructions for Building an extension. And a Javascript reference. There's also the Embedding API Reference with documentation on all the nsI* interfaces. And while not from mozilla.org, there's XULPlanet, which documents XUL.

The documentation has been lacking historically, but things are quite a bit better now.

But since this summer, developer.mozilla.org has gone live. They've got instructions for Building an extension. And a Javascript reference. There's also the Embedding API Reference with documentation on all the nsI* interfaces. And while not from mozilla.org, there's XULPlanet, which documents XUL.

The documentation has been lacking historically, but things are quite a bit better now.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_for mat=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_ desc=dhtml&resolution=FIXED&emailassigned_to1=1&em ailtype1=exact&email1=aaronleventhal%40moonset.net &chfieldto=Now

Maybe an unemployed university student has time to play with such examples that lack documentation. Professional developers do not.

That is a bit of a contradiction in terms. One can be unemployed or be employed by a University to carry out research towards a PhD but not both.

In any case here are some design docs.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/PublicAP Is.html

A simple introduction
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/embedove rview/EmbeddingBasicsTOC.html

The status of the API freeze (i.e. what APIs you can rely on not to change).
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/EmbedInt erfaceFreeze.html

In any case, actual trivial embedding code is the best documentation IMHO. I detect an attempt at personal abuse suggesting that I'm not a professional developer and would know nothing in this regard. It isn't worth getting into an e-penis size discussion in this regard but if you don't view the wealth of Gecko stuff available as enough then you've no business calling yourself a programmer.

Maybe an unemployed university student has time to play with such examples that lack documentation. Professional developers do not.

That is a bit of a contradiction in terms. One can be unemployed or be employed by a University to carry out research towards a PhD but not both.

In any case here are some design docs.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/PublicAP Is.html

A simple introduction
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/embedove rview/EmbeddingBasicsTOC.html

The status of the API freeze (i.e. what APIs you can rely on not to change).
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/EmbedInt erfaceFreeze.html

In any case, actual trivial embedding code is the best documentation IMHO. I detect an attempt at personal abuse suggesting that I'm not a professional developer and would know nothing in this regard. It isn't worth getting into an e-penis size discussion in this regard but if you don't view the wealth of Gecko stuff available as enough then you've no business calling yourself a programmer.

Maybe an unemployed university student has time to play with such examples that lack documentation. Professional developers do not.

That is a bit of a contradiction in terms. One can be unemployed or be employed by a University to carry out research towards a PhD but not both.

In any case here are some design docs.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/PublicAP Is.html

A simple introduction
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/embedove rview/EmbeddingBasicsTOC.html

The status of the API freeze (i.e. what APIs you can rely on not to change).
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/EmbedInt erfaceFreeze.html

In any case, actual trivial embedding code is the best documentation IMHO. I detect an attempt at personal abuse suggesting that I'm not a professional developer and would know nothing in this regard. It isn't worth getting into an e-penis size discussion in this regard but if you don't view the wealth of Gecko stuff available as enough then you've no business calling yourself a programmer.

XUL, i think you're right here. But why firefox and not mozilla (I don't mean mozilla, the suite or browser, i mean the current XUL Runtime Engine, XRE)? I'm sure that this same donation would benefit any XUL application as much as a web page/app. I remember hearing that IBM was interesting in developing most of their client software with XUL, so I'm sure this would help. Anyone else notice that google and ibm are swallowing up all the XUL developers they can find? http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there. is.only.xul

They have certain milestones for 1.1 and certain milestones for 1.5. They are completing many milestines for 1.5 so that is what the release is going to be.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap-1. 0.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:Home_Page

They have certain milestones for 1.1 and certain milestones for 1.5. They are completing many milestines for 1.5 so that is what the release is going to be.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap-1. 0.html
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:Home_Page