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Firebird - speaking of which, where the hell is my 0.8?

Mozilla is in the middle of moving all of their code (with the permission of contributers) to a GPL/LGPL/MPL tri-licence. The Mozillazine article Relicensing of Majority of Mozilla Codebase to Begin Soon has the details.

Safari Enhancer of course remains a must-have app for other tweaks. I also like Safari Bookmark Exporter so I can dump my bookmarks into Camino, Mozilla, and Firebird - speaking of which, where the hell is my 0.8?

Wrong. The bug does exist in other browsers, specifically Mozilla. Try it for yourself

...the forums are down. Too bad, I was looking for an update on FB 0.8 (due out in Mid-Dec).

It's nice to see that Apache is gaining ground. Now it if could only send out WMV and RAR files with the correct MIME type, that would be great!

as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown.

The "sudden" change happened as NASA "suddenly" applied another filter for the camera. They do this to better detect certain things in the picture I suppose. They spoke about it on a press conference when they was asked this question.

From Mozilla guru Asa Dotzler's weblog:

Q. Then what we're seeing that's in that Pancam image doesn't correspond to what we'd see if we were standing there?

Jim: we have a pair of red filters that give us stereo. The red you're asking about is the infrared filter which is different from the red humans see. We can convert that red easily. We also have a red filter that matches human sight red but we prefer to use the infrared filter to get matchup with both cameras. Two cameras each have 8 filters. One filter on one eye is a dense welder-like filter to look at the sun. On the left camera is low frequency and the right camera is higher frequencies. Total of 11 unique wavelengths.

How many discussions about politics and technology are going on on SWIFT? How much art creation or intellectual pursuit? How many blogs or personal homepages?:)

As far as I am concerned, using SWIFT would be even less fun than using the internet behind the Great Firewall of China.

If it's any consolation, there is a newer version of Mozilla available for Mac OS Classic.

Backstory: mozilla.org stopped doing OS 8.5/9 releases because they wanted to concentrate on OS X. They advertised it for port status, but no-one stepped up. Mozilla 1.2.1 was the last Classic release available.

However, a Mozilla-based browser called WaMCom is available. The latest version of WaMCom is based on Mozilla 1.3.1. It's true to the original and the only changes are that they added 480 truck bug fixes and some extras that aren't yet in the suite were added. Most importantly of all, they managed to get it working on Mac OS Classic!

Yeah, it's not 1.5 (or even 1.4), but it's better than 1.2.

These two MozillaZine articles offer more info:

Article 1
Article 2

If it's any consolation, there is a newer version of Mozilla available for Mac OS Classic.

Backstory: mozilla.org stopped doing OS 8.5/9 releases because they wanted to concentrate on OS X. They advertised it for port status, but no-one stepped up. Mozilla 1.2.1 was the last Classic release available.

However, a Mozilla-based browser called WaMCom is available. The latest version of WaMCom is based on Mozilla 1.3.1. It's true to the original and the only changes are that they added 480 truck bug fixes and some extras that aren't yet in the suite were added. Most importantly of all, they managed to get it working on Mac OS Classic!

Yeah, it's not 1.5 (or even 1.4), but it's better than 1.2.

These two MozillaZine articles offer more info:

Article 1
Article 2

Actually, Mozilla/Firebird is partially vulnerable to this bug too. At the moment, the patches are Opera and Safari.;)

Despite not being mentioned in the release notes, Safari was also updated to v1.1.1. However, the only difference I can see is that the title attribute now shows up as a tooltip (which is a good thing, granted). Dave Hyatt's weblog lists many other changes post-v1.1, but in my tests they didn't make it in to v1.1.1. Such a shame.

The Netscape ISP in the UK was a no-frills ISP, which basically used the name recognition to interest people.

However the name had probably faded from too many people to be successfull.

ZDNet posted this article when it eventually closed down.

Mozillazine did cover this story of the new US based ISP on their blogs.

Elsewhere on MozillaZine, somebody (sounding authoritative) said that the transition would occur in the first half of 2004. Nobody really knows. I would guess that it will be at least two more versions after 1.6, but I am not a Mozilla developer.

From http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3 990
Microsoft's NTLM authentication protocol, popular on Windows-based corporate networks, is now supported by Mozilla on all platforms. Previously, NTLM authentication was only available to Windows Mozilla users, requiring the presence of the Windows SSPI API. Now, the SSPI code has been discarded and a cross-platform implementation has been checked in.

This makes me wonder if Microsoft will peruse legal action to block Mozilla from using a cross-platform, non MS implementation of an MS technology. Because NTLM is undocumented, I wonder what the legal ramifications of implementing it are? Do you own a copyright to an undocumented technology?

I've been told this is a myth, but not definitively by any of the developers. You might ask over at MozillaZine, although I imagine you'll get conflicting reports there too.

It's not done yet, so you'll need to read some of the actual forum posts to figure out what you need to do, but they have an experemental version that I love.

The Problem with Mozilla Calendar is that it is still very buggy, and AFAIK, development on it has stopped since OEOne scaled back its support of the project. I use Mozilla Calendar but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because it still has several visible bugs. I hope someone picks up interest in this project because it is holding back several users from ditching Outlook in favour of good ole Moz. If i had enough money, this item would be on the top of my Mozilla bounty list.

I have found mixed results with other users: Slashdot recently linked [slashdot.org] Shuttleworth's Software Development Bounties [markshuttleworth.com] where he says "Bayesian filtering of junk mail has worked really well for me in Mozilla." This is, of course, after a long time of training. Binary Bonsai has similar things to say.

At least, as eWeek concludes, it's better than Outlook 2003. I switched over at 0.3, and 0.4's been running smoothly for me so far. *crosses fingers*

1) Might ask for help in a Better Place
2) Apples and Oranges, POPFile isn't a spam filter, it's an email classification system.

There are several groups of Mozilla contractors/consultants.

Suggest you read the following article: The Reality of Bugs as to some insight why the bug in question has not been fixed. The article references Safari, but it is equally valid for any complex software. Yes, you're right - it's a serious bug, but in my opinion (not that it matters) you have managed to make yourself look like an asshole by giving the appearance of demanding certain release dates.

Even I have the good sense to realize that things move on a different timetable in a large organization, and action cannot be taken on every concern immediately. Shuffling people around to deal with a single issue may ultimately delay many issues that are just as pressing.

Sorry, mate. You tried to cast yourself as concerned user and I think you came off as an arrogant ass. Especially considering the timing.

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Netscape 7 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant firing of all 50 Netscape developers by AOL only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Mozilla.org leader Mitchell Baker states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Firebird are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Firebird posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Firebird users. Camino posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Firebird posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Camino. A recent article put Netscape 7 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 7 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 7 usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.

Fact: Mozilla is dying

This bozo is karma-whoring and somebody needs to mod him down. What he posted is a blatant duplicate of post number 9 in the original Mozillazine article.

More often than not, the problem is due to poor HTML. IE typically renders "what they meant" while Gecko renders "what they coded." Check out The Burning Edge to see all the bugs and fixes in the nightly builds of Firebird. Check out the FB Bugs forum at Mozillazine and see how many of the "This site doesn't work right!" posts are due to coding errors rather than bugs in the rendering engine. Thanks to IE, people have gotten used to non-standard HTML and poor coding. If you write some really bad HTML that IE happens to render properly (the way you want it to look), and Mozilla renders it exactly the way you wrote it (errors and all), the problem is still your code, not Mozilla's rendering engine. Oddly enough, if you write correct, standard code it will work on any browser (disregarding bugs in the browser, which aren't your problem).

I too have non-technical family members using Mozilla. I actually haven't heard a single complaint from them about anything not working right with it. They love the built-in popup blocker and Bayesian spam filter as well.

There's also more volunteers than the early days, not just with coding and testing, but with user support too, such as the excellent Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird Help sites.

But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness. If you've not tried it for ages then it's worth a try now, features like type ahead find, tabbed browsing and of course pop-up blocking make it an excellent product and make using IE a painful process. The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice, if you don't like Mozilla then there's always Opera, although personally I hate the interface to it - but others will disagree, choice is good, and having a situation where more people try alternative browsers is good for making sure we don't get tied into a Windows (i.e. IE) only web.

An identical comment was posted on MozillaZine earlier today by "glazou" - is that you, or are you kharma-whoring?

The only few gripes that I have right now are: 1) The aluminum keyboard feels like dragging my nails on a chalkboard if my nails (esp thumb) hit the hey instead of flesh.

Cut your nails ;) I have long nails and so does my girlfriend. We have not had this kind of trouble on our PowerBook 17".

2) The integrated Google search doesn't have buttons that let me search directly to images and/or discussions, and when the search comes up, there aren't buttons of the words that I just searched for allowing me to search within that document.

That _would_ be a cool feature in Safari. Send it to Apple, they listen. Meanwhile Ambrosia has a cool utility called iSeek that does exactly what you want, but puts the search in the menu bar.

3) Many web pages totally break using Safari - I am going to debug one page that I use all of the time and send the fixes (JavaScript) to the person that maintains it since it is sommething I use daily when analyzing stock charts (well, nightly).

As I'm sure you know, it is up to the developer to create webpages that adhere to standards, not Microsoftisms. Dave Hyatt, who is a standards and perfection nut is one of the developers on Safari. He has a web blog discussing Safari here.

4) The resolution on this laptop isn't so great - but the screen does look fantastic.

It could be better, but most users are not used to user elements being tiny. Until resolution-independent interfaces are developed, I think the resolution is just right for the display size (17" and 1440x900 for me). This is all in my humble opinion of course ;)

5) I'm not sure that my backlit keyboard works. It is turned on and no matter what changes I make via F9/F10, I still see no backlighting. Not a huge deal, but still a gripe.

As people have mentioned. It need to be dark for it to kick in. There are two sensors, one below each grill.

6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.

The FTP is integrated in Finder. Use connect to server (cmd-K) and type and FTP-adress. Upload and passworded servers do not work. This is done for two reasons, one is to not alienate 3rd party developers (I use Fetch myself), and the second is security. Apple is focused on security these days, and sending clear-text passwords isn't very secure :)

8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.

Acceleration is always on, because that is the Apple Way. Mac Users love it, PC-users shouldn't have a great difficulty adjusting to it since it's makes sense. Set the speed to full if you want it to be closer to Windows' hyper-active mousing ;)

10) I'm still getting used to the kepay layout for shortcuts - fortunately my misstrokes have yet to do anyuthing harmful.

I'm sure you will find that the cmd-combination is much easier on your hands as you can reach more keys without straining your wrist. Also most shortcuts are consistent across applications on the mac platform, another bonus.

11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.

I don't see how you m

And this dialog has the Netscape logo.

Lindows will be releasing it under the Mozilla license. And, they've contracted a ex-Netscape employee (Daniel Glazman) to be the lead developer.

Read here for more and past information:
Lindows.com Announces Mozilla-Based Nvu...
Lindows.com Contracts Daniel Glazman to Develop...
Daniel Glazman Starting Company to Develop Composer

And this dialog has the Netscape logo.

Lindows will be releasing it under the Mozilla license. And, they've contracted a ex-Netscape employee (Daniel Glazman) to be the lead developer.

Read here for more and past information:
Lindows.com Announces Mozilla-Based Nvu...
Lindows.com Contracts Daniel Glazman to Develop...
Daniel Glazman Starting Company to Develop Composer

And this dialog has the Netscape logo.

Lindows will be releasing it under the Mozilla license. And, they've contracted a ex-Netscape employee (Daniel Glazman) to be the lead developer.

Read here for more and past information:
Lindows.com Announces Mozilla-Based Nvu...
Lindows.com Contracts Daniel Glazman to Develop...
Daniel Glazman Starting Company to Develop Composer

MozillaZine has an article about Nvu with some tasty details.

Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, has announced that his company is starting a project to build an easy-to-use Web publishing product for Linux. The new application, called Nvu (pronounced 'N-view'), will be based on Mozilla Composer and released under the Mozilla Public License. Lindows.com has contracted Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations to be the lead developer, though the company hopes to attract other contributors. Version 1.0 of Nvu is expected in the first quarter of 2004. See the Nvu FAQ for more information.

So, it's based on Mozilla Composer, the lead of developer of Composer will be on board and it's going to be released until the Mozilla Public License. Could it get any better?

MozillaZine has an article about Nvu with some tasty details.

Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, has announced that his company is starting a project to build an easy-to-use Web publishing product for Linux. The new application, called Nvu (pronounced 'N-view'), will be based on Mozilla Composer and released under the Mozilla Public License. Lindows.com has contracted Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations to be the lead developer, though the company hopes to attract other contributors. Version 1.0 of Nvu is expected in the first quarter of 2004. See the Nvu FAQ for more information.

So, it's based on Mozilla Composer, the lead of developer of Composer will be on board and it's going to be released until the Mozilla Public License. Could it get any better?

More info on the Composer standalone

Safari on the mac still can't even handle forms right. try tabbing to a drop down box and see what happens.

And in case you're curious, here's what we've already got working post 1.1 in WebCore that you can look forward to:

(1) Support for the title attribute using tooltips

(2) The ability to tab to all controls in a Web page and to manipulate them from the keyboard.

(3) Support for table border collapsing.

(4) Support for the CSS cursor property.

... and a whole lot more ...

So all we need now seems to be the Safari 1.2 release. The only question is when that will be...

A/k/a "requirements driven development", among other names. It's generally considered to be a sound development strategy for any kind of software development. First you figure out -- if only roughly -- what the software needs to do, then write tests that will verify that a given implementation will work, and only then do you start working on the actual system itself.

Once development is under way, the goal should always be to make it correct first -- and you know it's correct because it passes the tests (provided that they are well written & robust) -- and, once the operation of the system is correct, then you can go back & optimize subsystems to improve performance.

From reading David Hyatt's "Surfin Safari" blog, it can be inferred that this is the development strategy that Apple is using for at least Safari, if not all their software. People have been submitting pages that mis-render on Safari, and Hyatt or other people come up with reductions of the page in question that still produce the bug in question. The reduced version of the bug is added to Safari's test suite, and Safari is then rewritten to correct the error. In the future, the reduction is still part of the test suite, so if future development versions cause the error to come back up, the error will be detected and fixed again.

Additionally, I've read that they have a performance policy which mandates that no software patch can ever make an application run more slowly: if a necessary patch to one subsystem causes performance of that subsystem to degrade, the developer has to either rewrite the patch to optimize performance, or produce an additional patch to a different system that cancels out the degradation resulting from the first patch. In this way, it's guaranteed that every patch to the system either maintains or improves the performance of the system overall. But significantly, note that this performance optimization is built into the patch / test phases of development, not the original development work. That is, they're paying attention to the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" maxim, and putting correctness before speed. Note that, as an apparent result of this policy, every version of OSX has been generally faster than the one that proceeded it -- compare & contrast this with Windows :-)

But yeah, test first, and come up with mechanisms for good tests first. It's a very good idea, and applies not just to web systems but to pretty much all software development.

Recently I've had 3 enteries in my guestbook that are blatant adverts for rather-dodgy commercial websites. I've deleted them, but wondered if anyone has had similair problems? One was an advert for 'bingo cards' and another for one of those dodgy 'casino' types. Now, what's interesting is that I log the user_agent that was used for all enteries, and all of these adverts stated the user_agent as Snoopy 0.95. If you follow the link you'll see that Snoopy is, infact, a PHP class that emulates a web browser.

Obviously someone has been using it to automate the task of spidering the web and looking for guestbooks and then filling them in with this blatant spam. What suprises me, though, is that I custom wrote my own guestbook, so I'm a little suprised that what appears to be an automated process can work out how to fill in all the fields correctly. I guess my field names are fairly common, but it still managed to work out which was the 'sign' page and fill in the form, including checking radio boxes etc.

I have feeling that the reasoning behind this spam is that it automatically creates a link from my website to the spammer's website (since I have a field for guests to fill in their own website). My guess is that this is a way to generate lots of links back to the spammers' site and increase their Google page ranking. It just amazes me the lengths these people will go!

Most estimates I've heard put Linux at around 5% marketshare and Apple's sales at around 5% of the computers sold per year. Linux doesn't run IE, and with MS stopping development or IE for the Mac, that's almost 10% that won't use IE. There are also other operating systems, which, while their marketshare may be small, still don't run IE.

Plus, while most people who use Windows do use IE, some portion of them don't. Mozillazine.org lists almost 367,000 downloads of Mozilla for Windows in just the past three weeks.

The standalone version of the Mozilla Calendar is called Sunbird.

There is no 'Book of Mozilla' in the real world.

See this thread for some more details. Also, google is your friend.

Composer I know for a fact will still be developed, as outlined in this MozillaZine article. One of the primary authors, Daniel Glazman, has been hired by the Lindows company (seriously) to maintain it and he plans to check the code into the Mozilla CVS. It will be a standalone application like Firebird and Thunderbird, eventually using the shared Gecko backend that's in the works.

As for ChatZilla, it's available as an extension for Firebird, and I've heard talk of making a standalone app version too, although I can't find a link to back it up. But the point is, the developers of these projects haven't randomly abandoned them, they'll still be here in the post-SeaMonkey world. Or as another poster said, you can always just run SeaMonkey, although I happen to prefer the birds.

Composer I know for a fact will still be developed, as outlined in this MozillaZine article. One of the primary authors, Daniel Glazman, has been hired by the Lindows company (seriously) to maintain it and he plans to check the code into the Mozilla CVS. It will be a standalone application like Firebird and Thunderbird, eventually using the shared Gecko backend that's in the works.

As for ChatZilla, it's available as an extension for Firebird, and I've heard talk of making a standalone app version too, although I can't find a link to back it up. But the point is, the developers of these projects haven't randomly abandoned them, they'll still be here in the post-SeaMonkey world. Or as another poster said, you can always just run SeaMonkey, although I happen to prefer the birds.

stuff they couldn't write themselves

Yep, because if there's one thing someone like Jordan Hubbard couldn't manage, it's writing BSD userland code.

On the other hand, it's not always that simple. Take a look at David Hyatt's Surfin' Safari blog some time, where he writes about how he is trying to make Safari adhere to the W3 specs, while also getting the browser to emulate the quirks in IE or Mozilla.

Some of the other browser's quirks are just bugs, but people have developed sites that depend on them -- if he went with the spec instead of the bug, people would assume that Safari was the broken browser, even though its behavior in such a situation would be technically correct.

In other cases, the spec is ambiguous, and IE & Mozilla have come up with what seem to be equally valid interpretations in their implementation. What should Safari do then but choose one of those paths or come up with yet another interpretation to follow.

Standards compliance is nice and all, but in practice a properly standards compliant page can still have quite a bit of variability in how it's rendered on different browsers.

In the end, the only way to really know is to test, test, test. Just as, unfortunately, it has always been...

- if you code XHTML, then all XHTML compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code CSS, then all CSS compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code XYZ, then all XYZ compliant apps should do the same thing.

- if you code XHTML, then all XHTML compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code CSS, then all CSS compliant browsers should render the same.
-- if you code XYZ, then all XYZ compliant apps should do the same thing.

no offense but if you are doing any kind of web development you better have all the major platforms on your desk:

A Mac with old Mac IE and new Safari (Mozilla/Netscape and Camino optional)

A PC with various flavors of IE and Mozilla/Netscape.

A Linux machine with the current Red Hat, with Mozilla and Konqueror.

Personally I have a Mac and Linux machine with VMWare running multiple OSes.

Sure you can dig into iCab and Opera and fringe browsers but the above list is good enough (I can just hear the Opera user(s) priming their flamethrowers, sorry guys).

Also keep this in Mind: the Mac folks are really trying hard for a standards-compliant browser that ALSO renders all the quirks of IE and other browsers. So if your code doesn't work right on the Mac there's a button right there on Safari that let's you submit the page to Apple as a bug. Maybe it's your bug or misunderstanding but if not you can be sure the Mac folks will fix it.

Check out David Hyatt's blog.

Alas, the standards are ambiguous. Plus, there is all sorts of legacy brokenness that needs to be supported. Plus new brokenness from certain large companies with such influence that whatever they do becomes the standard---in some people's minds anyway. Dave Hyatt says it much better in some of his recently archived blogging.

Thats good news.

Its the memory usage that has stopped me using it until now.

guys at mozillazine seem to concur it takes less mem and is faster.
yay.

I've run the weeklies since before 0.1, they all ran for me. I run Thunderbird under Windows XP Pro on a P4 system.

We need more specifics about your problem.

The best place for you to get this fixed is the Thunderbird Bugs forum.

Post a description of your problem with details and exactly what you do to get to the point where you can't run TB.

Just to throw you a bone, make sure you are unzipping TB with all the folders in the zip intact.