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The Internet Explorer team has got to be the coolest group in Redmond... unless, of course, you believe the cake is a lie!

That sounds as expected to me. If you have limited rights you can't install or update software, unless you installed it in your own directory.

Anyway, the bugs are filed and Mozilla is working on making it better, see the comments from Robert S. in the thread http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1587505

So I was trolling, eh? Mozilla Firebird had DOM Inspector in 2003. It was in development as early as 2001. Sheesh! Will you Opera fanbois never give up? Opera even copied the name from Mozilla!

So I was trolling, eh? Mozilla Firebird had DOM Inspector in 2003. It was in development as early as 2001. Sheesh! Will you Opera fanbois never give up? Opera even copied the name from Mozilla!

Yeah... except, the Mozilla folks have already said they're not going to do this in Firefox:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html

To summarize: there are functions in the OS that do these things, that every other piece of software uses, that have been in the OS for over a decade, and that do these functions better than a CODEC embedded in our Web Brower ever will. Thus, we refuse to use those interfaces.

I suspect next, Mozilla will be writing their own video drivers, file system, PDDs, etc. since they can't trust any of those to be 100% functional. Or maybe, they should just write the stinkin' web browser, and use the parts of the OS that are written by folks who know those functions better than Team Mozilla.

Of course, what'll really happen is that someone will hack Firefox to use the OS routines, and before you know it, Firefox will be about as popular as Navigator is today. Or it may slip completely, overtaken by Chrome. Religion is like that... it's a guaranteed fail, when it's put up against rational thought.

Yeah... except, the Mozilla folks have already said they're not going to do this in Firefox:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html

To summarize: there are functions in the OS that do these things, that every other piece of software uses, that have been in the OS for over a decade, and that do these functions better than a CODEC embedded in our Web Brower ever will. Thus, we refuse to use those interfaces.

I suspect next, Mozilla will be writing their own video drivers, file system, PDDs, etc. since they can't trust any of those to be 100% functional. Or maybe, they should just write the stinkin' web browser, and use the parts of the OS that are written by folks who know those functions better than Team Mozilla.

Of course, what'll really happen is that someone will hack Firefox to use the OS routines, and before you know it, Firefox will be about as popular as Navigator is today. Or it may slip completely, overtaken by Chrome. Religion is like that... it's a guaranteed fail, when it's put up against rational thought.

I think you're full of it. Microsoft is a key committed member of the CSS WG and continue to work in good faith helping the group.

Yeah, that must be why people were getting out of the CSS WG because of Microsoft's behavior: 1, 2, 3, 4

Since you're big on the whole standards thing, you might like to know that IE8 is the only fully CSS 2.1 standards compliant browser at the moment.

Nope. That is a blatant lie if I ever saw one.

With regard to ECMAScript4, Microsoft had some fundamental differences with whether it was worth expanding the language considering the legacy baggage and the need to add modern scripting features.

Actually, ECMAScript 4 was seen as a threat against Silverlight: 1, 2

TK: I think that the fact that Google only enabled h.264 HTML5 video on youtube has more to do with the fact that all their videos were already encoded in that format (at 3 different resolutions), for iPhone and Android support. Therefore, it was relatively easy to just turn on the switch for beta HTML5 embedding.

Transcoding all those videos to Ogg Theora (with multiple copies for SD, HQ and HD) would require a major computing effort and storage space availability, that, sadly, just isnt worth it at this point. Remember, it took MONTHS in 2007 for youtube to transcode all of their h.263 FLV videos to h.264 mp4's for iPhone support. And that was before Youtube added 720p and 1080p HD video support. They'd literally have to double their datacenters' storage space!!

They sure can. They can buy the license(s).

They choose not to for various reasons.

There's a huge difference.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2007/images/internet_dog.jpg

nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Change it (Eat more CPU in exchange for faster display)

[Default 250ms or 0.25 seconds, try 20]

Why does everyone seem to forget about Dirac?

The article states that Theora outperforms Dirac "at typical Web bit rates" such as 500 kbps.

But nevertheless, linux zealots coming in 3.. 2.. 1..

What "linux zealots"? Linux users are just as interested in this, only for them it would be GStreamer instead of DirectShow. Ditto for OS X users, who'd want QuickTime support.

Any multimedia application should use the standard OS/DE services to discover and use media codecs, on any platform, period. Any excuses are either because of technical ineptitude, or political POV-pushing. In case of Firefox, they have already explicitly acknowledged it to be the latter, putting them squarely in the same moralistic camp as RMS "you're evil if you use non-free stuff, and I'll do everything I can to force you to be good" camp (as opposed to OSI etc).

Congratulations, you're /. user #1001 to suggest this. Read why Gecko won't use DirectShow in the foreseeable future.

Do you volunteer to maintain this mess?

roc has explained why using DirectShow in Mozilla's Gecko won't happen in the foreseeable future.

A Mozilla developer has pointed out several drawbacks of using Directshow for HTML5 video. Among them was that some Directshow codecs are of questionable quality, it can be source of security bugs and would mean a different backend for every supported platform.

The Opera folks have said Directshow is not well geared to streaming videos so Opera has gone with a minimal gstreamer port for HTML5 video.

Seethis for details.

That's been seriously considered. The reason it's not being done (yet?) is described at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html

Pick a large, active open-source project and try to help with the problems its developers have. You will be loved.

Here are some of the problems I'm aware of within the Mozilla project.

Speed of development

'make' doesn't scale. An incremental build, even with no changes, takes at least a minute. (In contrast, just checking whether any files have changed takes 'hg' less than 10 seconds.) Maybe help us move to 'scons', or help improve 'pymake', or just help us get our dependency generation right.

'ld' is slow. Once a developer makes a change to any c++ file, the incremental build is going to take several minutes while the linker uses up all her RAM. Maybe help us move to another linker such as 'gold', and contribute any necessary changes back to the 'gold' project.

'hg' merges are confusing. hg's developer-facing user interface could be improved, both while doing a merge and after doing a merge.

Automated testing

We've built an interesting interface around hg-pushlog (which is itself a Mozilla extension to hg) and buildbot that lets us see which tests failed after each change. I'd love to see these tools generalized to the point where other open-source projects can use it and contribute back to it.

As we require unit and integration tests for more and more components of Firefox, we're finding that a small number of tests failing intermittently can make it difficult to move quickly. We could use better tools for tracking test failures, and for record-and-replay debugging to help us figure out the intermittent failures, and probably for other things we haven't thought of.

Programming languages

We need a decent low-level programming language. Something that lets programmers implement sneaky fast algorithms, but lets programmers do it without constantly shooting themselves in the foot with security holes. Something you'd want to write (difficult parts of) a web browser or OS in.

I don't know if the answer is adding more and more to the type system (like in Cyclone), or integration of assertions with static analysis (like in D), or simply making it easy to integrate low-level code with high-level code (like in C#, or with ctypes or jsctypes).

Mozilla is doing interesting things with custom static analysis of C++ code.

Making collaboration tools support workflow and GTD

We have a crash analysis system and a bug-tracking system with lots of information, but the workflow is poor, so much of the information is not acted upon.

It's hard to come up with a good workflow (and make the tools support that workflow) in a large project where many of the contributors are volunteers who decide themselves what to work on, but I think we can do better.

If you hate the redirects (and I sure do.. copying URLs is the best), then push for HTML5. Specifically this feature: the ping attribute.

It takes what Google (and many, many another site) is doing and makes it possible to implement the ping separately from the target URL. Seems trivial; could make a huge difference.

Of course, the danger is that it gives extension authors an easy target. It's much easier to develop a privacy-enhancing extension that filters out all ping attributes, than it is to perform the same service on a single URL which conflates the ping with the target.

We'll see; I hold out high hopes for it.

I think there is a setting to limit the number of simultaneous connections. I forget what it is called, but I'm sure you can find it in about:config ...looking with the search filter, I think it is network.http.max-connections ... there appear to be settings per server too.

Though, what I think the real problem there is Firefox should just use the cached copy there, since I assume with what you are doing it would have it. Isn't this the point of having a cache--so the browser doesn't have to constantly reload from the network all the time?

It also seems to do this when saving files and restoring from crash. Lots of bandwidth wasted, also sometimes I don't have network access while I use these features, so it doesn't work. I thought it used to access the cache for saving. I wonder what changed.

I do have to say one thing they did really well. They did do a great job with crash recovery, now you don't loose your links. I have a messed up machine. It used to lock up quite a bit, fixed that, but sometimes the video doesn't come back after wake up, so I have to switch to a vt, kill -2 firefox (to make sure it quits nicely), and reboot. As well as I can remember, every time Firefox still has the tabs saved somewhere and asks me if I want to reopen them or not. Kudos to them.

A good place to start is the problematic extensions page http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

> The only situation where I would use that junk is if I had a software lock-down at work

That's a nontrivial part of IE6 usage, yes. An interesting plot of IE usage vs time from June 2008 to June 2009, with both moving averages and day-by-day numbers plotted shows that a third of IE6 usage is precisely work-day usage: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/one_year_of_int.html

"Why can't they just get it right?"

They'll get it right eventually. You just have to give their marketing department time to convince everybody in the new target market that their version of wrong is the new right. They'll get by with a little help from their new friend ;-)

Don't forget to consider this before marking me as a troll and taking the hit at Metamod time: Weblog of Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects.

This post puts words in Mozilla's mouth. While this was a high-profile Mozilla figure (Asa Dotzler), it is his personal blog, so keep in mind it's just what he thinks, not any recommendation on behalf of Mozilla.

In any case, his exact words were, "And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)" That's not exactly a whole-hearted recommendation; it's saying, "Here's something bad, but this is how you can switch it to something better." And again, of course, it's just his opinion based on the respective privacy policies--but, if someone appeals to the PATRIOT Act like Google was talking about, I'm not convinced it matters either way. (Just because it's not tied to your account doesn't mean they can't figure it out.)

I can't find any info on recent Lightning work (aside from the fact that the nightlies are still being pumped out) ... the developer blog is offline (is mozillazine dead? their front page last speaks from June 2009...), and the Mozilla Calendar development roadmap was last updated about year ago.

Nevertheless, the roadmap's stated plan is to release Lightning 1.0 shortly after Thunderbird 3.0 ... no idea if that's still on track. If I recall correctly, the calendaring portion was so side-tracked that they removed it from TB3 altogether, also shunting all(?) Mozilla-(corporate)-sponsored time away from it. OpenOffice.org is actually the bigger pushing body for TB3 as an MS Outlook killer (which means a calendar is desired), but Oracle's purchase of Sun may have rearranged (or deferred) priorities.

When TB gets native calendaring, I'll push hard on migration from Outlook for my corporation. If Lightning becomes as stable and ready as Enigmail (which is to say that politics are the only barring element from inclusion), I may make that push anyway ... but a streamlined integration is essential in the long run, and resistance to that makes me balk.

I can't find any info on recent Lightning work (aside from the fact that the nightlies are still being pumped out) ... the developer blog is offline (is mozillazine dead? their front page last speaks from June 2009...), and the Mozilla Calendar development roadmap was last updated about year ago.

Nevertheless, the roadmap's stated plan is to release Lightning 1.0 shortly after Thunderbird 3.0 ... no idea if that's still on track. If I recall correctly, the calendaring portion was so side-tracked that they removed it from TB3 altogether, also shunting all(?) Mozilla-(corporate)-sponsored time away from it. OpenOffice.org is actually the bigger pushing body for TB3 as an MS Outlook killer (which means a calendar is desired), but Oracle's purchase of Sun may have rearranged (or deferred) priorities.

When TB gets native calendaring, I'll push hard on migration from Outlook for my corporation. If Lightning becomes as stable and ready as Enigmail (which is to say that politics are the only barring element from inclusion), I may make that push anyway ... but a streamlined integration is essential in the long run, and resistance to that makes me balk.

Lightning isn't ready yet, it's 1.0 release is lagging behind TB 3.0. You can use the current nightly builds and they should work with Thunderbird 3. They're marked as Lightning 1.0B1pre. You can grab a nightly here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/download.html#nightly

They said they're basically at 1.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate status and hope to have the official 1.0 Beta 1 release out within a couple weeks, at least according to the Mozilla Calendar blog. Details are in the Mozilla Calendar Blog (currently offline):
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/

We're going to stick with recommending Thunderbird 2.0 for a little bit on PortableApps.com because Lightning isn't ready, and it is (arguably) the most important Thunderbird extension. And recommending nightlies to regular users is a bad idea.

Yeah, I dug around online for solutions and had this working in 2.0 reasonably well using mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new.

I posted this question on mozillazine a few weeks ago and got some more information, including the bugs listed in bugzilla which are still unresolved. I probably should have included those before.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1615305
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496119
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528009

I'm not sure how, since the FAQ for thunderbird clearly states 4GB is the limit unless the file system limits it to something LOWER.

Its actually not a limit on a individual mailbox, its the limit on an entire mailbox folder!

Brendan Eich's notes about an early draft and "Programming in the large" and a blog post about ECMAScript 5's strict mode (which does far more checking) talk of features that will hopefully give people a better change at dealing with the issues you raised.

OK not so useful to you now but hey...

FF less than 3.6
      1. Right-click -> New -> Boolean
      2. Name: extensions.checkCompatibility
      3. Value: false

FF more than or equal to 3.6
extensions.checkcompatibility. is used instead (bug 521905). "" is the application version, including alpha and beta releases but excluding minor version updates. For example: Firefox 3.6b2 -> extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6b Firefox 3.6 -> extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and Firefox 3.6.1 -> extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6.

it's all here, did you even look before complaining?

You can make it less promiscuous:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plugin_scanning

(but a virus could just edit or blow away your settings, so it isn't a complete fix)

Actually, even if Firefox kept an encrypted store of what DLLs it had told the user about, there really isn't any way to prevent a malicious program from simply replicating the code used to create the store, so it would be pretty hard to always notify the user.

Google update is initiated here on my system (it looks like it is intended to facilitate installing updates to Google software while using Firefox, I would be surprised if it was doing anything nefarious):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MozillaPlugins

I guess the DRM plugins are loaded because Firefox treats the Windows Media Player directory as a plug-in directory, by default:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plugin_scanning

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Nglayout.initialpaint.delay

I still don't get back the pre-awesomebar behavior. When I type in a partial URL, it still shows me matches based on the text of the web page, not just the URL.

I've not tried this myself, so I can't confirm, but under about:config (or wherever you are changing it), check out: Browser.urlbar.richResults, browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped and/or browser.urlbar.default.behavior - some of this can be changed as easily as from Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Location Bar.

Have you tried this extension?: Old Location Bar 1.8 - seems just what you're after really. Oh, and if you haven't already looked, the Mozilla KB is a nice place to start too.

Or I guess you could just downgrade or hack it out the source yourself? I really hope that some of this is some help! I hate it when apps change to something you don't enjoy! =)

Are you saying that as of firefox 3.5 it is now possible (which it wasn't in 3.0) to easily and completely disable the awesome bar? If so then (a) please tell me how to do it

Depending on what you find objectionable, the MozillaZine Knowledge Base has information that might help.

If it's not the matching/searching/etc. that you object to, but rather just the multi-line display, then you need to edit userChrome.css and add something like the following:
/* Set the location bar to show only URLs, on one line */
.autocomplete-richlistitem spacer,.autocomplete-richlistitemlabel{display:none}
.ac-title description{font-size:11px!important}
.autocomplete-richlistitem{border:none!important}
.ac-title{margin:-4px 4px 0px 0px!important;display:none}
.ac-url{margin:-19px 0px 0px 20px!important}
.ac-url description{color:MenuText!important}
.ac-url description[selected="true"]{color:White!important}

Second time? Citation needed, seriously.

Apart from self-contained data loss bugs that corrupt single files or bork their own data, the only difference between them is the identity of the data affected--deleting your user folder is no more or less "destructive" than deleting the Program Files folder or the System32 folder or any other combination of important data.

More to the point, you have a short and selective memory. On the Windows side, the number of data loss bugs in the Microsoft KB is staggering--many of which far more easily triggered than the Snow Leopard bug (which PC World was unable to reproduce). There have been plenty of famous and significant data loss bugs in Windows' history, like the Windows 98SE shutdown bug, the Windows 2000 ATA bug, and even the Windows XP bug that ate the user data folders, quite similar to the Snow Leopard bug: http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2116562/winxp-bug-ate.

How about the similar data loss bug in the Linux kernel a few years ago: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-976427.html. A simple Google search will reveal several more, before and since, in the kernel and in distribution packages.

Then there's the infamous Mozilla bug that wiped out the entire Program Files directory on Windows: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4264

It's not just user-level software development, either. Just look at Intel's repeated data loss bugs in their SSDs.

All the big names have let a bug like this slip at one time or another. It's unfortunate, but inevitable.

Well, as I said, everyone apparently has puny balls.

If the DNS software itself breaks by being fed UTF-8, then I can break it today by simply putting rødgröd.amorsen.dk into my DNS server and asking the broken host to fetch that record. So security isn't an argument. What is left is a fear that some people might not be able to access the new domains. Well guess what happened with punycode: Noone could access the new domains because browsers didn't implement punycode. And of course punycode didn't actually prevent security problems.

Fail.

If we had actually wanted it, we would have gone ahead and figured it out for ourselves.

Um, ok, then explain this

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files

and this

http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/rn01re01.html

Except Java and Acrobat ask me if I want to install Firefox plugins during install.

Except they do not.

In fact, Java, at least, also does a system-wide plugin install, meaning that it cannot be uninstalled from Firefox extension manager; not sure about Adobe Reader, but I think it does that too.

Host your own blocklist and point extensions.blocklist.url to it. Or locally: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Blocklist.xml

If you're the default Free Tech Support Guy for a friends and family circle, and you've mandated Mozilla apps as a condition of said support, then you might get a bit tired of getting worried calls asking about their "internets popup point net problem".

Granted, that's pretty much what you signed up for, but it does worry Joe and Josephine User when their internets start acting up. Yes, Mozilla, I'm looking at you here.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.blocklist.enabled

1. about:config
2. extensions.blocklist.enabled: True -> False
3. Insurance: extensions.blocklist.url: delete string contents

Done!

gee, and it really helps your case when the Microsoft rep on the HTML5 was one of the key people delaying the standard, isn't it?

Adrian Bateman gave a number of sound, reasonable objections to various aspects of the spec. Several echoed complaints that other commenters had made in the past. Some got immediate agreement from other vendors like Mozilla, resulting in speedy changes to the spec (like the removal of <bb>). There's ongoing discussion about other features, like <keygen>, which have resulted in productive changes.

It's fair to say that Microsoft is still only involved in the HTML5 community at arm's length. Adrian is the only MS rep to have commented so far, AFAIK, and his comments came years later than they might have. But MS is contributing constructively and is looking to implement HTML5. Quoting Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan on his blog, referring to a talk by IE8 Technical Evangelist Giorgio Sardo,

His basic message was "we care about standards (including HTML5), we're doing it, our release cycles are slow because we have the most users but we will get there." What I thought was very interesting was that he made no attempt to distance themselves from HTML5 or even say that they'd be selective about which HTML5 features made sense to implement. His message tacitly assumed that HTML5 is simply something they will do.

Nothing that MS has done will slow down the standardization process. Major features like <video> are already set in stone in most respects, since they have multiple interoperable implementations. If MS has come late to the party, it just means they get less say. HTML5 is still set for Last Call in October last I heard. Its progress to further levels of the W3C echelon will be slowed based on the number of formal objections made by various parties; there's no indication yet that Microsoft will slow it down particularly much. As far as I know, Microsoft has not yet filed any formal objections.

The W3C standardization process is hardly relevant, though. Nobody cares what the W3C says. <video> works in the latest versions of all browsers except IE, for instance. It doesn't need to be part of a "finished" specification to be used in practice.

Almost all of the firefox crashes are caused by buggy plugins or extensions. For example, check out: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes for a list of common plugins, that are known to cause crashes. Firefox has always been very stable for me and almost never crashes, but I'm very careful with the plugins, that I allow. Usually, I disable all the plugins, except Flash and the Adobe PDF reader and always make sure, that they are updated to the latest version (Adobe's updater is notoriously broken, so I check manually). Even in the rare cases, when I have experienced Firefox crashes, the session restore has always worked fine for me. In fact I tend to not use bookmarks and just keep the tabs open for some of the interesting sites, that I read (I do that mostly for online comics) and rely on the session restore to keep them and I have never lost any of them.

That is why good people should always own the majority of shares in their company, and therefore be able to actually control the company and prevent it from doing evil yet legal things.

Majority shareholders aren't allowed to stop making a profit either, AFAIK. Every shareholder bought stock in the company with the expectation of making a return on their investment. If the management deliberately fails to do so, then they were more or less defrauded. If the majority of shareholders could really do whatever they wanted with the company's assets, they could, for instance, liquidate all of them and distribute the money to themselves, making the minority's shares worthless overnight. This would be totally legal in a private company owned by a single person, but not in a publicly-traded company. Who would buy stock if that could happen?

On the other hand, if the shareholders are all okay with it, I'm pretty sure that the company's allowed to do what it wants. It's routine for companies to do things that aren't in their immediate business interests, like giving away large sums of money to charity. It's accepted that in the long term this helps the company by making it look good, etc. Eric Schmidt apparently told Robert O'Callahan once, in a private conversation while he was still CEO of Novell, that ethical behaviour always, in the long run, maximises returns.

That's my understanding of it, anyway, which might be entirely wrong. I know little enough law, and most of what I do know is copyright law.

you can use the profile manger to make a "special" (/cough pron) profile then switch to that for your "special" browsing needs then swtich back to you wife/boss/kid ..etc safe profile when you are ummm done..... YOU SICK BASTARD =p

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

From http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disabling_autocomplete_-_Firefox To prevent entries from History or bookmarked items from appearing but show those that you have specifically typed into the Location Bar (url bar), use about:config to toggle browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped to true. To completely disable the Location Bar autocomplete function in Firefox 3, modify the preference browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 (zero). [1]