Slashdot Mirror

Mozilla Lightning is the future Calendar app from Mozilla:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning

Sunbird is, as far as I understand, going to be abandoned.

Well, silly me. I read another comment, and apparently there is a standard, or at least a draft thereof, which is supported by the various Mozilla calendaring projects.

Well, silly me. I read another comment, and apparently there is a standard, or at least a draft thereof, which is supported by the various Mozilla calendaring projects.

#1. "I THINK: Single Window, Sort bookmarks, close tab on double click, last tab. I believe that's the list."

I'm not going to waste my time on each of those. Here's the URL for "close tab on double click".
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php ?application=firefox&category=Tabbed%20Browsing
Search for the phrase "Tab Clicking Options supersedes Close Tab On Double Click".

So, when the functionality provided by an extension is provided by FireFox in a later version, and the coder maintaining that extension posts that, you feel that there is a "problem" when that extension no longer works on the newer version of FireFox.

Hey, lots of luck getting IE7 to work on Win2K.

2. "FIREFOX of course."
Hey, don't blame me if your writing isn't clear. So, sometimes FireFox freezes when you launch it.
Sometimes a reboot fixes that freeze ...
Sometimes it doesn't ...
Which means that, sometimes, FireFox freezes and not even a reboot will get it unfrozen ... yet you still seem to be using FireFox ... even though it is frozen.

Right. Whatever. Good luck with that.

3. "New version != security patch."
Ummmm, yes it does. The installation might not be as easy as you'd like, but it is still a security patch.

Anyway, lots of luck with your Microsoft experiment. I'm sure my firewall will be blocking the loads of spam that your pwn'ed machine will be spewing.

Buh bye now.

By fat the easiest solution is the SiwtchProxy Tool, a Firefox Extension that is easy to install and manage.

SiwtchProxy Tool offers a simple status-bar interface where the user can change proxies on the fly. It comes with a pre-set anonymous setting which will change the proxy periodically (user-supplied value). For the list of proxies used, you can supply a simple text file or use a web-based dynamicaly updated list.

For SwitchProxy Tool homepage, see http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/switchpr oxy or https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&id=125
(I have not observed any of the problems mentioned by the users - with the obvious exception that sites that know you by IP address won't recognize you if you use the anonymising proxy, but that can hardly be construed as a bug.)

You can find several suitable anonymising proxy lists in this forum:
http://forums.mozmonkey.com/viewtopic.php?t=19

It's really quite fast, elegant and easy.

Wget is a nice tool that I often use, but for this kind of action (i.e save all/most/some images from a web page) the Down Them All extension to firefox is really great.

...it's much easier than having to tab 30 times till the correct hyperlink is selected in my browser...

Ah ha! But if you were using Firefox (like any self-respecting Slashdotter) you would know that your browser will take you directly to a link simply by typing the first few letters of the link text. Read all about it.

Granted, many sites implement links as images which brings us right back to square one, but there are enough situations in which the Find As You Type feature works that it's worthwhile to know about.

...it's much easier than having to tab 30 times till the correct hyperlink is selected in my browser...

Ah ha! But if you were using Firefox (like any self-respecting Slashdotter) you would know that your browser will take you directly to a link simply by typing the first few letters of the link text. Read all about it.

Granted, many sites implement links as images which brings us right back to square one, but there are enough situations in which the Find As You Type feature works that it's worthwhile to know about.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work very well in all cases ... Just have a look at Mozilla bug 271895. Some functionality testing remains manual work. However, I think there's people ready to do that if there's a framework.

2) not able to bookmark properly

I don't like frames either, but Firefox's inability to properly bookmark sites using frames really irritates me. Because very occasionally, I want to bookmark a webpage which I didn't design myself :-) IE does implement this feature correctly. But the Mozilla developers don't seem inclined to fix it: "Frame State Bookmarking (frameset bookmarks)" bug... (You can vote for this bug if you agree.)

Dvorak's on to something when he said people who prefer aesthetics could now buy a Mac to run Windows on it (though the reverse will most likely not be true, i.e. you can't run OS X on non-Mac hardware) - left unsaid is, of course, that some people will buyh these machines to run Linux instead.

Targeting a Mac will be easier, sure - some developers will probably buy a Mac and dual-boot (or virtualize) Windows or Linux on it, so there will be more Mac developers.

Thing is, most free software types won't consider OS X free enough - I'm switching back to Linux, personally; and a lot of OSS running on OS X share code with their Linux/Unix/X11 counterparts. Adium uses Gaim as its engine. Dashboard is based on WebCore, which is forked from KHTML - porting it back to KDE would not be too hard, and guess what, there is a GTK port. If efforts like gDesklets flounder, we can possibly port Dashboard wholesale to Linux.

Firefox and Thunderbird runs better on Linux (seriously. Try them on both platforms), and if Dvorak thinks OpenOffice is not user-friendly, he has not tried running it on a Mac yet. Oh, John, OO.o looks much better on Linux than on Windows too - if you're running the 1.1.x series, the Windows version does not have all the UI improvements that GNOME and KDE developers from Novell, Red Hat and others throw into it.

Lots of fun things are happening in the OSS world, especially on the desktop front - Sun and Novell are doing usability testing, Gtk# is making waves, in fact, F-Spot is the best photo-library tool I've seen, certainly looks faster than iPhoto and has cool things like Flickr integration built-in. Don't count us out yet.

Dvorak's on to something when he said people who prefer aesthetics could now buy a Mac to run Windows on it (though the reverse will most likely not be true, i.e. you can't run OS X on non-Mac hardware) - left unsaid is, of course, that some people will buyh these machines to run Linux instead.

Targeting a Mac will be easier, sure - some developers will probably buy a Mac and dual-boot (or virtualize) Windows or Linux on it, so there will be more Mac developers.

Thing is, most free software types won't consider OS X free enough - I'm switching back to Linux, personally; and a lot of OSS running on OS X share code with their Linux/Unix/X11 counterparts. Adium uses Gaim as its engine. Dashboard is based on WebCore, which is forked from KHTML - porting it back to KDE would not be too hard, and guess what, there is a GTK port. If efforts like gDesklets flounder, we can possibly port Dashboard wholesale to Linux.

Firefox and Thunderbird runs better on Linux (seriously. Try them on both platforms), and if Dvorak thinks OpenOffice is not user-friendly, he has not tried running it on a Mac yet. Oh, John, OO.o looks much better on Linux than on Windows too - if you're running the 1.1.x series, the Windows version does not have all the UI improvements that GNOME and KDE developers from Novell, Red Hat and others throw into it.

Lots of fun things are happening in the OSS world, especially on the desktop front - Sun and Novell are doing usability testing, Gtk# is making waves, in fact, F-Spot is the best photo-library tool I've seen, certainly looks faster than iPhoto and has cool things like Flickr integration built-in. Don't count us out yet.

If you are using the TabBrowser Preference extension for Firefox, the exploit site will just open in a new tab, and the MSDN site will remain unaffected. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=158&application=firefox

I don't know about Quake, but there's a patch for Crystal Space/Mozilla called Crystalzilla which does this.

http://interreality.org/projects/crystalzilla

"Proof of concept" using all free software (client and server): Free 3D engine, free web browser, free networking architecture. Pending changes to Mozilla will be integrated into user applications sooner or later. Hackers wanted...

Here you go, sir. Pure open source goodness.

I'm really not certain I comprehend this. Apple wrote code which they contributed to KHTML, and this is bad. What's more, Apple wrote code which BURNED OUT KHTML DEVELOPERS!

Strangely, I feel no sympathy for a developer who gets burned out when a big company writes code for them...

"Meanwhile, Apple got the code to a rendering engine for free and gave back little to nothing."

This is an obscene bit of rhetorical hopscotch. Apple did exactly what companies SHOULD be doing. They took advantage of open source software and made their changes public. Compare and contrast this with Microsoft and BSD... BSD got exactly no code out of Microsoft. KHTML got all of the changes made to KHTML, some of which were calls into proprietary code, and thus not terribly useful.

What's burning out the KHTML developers is their insistence on trying to treat anyone who works on their code as active members of their development team. Sure, it would be all keen an cool if KHTML and Safari were to merge and tightly couple if not merge their code-bases, but Apple has a proprietary UI, and that makes it hard to do. Now, if you're in the "proprietary code makes you evil" camp, then you're going to feel that way about Apple no matter what they do, but modifying KHTML and contributing the changes back didn't make them any more or less evil by that metric.

What's more, complaining about the current state of affairs is akin to complaining that someone who just ported your application to Windows didn't make the .Net Framework open source. What kind of drugs do you have to be on for that to make sense? Sure, I want free stuff and world peace too, but I don't stamp my feet when someone helps me out, just because I didn't get everything I wanted.

In the long-run, it's looking like Apple would have been better off selecting a more mature code(r) base to work from.

These browsers are still missing a rich-text editor that gecko/IE have.

See MIDAS http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midas-spec.html/

So these browsers are currently not sophisticated enough for my web site.

Bubble bustin' time! Garbage collection doesn't always live up to its reputation. I have seen Java apps leak memory like a sieve. This one project I was working at would start up a production (!) EJB container in the morning, and by 13:00, it would have run out of memory and crashed. I told them to fix their leaks. When they got over arguing that the garbage collector prevents memory leaks and checked it against a memory profiler... they started fixing the memory leaks and the problem was solve.

In any case, I doubt that the garbage collection in the Javascript engines are anywhere near as sophisticated as in Java itself. So I would think it would be easier to leak memory. Anyway Mozilla has a bit of an article on this here./p

Last time I checked, Firefox works in Windows 2000.

Bubble bustin' time! Garbage collection doesn't always live up to its reputation. I have seen Java apps leak memory like a sieve. This one project I was working at would start up a production (!) EJB container in the morning, and by 13:00, it would have run out of memory and crashed. I told them to fix their leaks. When they got over arguing that the garbage collector prevents memory leaks and checked it against a memory profiler... they started fixing the memory leaks and the problem was solve.

In any case, I doubt that the garbage collection in the Javascript engines are anywhere near as sophisticated as in Java itself. So I would think it would be easier to leak memory. Anyway Mozilla has a bit of an article on this here./p

Bubble bustin' time! Garbage collection doesn't always live up to its reputation. I have seen Java apps leak memory like a sieve. This one project I was working at would start up a production (!) EJB container in the morning, and by 13:00, it would have run out of memory and crashed. I told them to fix their leaks. When they got over arguing that the garbage collector prevents memory leaks and checked it against a memory profiler... they started fixing the memory leaks and the problem was solve.

In any case, I doubt that the garbage collection in the Javascript engines are anywhere near as sophisticated as in Java itself. So I would think it would be easier to leak memory. Anyway Mozilla has a bit of an article on this here./p

I have limited Firefox's memory considerably with this:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_me mcache
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 16000);

I don't know of such a setting in IE but maybe there is some registry key that needs adding or tweeking.

There is a rather long bug report open about this. Bug 76831. A workaround mentioned in it is to type: about:config in your address bar. Right-click the bottom pane, and add a new "boolean" value with the name config.trim_on_minimize, and set it to false, and then restart Firefox.

Fixed in Firefox 1.1 according to this.

"use some fully compliant XSL/XML and tables or divs to create a stack of layers consisting of images that are wrapped in tags."
"vertical-align: bottom;" fixed the test case I came up with. It appears to be related to this "bug":
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5821 (Copy and paste into a new window/tab)
However, I didn't have time to come up with more complex examples.

Mozilla's box model is not perfect, David Hyatt found an interesting case, but IE is far worse:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005 _01.html#007252

If I get the time, I may give this "insane collection of images" issue a go, but some testcases would be really nice.

Bubble bustin' time! Garbage collection doesn't always live up to its reputation. I have seen Java apps leak memory like a sieve. This one project I was working at would start up a production (!) EJB container in the morning, and by 13:00, it would have run out of memory and crashed. I told them to fix their leaks. When they got over arguing that the garbage collector prevents memory leaks and checked it against a memory profiler... they started fixing the memory leaks and the problem was solve.

In any case, I doubt that the garbage collection in the Javascript engines are anywhere near as sophisticated as in Java itself. So I would think it would be easier to leak memory. Anyway Mozilla has a bit of an article on this here.

The biggest issue is that Firefox can take MINUTES to page-in on some Windows system due to some mysterous misuse of the memory manager. FF leaking tons of memory makes this problem very evident to users:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76831

The SVG implementation is there in Deer Park, the test version of Firefox 1.1. Examples here

But the additions mentioned in this article are not "additional types, values, objects, properties, and functions". They're new reserved words, like "for" and "if".

On the contrary, the additions mentioned in this article are simply additional methods (a method in javascript is simply a property that contains a function).

For example, see the documentation for the new forEach() method :

http://developer-test.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_Jav aScript_1.5_Reference:Objects:Array:forEach

The additions are not reserved words.

Even though the release notes suggest that transparent windows in XUL are possible, no example is available except this one:
"-chrome http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=1119 01" (use that to start deer park to see what I mean).

It bothers me that this is (one of ?) a very unusable feature.
When I want a transparent window I expect it to have full controls - yet this is not supported. When transparency is enabled 'chrome' - ie the controls - dissapear with it.
Worse yet, real content disappears too.
Thus, a window on top of your desktop with only the content of a webpage displayed, but no background, is not possible.

So it seems that some of the solutions/features are more of a "checklist" nature ('check: we have transparency') than of a practical, real-life nature.
My critique is that it should be presented as such, so other developers are triggered to jump in and "fix" it.

Session saver has an option to save and restore sessions on crashes.

File a bug.

See bug #9458 from July 1999. (You might have to copy the link and open it by hand since the Mozilla-Bugzilla does a referer-check to filter out requests from slashdot links...)

The <canvas> is cool. Safari compatibility or not, this could be the LOGO of the noughties. JavaScript is a fun language when you're not trying to be cross-compatible with every browser under the sun.

However, the last paragraph reads:

If fallback content is desired, some CSS tricks must be employed to mask the fallback content from Safari (which should render just the canvas), and also to mask the CSS tricks themselves from IE (which should render the fallback content). Todo: get hixie to put the CSS bits in

(emphasis in the original). While I commend Ian's commitment to standards, I can't imagine he will be very pleased with this tasks (for those who don't know him, he's victriolic against violations of the standards. He's a first-rate purist). I predicts the flames will be very pretty to look at.

Tab mix http://tab-mix.info.tm/
Tab opening - Open new tabs next to the current one with a customizable order

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=625

When someone writes some writes some code to implememt an API that Robert O'Callahan wrote for the upcoming release. The API renders web pages to images.

Right now Mozilla/Firefox use a rather crusty history file format, Mork. There are plans to replace this history file with sqlite (Bug 245745, not until Gecko 1.9) which would make an extension writer's job a bit easier.

It's coming, but not until Firefox 1.5 (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:1.1_Mac_Migrators ).

"The Safari migrator will not be importing passwords for 1.1. For 1.5 we will utilize the Keychain for password storage and provide a simple migration solution."

It's not like all these changes just spring up overnight. Use nightly (or hourly) trunk builds and you'll be up to date long before these releases or preview releases. I fully understand there's a reason for these sorts of dev previews, but the real testers and developers have been using these features and fixes for quite a long time now.

Trunk builds are quite nice for even the regular user, so long as you're willing to put up with a few issues from time to time. The tradeoff for bug fixes and new features is well worth it, if you know what you're doing. If a really big bug comes along, just use an older build for a week or so. You extensions will usually be A-OK from build to build, but if something breaks them odds are you would have had to version-bump or reinstall them anyway on the next release. Give it a shot. It was fun using livemarks and find as you type before the release, and it's fun using things like fast back and the improved rendering before every else.

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/ - Not updated much anymore, but still a decent resource.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/ - Nightly builds

http://bonsaibugs.org/pyblosxom.cgi/firefox/latest - Latest bug fixes

1. Talkback (aka Quality Feedback Agent) in Windows builds is only enabled by default for a random selection of users on the Windows platform. This feature was built into the installer so that the talkback server on Firefox release builds wouldn't get bogged down.

As this is an alpha release and is a good idea to send in as much crash data as possible you may want to do a custom install on Windows and make sure it's selected.

2. This release comes with a tool you can use to report broken websites. This can be found in the help menu.

This data is stored in a serpate database to bugzilla so that you can report any broken sites without having to worry about clogging up bugzilla with duplicates.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/new-brows er-features.html

With a project as big and important as GCC, you'd think they'd have a server for each platform set up for all their developers to play with. Gentoo has Sparc, MIPS, PPC, etc. boxes for their developers to use for porting software.

The FSF doesn't have the money to manage and administer and maintain a big cluster of disparate machines. This is occasionally a problem; I have had portability problems in findutils relating to NetBSD and Solaris, for example (and, less significantly, Ultrix and Unicos).

It seems to me that a smart idea would be to have some kind of system where a developer could submit a patch, which would then be sent out to a server farm, where each server would try to compile GCC with the patch, then run a test suite. Doesn't Mozilla do something like this nightly?

However, as other posters have commented, it's not always just accidental portability bugs. It is frequently the case that specific code has to be written to support particular platforms (this has been the case for supporting secure directory tree traversal on Solaris, for example). That extra code is going to be additional effort, and it is not unreasonable to expect that extra coding effort to be invested by those with specific interest in that problem. Sadly, this is not often the case. There are lots of important free software projects that could do with more help.

"You've never worked on localizing a non-trivial application, have you?"

Well lets have a look at a Mozilla source file, a simple shell script could be created like the following pseudo code:

for each line in file;
if "DONT_TRANSLATE" appears in line: skip to this line + 2;
else: translateViaGoogle(What's in between the dirks);
goto next line;

OK - it might not work straight out of the google box, but fixing the errors would more than likely be a lot quicker than manually translating a full project!

That's what regression testing is for. It is not unreasonable for any large system to contain a constantly growing testsuite that tests core features of the system. In fact, GCC does have a testsuite, although I don't know how versatile it is. For a compiler suite a reasonable testsuite would contain programs of varying complexity in the source language as well as object files for each valid combination of optimization/feature level and a platform (not a very difficult thing to produce).

The testsuite would then handle each such program in the following manner:

• Compile it using a given optimization/feature level
• Perform a binary diff against the "canonical" object code. Maybe do the same thing for aseembly outputs. Fail if outputs differ.
• Link a program, run it, and compare result to the expected one.

The only challenging part of this process is to "seed" the testsuite with canonical object files: someone would have to either trust a stable compiler version or to proof-read each .o/.s file. After that, all discrepancies would be considered failures by default. If the new compiler version produces different object code, it has to be either explained (and incorporated into the testsuite) or the compiler has to be fixed.

Combine the above with a distributed build system (like Tinderbox or CruiseControl) and you've got an automated regression testing system. After that, every applied patch would have to go through this ordeal to ensure that it doesn't break the compiler.

Yes, it should... but it doesn't.

I can't wait for a Welsh version of firefox =P

According to this Mozilla QA document, Firefox should have had a Welsh locale since 1.0.2? Not that I've looked, the closest I come to speaking owt other than English is claiming I speak "Lallans" whilst in the West of Scotland... aye richt ;-)

Point of interest, but Firefox has had Windows builds since the first release, 0.1.

This may actually be a good for users still on Win2k. They might just get / be forced to use a better browser... :-)

Although IE will be left unsecure, system admins can easily fix/workaround this by installing FireFox or Opera. Thus; no problem. And at the end of the day; the user gets a better browser...

Microsoft may unintentionally just help with the adoption of browsers from their rivals with this decision!

Linux kernel - 2.2.14 or higher with the following libraries or packages:

* glibc 2.3.2 or higher
* XFree86-3.3.6 or higher
* gtk+2.0 or higher
* fontconfig (also known as xft)
* libstdc++5

There are lots of ways to have tabs in earlier versions of IE without upgrading the operating system

SlimBrowser is on that integrates into IE seamlessly and gives you tabs, pop up blacking, and all the other "obvious to everyone but ms" features

Of course the better alternative is still available