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i've had a number of candidates who can't talk about refactoring (in spite of its IDE support), can't talk about design patterns beyond "Singleton" (I make that an exception to the "Describe a design pattern" question), can't even write simple pseudo-code on a markerboard to draw a "tree" or write (or even just *use*) an iterator from a collection. to the work they've done they are very "productive" with an IDE, and are probably ok programmers.

but they've gotten so slaved by the IDE they've really lost the ability to think about programming to the level I need to see. these are "senior" developer candidates who don't know what i would consider to be the basic minimums of software development and the level of programming skills it requires.

they can use the IDE but they have no clue why it works.

This is the poorest excuse for an article I've seen on Slashdot in a while. Not only is it a rehash of an argument that's been going on for years, it doesn't even get its facts straight regarding the ACID2 test.

Opera9 isn't the only browser to pass the ACID2 test. Hell, it's not even the first.

Safari passed on April 27, 2005:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005 _04.html#008042

iCab passed in June, 2005, followed closely by Konqueror:
http://www.webstandards.org/2005/06/07/icab-konque ror-pass-acid2/

Beta builds of Opera were next on March 28, 2006:
http://www.webstandards.org/2006/03/28/acid2-suppo rted-in-opera-one-year-later/

A development branch of Firefox showed compliance on April 13, 2006:
http://www.thinklemon.com/weblog/2006/04/13/firefo x-acid2-compliance-on-its-way/

The funniest one is that someone cheated and got Firefox to pass last May:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/05/greasemonkey

/*
* Hide tab close button on tabs
*/

toolbarbutton.tab-close-button {display: none !important}

/*
* Don't allow focus on tabs
*/

tab[selected="true"] {-moz-user-focus: none !important}

/*
* Fix borders of content area
*/

#content {
border: 0px none !important;
border-top: 1px solid threeddarkshadow !important;
border-bottom: 2px solid !important;
-moz-border-bottom-colors: white threedlightshadow !important;
}

/*
* Fix borders of tab area
*/

.tabbrowser-strip {
border-bottom: 2px solid !important;
padding-bottom: 2px !important;
-moz-border-bottom-colors: black rgb(128, 128, 128) !important;
}

tab {
margin-bottom: 0px !important;
}

.tabs-right {
border-bottom: 1px solid white !important;
}

.tabbrowser-tabs {
padding-left: 3px !important;
border-bottom: 0px !important;
}

From http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize For windows only. Set as true to let Windows reclaim memory when fx is minimised (which may cause a delay when fx is restored).

How much longer do we have to live through people posting that everywhere?

Goodger got so bombarded with people disagreeing with that being the reason for Firefox's out-of-control memory usage that he posted in his next entry:

Firefox's caching behavior is just one area of memory usage. I'm really glad that there's been such a lot of discussion in the previous post I made, since many people have raised specific issues, bugs have been filed, and people are looking at the things people are reporting. This sort of feedback system is one of the things that makes the open development model great. Firefox 2 will be much better because of your help!

Now can you stop linking to that first blog only? And maybe tell all your friends to stop too?

To disable this feature, do the following: 1. type about:config in you address bar 2. scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 3. set its value to 0 (zero)

For those who had to look this up (like me :-)): "Pages that were recently visited are stored in memory in such a way that they don't have to be re-parsed (this is different from the cache). This improves performance when pressing Back and Forward." (Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers)

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.m ax_total_viewers

2) The EMACS key bindings on a textarea are gone. If I am typing in a text area I was a few control keys to work like emacs (F B P N D A E). Where are the rebind keys preferences? The functionality can't be all that hard to keep in the code.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Emacs_Keybindings_%28Fir efox%29

I get it all the time. I have been using "Find as you type" since pre-1.0 and it's only started happening with 1.5.0.2. I brought it up at mozillaZine and nobody seemed to care.

Has anyone sumbitted and official bug report on it?

Well, it sounds like your install of Firefox got b0rked, at least. The Firefox Standard Diagnostic should fix most of your problems.

Depends what you mean by successful. Gerv of the Mozilla Foundation looked at last year's projects a few months later, and found that they had died off as soon as the SoC ended. Hopefully this time around the Mozilla folks will be more careful about setting up projects.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hostperm.1

Have a gander at that.

p

I just use an extension called Tab Clicking Options, which lets me close tabs by double-clicking on them. This is much more consistent with behavior that's already in Firefox, since you can already open a tab by double-clicking on the tab bar. It's also easier to double-click on a larger target, a two-inch tab, when compared to a 16x16 close box. It saves space on the tab for the title.

From the announcement:

As we have been preparing for the FF2 Alpha2 on May 9 it has become increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an implementation of places that lives up to our standards of user experience and quality.

From Ben Goodger's weblog:

Firefox has never been about date driven development (within reason). The changes with Places should not be seen as a change in this sentiment.

So which is it? You can hardly drop a feature to meet your release date target while still claiming that you aren't driven by release dates.

I've felt for a while that Firefox's development has suffered and taken a back seat to marketing, and every so often, something like this happens to reinforce that belief. When faced with the choice between finishing a feature and releasing on a certain day, I believe most other open-source projects would choose to finish the feature. Whatever happened to "release it when it's ready"?

Here is a blog post by Ben Goodger discussing the descision to remove places. Basically it's so they can focus on making Firefox "Safer, Faster, Better"

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/010115 .html

- Places is still in the roadmap, just not for v2.0. (maybe 3.0 if not earlier)
- Places was too buggy to work with. Nightly testers report far "too many" bugs with it... even if they were fixed, imagine all those bugs that would be uncovered if used by the masses (nightly tester build bugs are a good indication of how many bugs will be found if open , it's somewhat proportional).

More to read at MozillaZine

P.S. I hope you can't tell that SpellBound is broken on my installation of FireFox.

If it stopped working when you upgraded FF a few versions back, check out the dev version. Works nicer now, has new features, an all-around good deal.

If it's broken for some other reason... whoops, ignore this post.

Hah maybe I sell out in trying to be controversial. But no I do have some real opinions on Firefox that usually get modded out of side. Here they arel, following my story.

In 2003 , back when I used Windows, and wasn't that geeky at all, I installed an 'alternative' browser at hte recommendation of my brother. This was Firebird 0.7. I liked it. It was faster than IE. He showed me how to use the tabs (using TBE) and how it blocked ads (adblock). I was impressed by the good many geeky features that made it useful - find as you type, style sheet changing, the search bar, clever bookmarks, easy restoring of tabs.

I thought this was a brilliant browser for geeks. And each version was an improvement, despite change in name.

I got caught up in the excitement. How Firefox 1.0 was going to be amazing and everyone would use it. Then around the 1.0 prerelease (sep 2004) things start to go wrong. I think this is explained best in the stylesheet changer issue. If you remember the old Firebird, down in the bottom right there was a button on websites to change stylesheets for those that had alternate ones avaliable. This is almost forgotten now as a result.

What happende. The firefox devs proposed removnig geeky features - this switcher, work offline the javascript console and even view source to supposedly make it easier for IE users to switch. There was firefox user outrage read http://blog.codefront.net/archives/2004/08/25/no-a lternate-stylesheet-switcher-in-firefox-10/ http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2004/ 08/24/513-is-firefox-going-nuts-or-what and even asa (sensible firefox dev) was unhappy http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/006265 .html

After extreme public outrage. They put the switcher back in. Between 1.0 PR and 1.0 See http://blog.codefront.net/archives/2004/09/11/alte rnate-stylesheet-ui-is-back-in-firefox/ Other geeky things were kept we thought.

But that wasn't true. 1.0 shipped without the stylesheet changer, but they got away with it, becauuse we were caught up in the hysteria. The decision to target IE users over their old userbase had been made. I don't know if you've used an out-the-box Firefox, but it's not much fun. It acts like IE. No single-window mode, (tabs + windows is ridiculously confusing), find as you type disabled, giant IE like buttons, links underline etc...

It was the change of target chosen by Mozilla from the powered user to the convert IE users on Windows. That doesn't mean you have to reproduce IE in everyway. Disabling find as you type, tabs by default. Even rearranging the buttons. IE users aren't dumb. They can cope with change.

The evangelical thing gets to me. Spreadfirefox preaches only to the converted. It's not about the freedom of choice GNU but about destroying competition. They'd promote Firefox over any other alternate browser, encouraging sites to support Firefox, not to support standards.

And even though I really hadn't got into Linux then. I see another sell out here. Mozilla was about Linux. It came as the default suite on many a distro. Then windows bugs became a priority - 1.0 for linux was a mess.

Do you know animal farm? Or the russian revolution. How we're promised everything, only for values to be sold out, to arrive at hypocrisy, and perhaps no better than what we had before.

Of course not. They're under no obligation to provide the "product" in the first place.

But open source software isn't, generally, a "product" in a marketing sense. That, i fear, is your problem. It is usually just a bunch of people doing what they like to do, for free.

I'm sorry, but why the hell then does anybody care at all whether Linux or Firefox or Apache or MySQL or anything else is popular out there? Oh, some of those you say are more secure and then better for the overall network? OK so I guess you do care. So you probably want to encourage others to use this software. Remember the Spread Firefox Campaign? Hey look, they even called it a Marketing Campaign. Well. Maybe it will even help increase donations and you can spend more effort on it. Seems like somebody actually wants to promote this stuff after all.

And damn if that doesn't sound one hell of a lot like a "product" in the marketing sense to me.

What will GOOG do to stop the same outright shambles this time round?

The page you linked to says nothing about outright shambles. He specifically says "I don't want this post to be seen as bashing either SoCcers or mentors". The page offers some excellent comments and suggestions for 2006, and I'm glad to see that Google is listening (Chris responded in the comments). Some of the suggestions are also meant for us mentors. The Nmap project is proud to have been invited to participate in SoC again for 2006, and we are looking forward to it!

You can call it "outright shambles" if you want, but all the emails I have from participants talking about how much they learned and enjoyed the program speak otherwise. And was it valuable to the Nmap project too? Take a look at their efforts and decide for yourself:

• Doug Hoyte nearly tripled the size of the version detection database, and added OS/device type/hostname detection using the version detection DB. He made numerous other improvements as well.
• Zhao Lei added more than 350 OS detection fingerprints to Nmap, bringing the total to 1684. He also helped design a 2nd generation OS detection (stack fingerprinting) system.
• Adriano Monteiro designed and implemented an advanced Nmap GUI and results viewer named UMIT (screenshots).
• Ole Morten Grodaas designed and implemented another advanced Nmap GUI and results viewer (its nice to have choices in open source!) named NmapGUI. Details and download here)
• Chris Gibson has written a sweet little network tool named Ncat, which takes the venerable Netcat in an interesting and extremely useful direction with features such as connection brokering, socks proxying, and much more.
• Paul Tarjan added the runtime interaction feature to Nmap. While Nmap is running, you can now press 'v' to increase verbosity, 'd' to increase the debugging level, 'p' to enable packet tracing, or the capital versions (V,D,P) to do the opposite. Any other key (such as enter) will print out a status message giving the estimated time until scan completion.

They did much more -- these are just some of the highlights. So I, for one, am looking forward to continuing these outright shambles again this year! But at the same time, there is always room for improvements . So I appreciate Gerv's constructive criticism.

-Fyodor

The developers say that the memory cache explains the leaks.

THEY ARE LIEING.

We've also said bugs in popular extensions cause some of the leaks. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

But anyone who watches the project will see that we know leaks are bugs and are actively fixing them. Look in bugzilla, or look at the change logs of recent releases, for example: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5 .0.2.html

Miguel de Icaza, founder of the Mono project, made a blog post yesterday about the state of the SoC projects for Mono : http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Apr-13.html
11 projects out of 16 were continued, 6 students still being involved in Mono today.

The Mozilla project had far less chance : None of the 10 projects are alive as of today : http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/ 03/summer_of_code_six_months_on.html

I guess they'll be more carefull about the motivations of the people the choose this year...

Evidence: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/ 03/summer_of_code_six_months_on.html

What will GOOG do to stop the same outright shambles this time round?

Also interesting is this thread in the mozillazine forums.

Development version of SpellBound works on Firefox 1.5.0.x.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3511 30&start=0

Thank God! I've been waiting for this, I couldn't for the life of me understand why this no longer worked on the mac version. I also just found out that you can change firefox's keybindings to be emacs-like on any platform. Actually that article shows you how to change the keybindings to be like anything you want, they just use emacs as an example.

It's not leaked memory. See Here for details. There is a difference between leaked memory (memory that is completely lost because it will never be deallocated,) and caching (which is what firefox does.)

Seriously though, if it is using 1.5gb of memory, you probably have it to spare, otherwise it wouldn't be using it. If this is still unacceptable, you can TURN IT OFF!

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(F irefox)#Settings_that_reduce_memory_usage http://tech.cybernetnews.com/2006/04/04/reducing-y our-memory-usage-in-firefox/

Asa Dotzler had the same problem.

It is more of an issue when you want a laptop without using a mouse, like his case.

I use a 12-button wireless mouse with my desktop, and would consider a single mouse button complete hell.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3188 60

There is a way to switch back to the usable, but granted not-so-good XUL file browser. I also have issues with gtk2 in both aesthetics (i use KDE) and usability.

Actually, Firefox 3.0 could take advantage of your spiffy GPU because Gecko 1.9 will be drawing on Cairo or WP Cairo which will be accelerated by Glitz

The extension "Nightly Tester Tools" allows you to ignore the build IDs in the .xpi file, 'forcing' compatibility. They'll at least load once... they might, in some circumstances, immediately disable themselves. Or, they might break completely.

When it happens, the 'Alpha' designation means that no more major new features will be allowed from that point onwards. Also, it should be at least somewhat useable. It DEFINITELY doesn't mean that it's ready 'informal' use... you need to make a COMPLETE backup of your profile before installing one of these nightly builds.

The biggest new feature is 'places', a gigantic re-write of 'bookmarks' to include RSS and some new features. IMHO, it's badly broken. I've used several nightlys in recent weeks, and disasterous problems, (already known, but still to be fixed) have forced me back to a mid-February build.

Be sure to check the mozillazine forum firefox-builds (at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23 , NOT the firefox-support forum) for the most recent "The Official Win32 2006mmdd Build is out" thread. Then, look at the unfixed bugs in the list. And ***IMPORTANT*** use the last link in the bugs list to look at the separate list for 'places'.

As I write this, the Places list includes 216 bugs. One is a 'BLOCKER', another is 'CRITICAL' , and 15 are 'MAJOR'. I wouldn't use the current nightly on my box. (With my usage, the 'Critical' is more important than the 'blocker'). But, in any case, I'd recommend that you wait until there aren't any 'CRITICAL' bugs which could affect you before downloading any nightly.

*IF* you download and use a nightly, I say that you are MORALLY OBLIGATED to check for duplicates on any bugs you find. Right now, that means you've got 194 'normal', 'blocker', and 'critical' bugs to cehck against... just for places.

for everyone's sake, WAIT FOR A HALF-DECENT BUILD!

Javascript 2 is being worked on. (You may want to look around more, that's just the first thing I found.)

MNG wasn't "dropped" from Firefox 1.5, it was never even planned on being included. It hasn't been included in Mozilla since (IIRC) Mozilla 1.3, years ago. However, I was looking at it just yesterday, and the code is getting constantly smaller and better, so hopefully it will be included in Firefox 3.0 (planned, IIRC, for around a year from now).

The idea of people who actually write markup language specifications and know a heck of a lot more about the internet than you do.

See also A blog post by someone who actually makes browsers and also knows a heck of a lot more about the internet than you do.

No it is NOT released.

See Asa Dotzler's blog post

Quote from Asa Dotler's blog:
 
  When we make a new release, we'll say so. Please don't report new releases because someone checks in a change to the user agent or similar. If we're actaully doing a release, we'll announce it. Thanks.

Okay, almost done. If you only could help me fix this little error in my code:

      alternate = new Universe ();

I always get an "Universe is not defined" error, probably because I didn't link to the right place.

Beside I've exactly the identical problem on a slighly smaller scale with a Thunderbird extension I currently try to create. See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3921 79&highlight=. Maybe writing a Thunderbird extension is similar complex as the Universe.

O. Wyss

Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.

There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?

A lot of times Safari won't render big chunks of web pages because of malformed markup. Dave Hyatt (rightly, I believe) doesn't want to spend lots of coding effort dealing with error recovery when parsing sloppy web pages. Browsers like MSIE and Netscape (pre-Mozilla) are too permissive and have allowed people to get away with downright bad HTML.

That said, the Safari Compatibility Hit List was recently created, to either fix Safari compatibility problems or to encourage sites to fix their markup.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.cap acity I have 1.5 GB of RAM; I have my cache set to 64 MB (4096).

"FOSDEM: The Mozilla Foundation's partnership with Google has kept it afloat for the past few months, and is now allowing it to hire more staff"

Seems to suggest that the google deal came through roughly at the same time. however that headline was misleading to suggest google was keeping Mozilla foundation afloat. see

As long as google sticks to gathering information from me only when i use google I am happy enough, it's when you get into alexa type activitys i am not.

Although Alexa does go hand in hand with the internet archive. (damn conflicts with something I do like)

If your interested in Datamining in general http://www.kdnuggets.com/dmcourse/other_lectures/i ntro-to-data-mining-notes.html or "knowledge discovery" then that link looks interesting

I like google but they are slipping wtf are all the landing sites doing high in the rankings. you know if google could derank hits based on how quickly someone went back to google after following a duff link it should progressively improve

The way to remove it, as I eventually found out, is to rename the search engine name, on windows it would be in %programfiles%\mozilla firefox\searchplugins.

I just delete the damn thing. There doesn't seem to be any negative effect in doing so. While I'm in that folder I delete the rest of the directory too. What bothers me is the Firefox folks have forced this spying shit on the users without consent. Even if you compile it from scratch, the f-ing Makefile forces these plugins to be installed. Anyway, I don't know what's so hot about an extra box for searching. I'd rather search directly from the address bar. Good thing Firefox supports bookmark keywords.

The Back-Forward cache causes immediate increased use of memory, just after loading a few pages. The increased memory due to memory leaks doesn't become apparent until after visiting hundreds of pages and several DOM Windows have leaked. That's why he said that the increased memory use people were complaining about is a feature, not a bug.

I hope the difference between the Back-Forward cache (a feature) and memory leaks (bugs) is now clear. Just because both cause Firefox 1.5 to use more memory does not mean both are bad. The feature is good, and the bugs are bad.

No one is lying, except possibly you. Enjoy Opera, the browser of whiners.

I'm really getting tired of that first blog post being cited everywhere. After Goodger posted that blog entry and received tens of comments suggesting that the bfcache is not the only memory problem, and there are others that are far worse and actually are bugs, he posted a second blog (which nobody seems to cite), saying that bfcache "is just one area of memory usage."

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009774 .html

Not on each tab. See Ben Goodger's blog for more details:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749 .html

Who will be running this Phishing database?
Is this anything like the SiteAdvisor tool we have now?
Is it possible they could fix the memory issues we currently see instead of rehashing features we already have? I just had to close a 400MB session on FF1.5.0.1 that is currenty at 55MB after a restart. I'm not sure if they're getting the message, but this is not a feature as they have claimed before. If it's really a feature, please give me a way to turn that crap off.

Check this out. This may answer some of your questions regarding that issue

Be sure to read the comments on that blog. You'll find it is a bug, and probably unrelated to the bfcache that Ben Goodger claims it is. That's why his next post is More on Memory.

He probably should have updated his original post though, so this wouldn't be incorrectly spread around the web, as if it's the only Firefox memory problem.

It is not a bug, it is a feature! http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749 .html

It turns out that it's not a memory leak, it's caching of the web pages which can be a lot of memory if you keep a lot of tabs open. You can turn the feature off, or limit how much ram it uses with this setting.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(F irefox)#Settings_that_reduce_memory_usage