Mozilla Entries

Intel Labs has a new project out Parallel Extensions for JavaScript, code named River Trail. River Trail brings the processing power of Intel’s multi-core CPUs and their vector extensions to web applications. With River Trail it will finally be possible to stay in the browser even for more compute intensive applications like photo editing.
Read more here

For a long time I simply just didn't have the time to do development on my addons.

I've created 6 addons and some are fairly popular.

Linky which is the most popular one just passed 620.000 downloads and has more than 35.000 active daily users. Linky enables you to quickly open multiple links. You can also download, validate, copy and bookmark multiple links. All in one click.

Launchy which enables you to open links in other applications has around 23.000 daily users and more than 380.000 total downloads.

Closy, Reliby, Validaty and Slashy all weighs in at around 2.500 active daily users.

The main purpose of this blog post is to tell everybody that the development is back in business. I've been able to find time to develop the addons again, adding new features and fixing old bugs.

I also would like to thanks everybody who donated money so that I can continue the development. Thanks! You can also donate!

I released a new version of all of the addons except Slashy. It's quite amazing to see the high number of Linky users if you take into consideration that the prior version was released in March 2006!

There's a rumor out that Sony is looking into bringing Firefox to the PS3 platform:

"We recently received a tip from a source very close to Sony who says that they have been in talks with Mozilla lately about possibly porting firefox over to the PS3. That said, our source made sure to point out that they were unsure if any deal had actually been reached at this point, but it is great news none the less considering the complaints Sony has been getting about the lack of reliability with their current built in PS3 web browser."

Read more

I'm here at EU MozCamp 2009 in wonderful Prague, and just saw that the about:memory feature landed on trunk.

I had the chance to talk to Vladimir Vukicevic, how implemented the infrastructure for it, and he told him that this is just an initial landing. The about:memory is not yet finished and it can and will be improved in loads of way.

The final/ultimate implementation will include data for how much memory JavaScript, images, etc takes up.

I'm trying to figure out a way to achieve this:

1) I want links to open in the same tab. So if I click on a link that has target=_blank or target=_new in my Mozilla Firefox I want them to open in the same tab. Popups I want to open in a new window.

2) I want links from external applications to open in a new tab but same window. So if I click on a link in my mail program I want a new tab to open with the link so that I don't loose data on the current tab.

HOW HOW HOW do I do that?

If I set "browser.link.open_newwindow" to 1 which means "Open links, that would normally open in a new window, in the current tab/window." it fixes problem 1 but not problem 2

A couple of days ago the first big part of the auto detection of mail accounts landed in Thunderbird. I've blogged about the feature before.

This means that you no longer have to enter all of the technical information to add an account. Just enter your name, email and password and Thunderbird will try to auto detect the rest.

Really really cool. Unfortunately it doesn't support Google Apps :(

Click on the image to see the full screenshot:

All of my domains, both personal and at work, are using Google Apps. But the new auto detection cant detect my setup. Damn. It sounded so cool.

My domain at work is dinnerbooking.com which is hosted by Google Apps. The IMAP is at imap.gmail.com, but Thunderbird doesn't find that since it doesn't do any DNS lookup.

Hopefully this get fixed later...

Last Thursday the "Videnscenter for Software" held a conference on "Open Source software in the public sector." And Mozilla was represented at the conference.

I've heard about the conference and learned that you could ask for a free pass for the conference. Instead of only getting the free pass, I also got the opportunity for Mozilla to have a booth at the conference.

So Mozilla shared a booth with Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org. I organized to get some merchandise from Mozilla Europe (big thanx!), so we got both posters, badges etc.

I also had my laptop running some Mozilla Firefox promotion videos, which is so much better than just normal slides. The videos I used are the ones from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/. Hopefully there's gonna be more of these videos.

We, Hansen from Mozilla Denmark, and I, attracted a lot of attention. Most people already knew Mozilla Firefox and a lot of them actually ran it at home.

At the conference we also meet up with Christian Sejersen from Mobile Firefox. He brought along a Nokia N810 device with the latest Fennec beta on it. Walking around showing the mobile version of Mozilla Firefox also attracted a lot of interest.

By the way. Now I'm also an official part of Mozilla Denmark. A couple of years ago, I thought I was Mozilla Denmark :)

The Mozilla Firefox marked share in Denmark is very low. Denmark is Microsoft territory. So perhaps events like this can be a way to change that.

Just a quick note about a cool improvement that is gonna hit x86_64 builds of Mozilla Firefox soon:

"Currently, JPEG SSE2 code is only Windows x86. I will add it for x86_64 platform. After adding it, JPEG decoding is 15% faster."

More information in bug 475225

The seven, perhaps unknown, things about Henrik Gemal.

I was tagged by Fabien Cazenave who started to learn XUL by tweaking my Launchy extension. Cool!

So here are the rules to this:
1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Here we go:

1: I've been charged with importing pornography into India
When I worked in India I was contacted by a Danish company that sold CD-ROMs (back in the days) and they asked me if I wanted to help them get into the Indian marked. No problem. Send me some CD's and I see what I can do. Unfortunately there were some porn CDs among the CDs they sent. Don't know if I can return to India...

2: I was the top Bugzilla bug reporter
When Bugzilla was at 100.000 bugs Asa Dotzler pulled some data out of Bugzilla. We were 10 people that filled over 700 bugs each and I was at the top with 1764 bugs and Seth Spitzer was second. Read the article.

3: I played a lot of AD&D when I was younger
I loved playing Advanced Dungeon & Dragons. Still dream about creating another adventure and play again.

4: I played soccer for almost 20 years
We were once at the Danish national championship and became number 7. We also had a cool sponsor so I meet a lot of the top soccer people from the 90' like Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and most of the Danish stars like Preben Elkjær, Frank Arnesen and Morten Olsen.

5: I lived in India for more than a year working for a Indian advertising company
What an experience! Quite amazing. I saw things that you can only dream about. Everything for dead poor people and filty rich people like I never seen before. Read my Indian story.

6: I have visited 35 countries or 15% of all countries
I love traveling. My wife and I did a lot of backpack traveling before we got our first child. Backpacked around in Thailand, Laos, Peru and Bolivia. See my map.

7: I have a road named after me
In the town of Kirkeby on Fyen in Denmark there is a road called Gemalvej. My ancestors come from around there. We traced the name Gemal back to around 1600. In Danish Gemal means spouse/partner/wife/husband.

I tag:
- Asa Dotzler
- Christian Sejersen
- Allan Beaufour
- William Quiviger

My son Mads is a early adopter of Mozilla Firefox.

The other day he got a Firefox tattoo on his left arm and was very proud of it. Showing it to everybody. And yes, it's washable.

So now whenever he sees a Mozilla Firefox logo he points to it. So when he sits next to my computer he has to point out all the time that he can see a Firefox logo.

Perhaps I can teach him to cry when he sees a Internet Explorer logo?

According to Techcrunch Mozilla Foundation is being audited by the IRS and its non-profit status is in question:

On the audit of the Foundation there has not been any formal notification of issues. There has been inquiry regarding its tax exemption. Management believes that it is conducting its operations in accordance with its original application for exemption and for which it received the advance ruling as a public benefit corporation.

Read the full story

Update:
Mike Beltzner wrote to me saying that the article is full of inaccuracies.
The Mozilla Corporation is not registered as a non-profit entity, pays taxes, receives revenues, etc. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization, and its status is not under question. Google does not provide funds to Mozilla as "charity"; it's a negotiated revenue deal, and they make more money off of the traffic generated than they pay to Mozilla. It's easy to forget that, but this is not a charity issue; it's an "affinity" revenue sharing deal.

This page has some of the best and coolest Firefox wallpapers that I've seen.

So check it out

My Spying tool called BrowserSpy moved to it's own website. BrowserSpy.dk is the place where you can see just how much information your browser reveals about you and your system.

Geolocation
For those using nightly builds or the new Geode addon can try my Geolocation test where your location will be shown.

What sites have I visited?
Using a known CSS "feature" BrowserSpy can tell Mozilla users if they have visited a specific website. You can try it yourself. Also see the relevant bug report.

So give BrowserSpy.dk a test

Up till now it hasn't been possible for Firefox extensions to intercept HTTP traffic.

But with the landing of a fix in bug 430155 - new nsHttpChannel interface to allow examination of HTTP data before it is passed to the channel's creator. it's now possible.

The fix is gonna be in Firefox 3.1 and perhaps also in Firefox 3.0.3.

A new version of Firebug that uses this new feature is also in the making.

Due to the power of extensibility in Mozilla Firefox, it's relatively easy for Firefox to clone most of Google Chrome features. Actually most of the cool feature of Google Chrome is already in Mozilla Firefox.

So check out the article on how to:
Enable Chrome's Best Features in Firefox

Also check out the speed test between Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer:
Beta Browser Speed Tests: Which Is Fastest?

There's also a comparison between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8
Lab test: Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8

Mozilla has renewed its agreement with Google that was set to expire in November, extending it into 2011. In 2006, over 85% of Mozilla's revenue came from its partnership with Google.

Read more

Should be an easy choice:

Setting up email accounts has always been a hassle in all email programs. But Thunderbird is adding the ability to auto detect the email configuration.

It works by the user entering his/hers email address. Then Thunderbird automatically tries to figure mail server name, type (IMAP or POP3) and connection type (TLS, SSL, plain).

The feature is slowly getting reviewed and will then get checked into the Thunderbird codebase.

You can read much more about the feature in the bug report.

The patch will likely also include the ability for ISPs and others to provide a XML file to specify how to setup an account using their service.

Read about the feature:
In the wiki
In the bug report

There is a lot of work going on to get Mozilla Firefox to run on mobile devices and the developers has already come a long way.

Unfortunately Mobile Firefox isn't available on Nokia N95 yet. The picture you see is just a theme for the phone. So it's just a themed icon for the built-in WebKit browser.

Theme available here

Mozilla Firefox for Mobile phones are currently known as codename Fennec. It's available for the Nokia N810 mobile phone. The Nokia N810 is a Linux based tablet.

Hopefully Mozilla Firefox will be available for the Symbian OS, which most Nokia phones uses. Symbian usage is really big in Europe, while Windows Mobile usage is high in the US.

Christian Sejersen earlier this year on the FOSDEM event said that the Symbian people were looking into porting Mozilla to the Symbian platform. Hopefully we'll get an update soon on this.

Harry Li from the Mozilla community is currently trying to port NSPR to the Symbian OS and is almost finished. Check out the bug report.

Given the fact that Firefox uses a lot of Private Bytes in Windows also makes it very easy to locate it when you have to kill it with fx Process Explorer. Just look at the top.

I use Process Explorer as the main tool to watch which processes are running and sometime to kill programs. What is does is:

Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.

And sometimes I have to kill Firefox the hard way. Finding it in the process list is always very easy. It's always at the top if sorted by Private Bytes usage.

So dont says that Firefox memory usage isn't a good thing :)

So what are these Private Bytes? From article:

This is memory allocated to the process that cannot be shared by other processes. It is probably the most useful single figure when you want to know "How much memory does my app use?" It still needs qualification. As we’ve seen, the Private Bytes may not all be in physical memory. If they are swapped to disk, and the user isn’t actively using the application, then they aren’t having much impact on other applications.

My boss at work called me into his office the other day and said that my site was listed on the official Firefox 3 download site. Not sure what he meant he showed me.

If you go to the official European download site for the Danish Firefox 3 there are shown some screenshots of Firefox 3 in action.

One of them are showing the new super cool location bar search feature. The user types "da vinci" and results from the history are shown. And on the screenshot my site gemal.dk is shown at the top on a search for "da vinci". Super!

I once wrote an article regarding the Da Vinci Code or Da Vinci Mysteriet in danish and it's that article that shows up.

The image can been see here:

According to the latest browser version market share from Net Applications Firefox still have a long way to go:

IE 7.0       46.45% 

IE 6.0       26.38% 

Firefox 2.0  16.13% 

Safari 3.1    4.28% 

Firefox 3.0   2.31% 

Safari 3.0    1.15%

even adding together the Firefox 2 and 3 it doesn't even match the old IE 6. Sad but true. At least according to these stats.

But they also write:

The release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17th was followed by rapid usage share gains, topping 4% worldwide. In the first hour after the effective release of the product, Firefox 3.0 gained 1% of worldwide share. Firefox 3.0 share gains came mostly from users upgrading from Firefox 2.0, while its overall usage share by grew about .4%, primarily at the expense of Internet Explorer.

He just concludes what I already knew:

Firefox 3.0 browser uses memory much more efficiently than its rivals, according to an independent tester who wrote a memory-monitoring utility to track usage by Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), Flock, Opera and Safari. In a lengthy post to his Web site, .Net developer Sam Allen spelled out the data he collected from the "Memory Watcher" application he wrote specifically to track Web browser memory use.

Read the full article

The danish media also as a translated version of the news item:
Firefox 3.0 bruger hukommelsen mest effektivt

Gears, Google's project to make Web browsers a better foundation for elaborate online applications, now supports Firefox 3, the company plans to announce soon. "Gears for Firefox 3, as of today, is available for all users," said Aaron Boodman, a Google programmer working on the Gears project, in an interview Tuesday. "We hope to announce it either today or tomorrow."

Read more

Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 5 will, when it comes out, have some improvements in connection parallelism.

Just like IE8 increase from 2 concurrent connections per host to 6, Mozilla Firefox will also increase it to 6. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server".

Furthermore the max number of HTTP connections will be increase from 24 to 30. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-connections".

The number of HTTP connections that can be established per host will go up from 8 to 15. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-connections-per-server".

If you using Firefox from behind a proxy then the max number of concurrent connections will be increased from 4 to 8. The about:config entry for this is "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy".

All in all this will make Firefox 3 beta 5 even faster. These changes are needed since, according to Mozilla developers:

Sites are demanding more connections due to JS traffic, and we're using up more of the total connection limit with suggest requests, antimalware, extension traffic, etc.

Read the bug report about the connection changes
Read about the IE8 Connection Parallelism

For the technical people these are the new defaults:
pref("network.http.max-connections", 30);
pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 15);
pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 6);
pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 8);

Fasterfox which is a Add-on that has performance and network tweaks for Firefox uses these settings:
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 40);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 12);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 6);

but these settings are not recommended since they, as Mike Shaver puts it, would get us (Firefox) banned from the internet.

"John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, argues that the Firefox platform is actually more robust and easier to use than "rival" platforms like Facebook, iPhone, etc. Unlike these others, Firefox is a true community platform, reflecting the tastes, requirements, and whims of a broad array of users. It plays host to a wide array of third-party plug-ins. But the community angle doesn't end with plug-ins. 40 percent of the Firefox code wasn't written by Mozilla. This has stayed constant as Mozilla has grown. This is exceptionally impressive when you consider that Firefox is 6 million lines of code."

Read the rest of the interesting interview

This is the actual headline from the largest online newspapers Ekstra Bladet in Denmark. See the full article here.

The online newspaper Ekstra Bladet had a poll about the Mozilla usage. 57% answered that they used Mozilla Firefox. The true Firefox usage at ekstrabladet.dk is much lower. The statistics shows that only 10% of the visitors are using Firefox. Denmark is Microsoft country.

But back to the free porn. One of the comments in the poll was that Firefox is much better at surfing porn. "I use Firefox as a backup browser and for surfing porn. This way I dont get busted". I think he (or she) must refer to the built-in privacy cleaner that Firefox has.

Other users are commenting about the popup blocker and the ability to remove banner ads. "This makes pages load faster and it's nice to get rid of Flash movies when my mouse cursor moves across the page."

A new about: entry has just been checked in. This time it's about:robots.

So if you're running nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox you can type "about:robots" and see this page:

For more information about this page and why it's there, turn to bug 417302.

Other known about: pages are:
about:mozilla
about:cache
about:config
about:plugins
about:buildconfig
about:credits

plus others. You can see all of them by reading the code here

The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 3 is now being build with Profile Guided Optimization (PGO). So what does this mean? That Firefox 3 is getter even faster. A lot of work has been done in making Firefox the fastest browser on the earth. And now with PGO we just got around 11% faster in JavaScript tests.

Unofficial we are now the fastest browser on the earth and more than 30% faster in JavaScript tests than the latest Opera Beta (9.5.9807)

Hopefully the next Firefox 3 beta will be build with PGO.

So what is Profile Guided Optimization?
When building (compiling) Firefox, a set of tests are run and the data from these tests are used to optimize the compiled code. The data from the tests enables the compiler to aggressively optimize code in Firefox. The data represents how the program is likely to perform in a production environment. Basically, it runs the Firefox code to see what functions get used the most and optimizes the final code around that data.

Profile-guided optimization is a relatively new feature in both GCC and Visual C++ that improves the quality of generated code.

IE already doing this
IE7 was build with Profile-Guided Optimizations and gained a 8% performance improvement with no additional code change.

For more information about Profile-Guided Optimizations:
- Profile-Guided Optimizations in Microsoft Visual C++
- Building with Profile-Guided Optimization

A truly amazing weekend. I attended Fosdem 2008. I basically spend all the time at the Mozilla room meeting with a lot of interesting people.

Some of the most interesting talks were the talks about:

Mozilla Prism
Mozilla Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop. Prism will either be built directly into Firefox 3 or available as an extension. This is a really exiting product from Mozilla Labs.

Mozilla Mobile
Firefox will be available on the mobile phone. This time it's for real. A dedicated team is now focused on developing a version of Firefox that will run on a mobile phone. Some features from the normal desktop version of Firefox might be stripped, but the mobile version will have both XUL, extensions and all the other important stuff. MathML might be stripped, but this has to be decided later on.

The mobile adventure is a very important. Just think about the last 10 times that you checked your mobile phone. I bet that only 1 or 2 times out of 10 it was actually to call someone and to answer a call. The other times it was properly to check email, browse, GPS or some other thing that didn't involve the traditional phone usage. Firefox Mobile might be able to do all of these tasks.

A lot of people might start talking about how to distribute Firefox Mobile and if/and how Mozilla should strike deals with handset manufactures. This is important, but I think it's more important to focus on actually making the product. So let's get a product first!

Read more about the mobile Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Support
The support channel for Firefox consist of a knowledge base, a forum and live chat. It's an important part of the community since it both helps the users with their Firefox problems but also helps the developers to focus on specific areas where the users are experiencing problems. Eventually the support site (in some way/layout) is going to replace the built in help. That's the one you get when pressing F1.

Firefox 3 will also include (from what I was told) a utility that pops up when you cant get access to the internet. Some kind of connection wizard. This was one of the biggest problems when upgrading from Firefox 1.x to Firefox 2.

Other cool stuff
Another cool presentation was the Songbird presentation. Songbird is a desktop media player build on top of Mozilla. It has a web page API and some of the coolest icons and graphics on the web.

Both the Songbird player and the TomTom Home are both built on top of the Mozilla trunk. A year ago this would be highly risky. This has all changed and now the trunk is really stable.

All in all being at Fosdem has been a great experience and I hope that I can get even more involved in the Mozilla project.

DOM Inspector is not going to ship as a optional component in Firefox 3. Currently it's available in the installer as a optional component. This will not be the case in Firefox 3.

The reasons for this are very good:
- it forced users to select custom install just to get the DOM Inspector
- it forced users to install Firefox again just to get the DOM Inspector if they didn't choose it on the first install

Instead it will be made available as an extension on addons.mozilla.org. See bug 271812 for more information.

Personally I think it's the right decision. I just hope that it will be available very soon on addons.mozilla.org

Firefox 3 is going to include support for the new Java SE 6 runtime environment.

This is a new implementation of the Java Plug-In that features increased reliability, ability to specify large heap sizes, ability to select a specific JRE version to execute a particular applet, and support for signed applets on Windows Vista.

The New Plug-in is designed to work with:
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista
- Firefox 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris and Linux

Note: The new Plug-in does not work with Firefox 2, and no support is planned for this browser with the New Plug-in.

The new Java plugin is still in beta. You can download it at Java SE 6 Update N Early Access Program

Read more about the new Java Plug-in
Get even more information by reading the release notes

From bug 406040:
For several months a new implementation of the Java Plug-In has been under development which uses the NPAPI and NPRuntime plugin and scripting mechanisms rather than the archaic OJI. This work has been done in close cooperation with Mozilla.org and several browser-side changes were needed in order to enable a non-OJI Java Plug-In. This work was done in the Firefox 3 train, so the new plug-in currently works only on Firefox 3.

For the first time I will be attending Fosdem. Fosdem 2008 will take place in Brussels, Belgium on 23/24 February, 2008.

FOSDEM '08 is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.

Mostly I think I'll hang around the Mozilla Developer Room.

Perhaps I'll join the Firefox 3 Extension Developer's Workshop and get my extensions updated. I hope I can find the time. A lot of people are requesting this.

Well. See you all there!

Two important patches just got checked into the trunk of Mozilla. Both improve the JPEG decoding procedure. Since a lot of the images on the web are JPEG, this is very important improvement for the overall performance of the browser. Speed improvements are always welcome.

Read more here:
- Speed up JPEG decoding by 30% by skipping buffer
- Speed up JPEG decoding by another 10%

It seems that the two patches overall improved the JPEG decoding with 17% improvement on Windows.

I think that the two patches will get included in Mozilla Firefox 3.

Sidste søndag var Christian Sejersen interviewet til Søndagsavisen.

En fin artikel som handler om at Mozilla nu åbner en ny udviklingsenhed, der skal fokusere på at udvikle Mozilla Firefox til mobiltelefonen.

Du har læse hele interviewet her:
- I PDF format
- I JPEG format

I følge Christian selv så fik de (Søndagsavisen) forbløffende meget rigtigt ud af artiklen.

Husk også at spille Casino hos InterCasino.

Today ASUS launched a new motherboard called P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n, which includes the ASUS Express Gate technology.

ASUS Express Gate enables you to surf the internet in 5-second-boot time without entering Windows. And the surf is done with Mozilla Firefox.

With a fast bootup speed of only 5 seconds, the ASUS Express Gate offers an optional Linux OS bootup that allows you to enjoy instant access to commonly used functions like accessing the Internet, VoIP, and Web emailing without entering the OS.
Read more

The big news is that the motherboard ships with an embedded Linux and webbrowser. And the webbrowser is Mozilla Firefox.

The web browser loaded up on this Linux environment is called the "SplashTop Browser", but it's really nothing more than a stripped down version of Mozilla Firefox.

The SplashTop Browser is a cut-down version of Mozilla Firefox 2.0.

See pictures on the browser
Read more about Splashtop.

I, like most other people, don't have that much time trying to keep up to date with what's going on in the Mozilla project.

Here's my quick list of tools and sites that I use to, on a daily basis, keep up to date with the Mozilla development.

Assigned bugs changed within the last 24 hours
The link will show you the assigned bugs that has changed within the last 24 hours. This will give you a quick overview of what bugs that could possible land (be checked into the Mozilla code) very soon. It's the quickest way to see what's being worked on right now.

Checkins in the last 24 hours
The shows the actual checkins that has happened in the last 24 hours. Here you can see what actually landed in the Mozilla code. Most of the stuff shown here will be available in the next version of Firefox (or Thunderbird)

Blogs in the Mozilla community
Another great way to monitor the Mozilla community is to read the different blogs from the Mozilla contributers. Planet Mozilla and my own Blogupdates are great ways to quickly get an overview of all the blogs.

Other ways.
Here are listed a couple of other ways. I dont use them myself, but they might be useful:
- Recent changes to Mozilla Developer Center
- Recent changes to Mozilla Wiki

Just a quick post about some of the most important checkins during the last couple of hours:

Page Zoom
Backend support for page zoom has been added. The patch does not include any UI. The page zoom functionality can also be accessed from extensions.

New google safebrowsing protocol
Implement support for the new Google safebrowsing protocol. The new protocol includes much better performance. Read about the new protocol.

Better IO support for use in JavaScript
Make it much easier for both extensions and JavaScript in general to use IO operations. Read about ScriptableIO

According to Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mozilla is gonna be separated from the Mozilla Foundation in some way.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is currently only focused on Firefox:

Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn't focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future.

Read more:
- The blog entry: Email Call to Action
- The Future of Thunderbird
- The Future of Mail

A fix for bug 150274 has just been checked in. The bug is about the ability to reorder newsgroups in Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla SeaMonkey by using drag and drop.

The bug report was filed on June 8, 2002 which is more than 5 years ago and had 35 votes.

The patch was produced by Markus Hossner which also is the creator of the MessageID-Finder extension.

The current spellchecker in all Mozilla products are based on MySpell. But MySpell hasn't been developed for a long time and has been replaced by HunSpell. OpenOffice.org which also used the MySpell spelling engine, switched to using HunSpell with it's 2.0.2 version.

Now Mozilla is very close to making the switch to HunSpell. The HunSpell spelling engine has been checked into Mozilla. This means better much spelling features. Read the bug report for more information.

Sometimes performance gains comes from the most amazing places. A fix to a bug in the calculation of the cache size of an image has resulted in a 6% performance win on Linux and a 4% performance win on Mac. If I read the bug report correct, then the gain is only in a Cairo builds of Mozilla Firefox (what eventually becomes Firefox 3).

To help find memory leaks in Mozilla Firefox the Mozilla developers has the last couple of weeks landed the so called XPCOM cycle collector. This tool thats built into Mozilla helps to avoid memory leaks that can make Firefox take up too much memory and make it slower. It periodically checks the Firefox memory usage and tries to free any unused memory. More and more areas of the Firefox code will support this feature and hopefully we'll have a Firefox 3 that will use less memory.

But memory garbage collection, which the XPCOM cycle collector does, is hard, so dont expect miracles. Bugzilla reports that there's 237 open memory leak bugs

So how does it work. From the XPCOM cycle collector webpage:
The cycle collector spends most of its time accumulating (and forgetting about) pointers to XPCOM objects that might be involved in garbage cycles. Periodically the collector wakes up and examines any suspicious pointers that have been sitting in its buffer for a while. If the collector finds a group of objects that all refer back to one another, and establishes that the objects' reference counts are all accounted for by internal pointers within the group, it considers that group cyclical garbage, which it then attempts to free.

Read much more about the XPCOM cycle collector.

Read the meta bug about the collector.

Apple release the Windows version of thier browser Safari yesterday and the community welcomes them on the Windows platform with a bunch of security bugs found after only two hours of the release. Hard to believe since according to Apple:
"Now you can enjoy worry-free web browsing on any computer. Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one."

My own experience with Safari is really bad. I installed it with no problems but when I started it, I got the browser but cant see any text all. Both all the text in the browser window and in the menus are gone. The File and Edit menus are just empty and the browser cant show text but only images.

Apple also release some performance tests that shows that Safari is the fastest web browser around. Again according to Apple:
"Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2."

But now has Wired News Benchmarks has shown that Safari 3 is slower than IE 7 and Firefox. And Wired News has some good news:
"The verdict? Firefox may be getting bloated, but it's still the fastest Windows browser, particularly for running Google web applications."

Yet again it's time for an updated list of the extensions I use for Mozilla Firefox. I did some cleanup of the installed extensions so I only have those extensions installed that I actually use. This also helps on performance.

All of the extensions (except one) listed below works in nightly trunk builds of Mozilla Firefox. The only extension that I needed to do some code change to, is the del.icio.us bookmarks extension. Since the landing of the Places code the extension stopped working. So I had to do some minor code change so that it worked.

My Firefox extensions

• AutoAuth Automatically submits saved HTTP authentication credentials.
• Autofill Forms Fill out web forms automatically
• ChromaTabs Colors browser tabs based on contents.
• Closy Provides you different Close tabs functionality fx Close all blank tabs and Close all duplicate tabs
• Console² The next generation error console.
• Copy URL + Copies to clipboard the document's URL along with the title or the selected text.
• Dansk ordbog - Danish Dictionary
• del.icio.us Bookmarks Access your bookmarks wherever you go and keep them organized no matter how many you have.
• DOM Inspector Inspects the structure and properties of a window and its contents.
• Fullerscreen Really full screen...
• FxIF View EXIF data in image properties
• InfoLister Lists installed extensions and themes
• InspectThis Inspect the current element with the DOM Inspector.
• JSView View the source code of external stylesheets and javascripts.
• LastTab Allows tab navigation in a most recently used manner.
• Launchy Open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Outlook etc
• Link Widgets A site-navigation tool
• Linkification Converts text links into genuine, clickable links.
• Linky Open/download/validate links and pictures in tabs or windows
• Live HTTP Headers View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
• MR Tech Local Install Local Install power tools for all users. (en-US)
• Nightly Tester Tools Useful tools for the nightly tester.
• Print Hint Helps you to quickly find printer-friendly versions of webpages
• ProxyButton ProxyButton creates a toolbar button to quickly turn proxy on and off.
• Reliby Reload all your Live Bookmarks
• Resizable Form Fields Resize HTML form fields, including textareas, select boxes, text fields, and iframes.
• Slashy Fixes Windows backslash file separators in links and images
• Talkback Sends information about program crashes to Mozilla.
• TDC CMS Extension for TDC CMS (Company Internal extension)
• Update Notifier Notifies you when updates are available for your extensions and themes.
• Validaty One Click Validator. Provides you a button to validate a page using a validator like validator.w3.org
• View Dependencies Adds a tab listing dependencies and their sizes in the Page Info window.
• Web Developer Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
• wmlbrowser Display WML (Wireless Markup Language) content.

Notes:
Some of the new extensions are AutoAuth which removes HTTP auth dialog boxes. I've also found a super replacement for AutoFill which was an extension I used for filling out forms. The new one is called Autofill Forms and it's really really nice. New is also Resizable Form Fields which helps you on pages where input boxes are way to small.

As part of Google Summer of Code in 2006 student Florian Queze set out to enhance Page Info window. Yesterday the code for the new Page Info window landed on the trunk. This means that if will be part of Firefox 3 when it comes out.

The Page Info window is the window you get when you right-click on a page and select View Page Info.

First you can see the old Page Info window. Then you can see the new ones.

You can read about the project and see the progress of the project.

For those who are interested in more info read the bug report.

I've got two Joost tokens left. So if you would like to test Joost, send me an email at spam at gemal dot dk and I'll invite you. But only if you're fast! Remeber to thank me :)

Update: All invites are gone!

What is Joost?
Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We're in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

A very nice checkin has just hit the Mozilla source code. Support for read and write of Google Calendar. So now both Lightning and Sunbird has support for Google Calendar. Please note that the support currently is minimal but it's being worked on. It's being build as an extension.

And no, I dont know where to get this extension. I dont think it's getting build right now. So you have to wait for more information.

Not that The Venice Project is about to use IE8 or something.... :)

Exclusive: Inside The Venice Project, Built On Mozilla
The Venice Project1 is not just another online video start-up. The Luxembourg-based company is the latest co-production of the two-person hit factory of Niklas Zennstrom2 and Janus Friis3. The founders of Kazaa and Skype4 are hoping that The Venice Project will upend the television experience just as their earlier efforts turned the music and phone businesses on their respective heads.
Read the article

Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation - Browsers Heading Apart Again
Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months". IE8 will apparently "compete even more directly with Firefox". Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.
Read the article

The much hyped "Venice Project" which is:

The Venice Project is code name for new venture of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype). The pair plans to develop software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer technology. Working under the code name "The Venice Project," Zennstrom and Friis have assembled teams of top software developers in about a half-dozen cities around the world, including New York, London, and Leiden. The teams are currently in negotiations with TV networks, although it's not clear whether any agreements have been reached.

is using Mozilla open source technology. The P2P client which will deliver the TV, will be based on XULRunner and will be available on the same platforms as XULRunner supports Windows, Mac and Linux. Super cool to see that a post dotcom company with a huge potential like The Venice Project is using Mozilla technology. Way to go Mozilla people and community! Also credit to another Mozilla Dane in the project Allan Beaufour Larsen.

There are some nice features in IE7 that might halt the steady flight to Firefox. Quick page zooms and enhanced web page programming support fit well, while Microsoft's antiphishing looks more thorough. However, Firefox 2.0 remains ahead of its rival in many areas. Upgrading from Internet Explorer 6.0 will mean finding your way around a new interface, so IE enthusiasts would find it a good opportunity to convert to Firefox.

That's the verdict that will appear in the January 2007 issue of PC Advisor.

Read more

The other day I reported (in Danish) that Firefox won over IE7 in a test of free anti-phishing solutions. Now software testing firm SmartWare has released a report that shows that the phishing filter in Firefox is soo much better than the one in IE7.

Summary
- Firefox 2 Phishing Protection is more effective than the Microsoft Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7.
- Firefox 2 offers users a choice between local and remote protection modes.
- Firefox 2 Phishing Protection uses local mode by default, which protects user privacy.
- Even in local mode, Firefox 2 Phishing Protection is significantly more effective than the Microsoft Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7, operating in either mode.
Read more about the test

Back to the numbers: The testers found that with IE7's auto-check turned off, the browser blocked less than two percent of all phishing sites thrown at it. With the phone-home option turned on, IE blocked 66 percent of the scam sites. In its default configuration, Firefox 2.0 blocked close to 79 percent of all phishing sites during the test period; with the "Ask Google" option enabled, Mozilla's browser blocked nearly 82 percent of all scam pages.

Read more and the report itself.

Also read about the built-in Phishing Protection in Firefox 2

I just saw that a thing called Tamarin (AVM2 open source) Flash9_DotReleases_Branch initial revision was checked into the Mozilla CVS repository. And shortly after the following press release was available:

Adobe and the Mozilla Foundation today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe Flash Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications.

Once again Mozilla Foundation leads the way in the open source world.

This is a major milestone in bringing together the broader HTML and Flash development communities around a common language, and empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world

Read the press release or read about the Tamarin project.

Firefox 2 get together i København 2006 var en stor succes. Vi fejrede således frigivelsen af verdens bedste browser, nemlig Mozilla Firefox version 2. Det blev som de andre gange fejret på Ølbaren i København. Vi har jo fejret både version 1.5 og version 1.0.

Ølbaren har blevet behørigt udstyret med Firefox plakater og en hulens masse A4 posters med gode argumenter hvorfor man skal skifte til Firefox. Måske det forkerte sted at reklamere, da stort set alle i Ølbaren den aften brugte Firefox. Måske der var et par enkelte uskyldige personer i Ølbaren den aften, som ikke var kommet for at fejre Firefox 2.

I år med TV dækning
Aften var af en anden årsag også historisk da vores party kom i TV. Eller rettere Net TV. Comon havde læst om vores party og havde kontaktet mig om de ikke måtte komme og lave et interview. Selvfølgelig måtte de det. Så nu er vores Firefox 2 party foreviget på Net TV. Så sus over til Comon og se giraffen.

Du kan se et par billeder fra aftenen her.

Stor tak til alle jer der mødte op og fik en øl og en snak med venner, kollegaer og Firefox entusiaster.

Du kan læse meget mere om Mozilla Firefox version 2 og alle dens herligheder her.

Det nye phishing filter, som er inkluderet i Mozilla Firefox 2.0 løber med æren af at være den løsning der fanger flest phishing forsøg i denne test. På en anden plads finder vi Netcraft Antiphishing Toolbar, forfulgt af en delt tredjeplads mellem Microsoft Internet Explorer 7’s phishing filter og Earthlinks Scamblocker.

CSIS har kørt de forskellige gratis anti-phishing løsninger igennem en test for at afgøre hvilken af løsningerne der er bedst til at advare om phishing sider. Både den nye Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 og Firefox 2.0, som sidder på overvældende majoritet af browsermarkedet, parate med et indbygget phishing filter til deres populære browsere. Phishing problemet er kommet for at blive. Den traditionelle form for phishing, som vi hidtil har hørt mest til, hvor helt almindelige brugere via e-mail lokkes til en forfalsket hjemmeside og her opkræves brugernavn og password, kreditkort oplysninger eller lignende, får i fremtiden hårdere betingelser. En stribe producenter er klar med gratis løsninger til slutbrugerne - nogle direkte integreret i browseren - som kan medvirke til at forhindre og synliggøre når brugeren lander på en ondsindet phishing side, eller generelt surfer forbi en side der kan opfattes som mistænkelig.

Læs mere om testen

Testresultatet kan af testen kan hentes her:
http://www.csis.dk/Media/test-aptools.pdf

Så er tiden igen inde til at vi skal have lidt Firefox komsammen. I anledning af at Firefox 2 meget snart bliver frigivet, skal vi da lige mødes og have en kop øl. Alle er velkomne! Ligesom sidste år er det Ølbaren i København der lægger hus til.

Datoen for vores lille komsammen er sat til tirsdag den 31 oktober 2006 kl 17 på Ølbaren. Skynd dig at reservere dato, og send rygtet videre i systemet.

Er DU parat? Smid en kommetar eller send en mail til <spam snabel-a gemal prik dk>

Future versions of OpenOffice.org will come bundled with Mozilla's Thunderbird email client and Lightning calendar application. The open source office suite is also planning to revamp its system for building and installing extensions by the end of the month by introducing an extensions system like that of Mozilla's Firefox browser. The process of developing, selecing and managing extensions will be standardised and simplified, according to Charles H. Schulz, the lead of OpenOffice.org's Native Language Confederation.

Read more and more

Brendon Chase writes:
There are a few good JavaScript debuggers out there and a few are integrated with popular IDEs but a new project, code-named Helper Monkey, led by Sun Microsystem's employee, Brendan Gregg, caught my eye. Project Helper Monkey brings the power of DTrace, a tracing framework originally created by Sun for Solaris to JavaScript. Gregg says he is doing this by utilising user statically defined tracing interface(USDT) probes to the Spider Monkey JavaScript engine, used by Mozilla-based browsers. According to Gregg he has added probe calls to "observe JavaScript function calls, object creation, and the destruction(garbage collection, and script execution. I've also written several DTrace scripts to report probe activity".

Read about DTrace meets JavaScript

Talkback or Quality Feedback Agent is a small piece of software embedded in Mozilla that gathers data about what is happening in Mozilla when it crashes. Such information helps Mozilla developers to quickly isolate the cause of a crash and then correct it. Talkback is now about to be replaced by Airbag, an open-source multi-platform crash reporting system that Google and Mozilla are working in cooperation on. According to Benjamin Smedberg Airbag will enable the Mozilla developers to get more, faster and more reliably data if the users Mozilla application crashes. Read the entire blog entry. Read more about the Airbag project itself here where you can also download the source.

J. Paul Reed Build/Release Engineer at the Mozilla Corporation writes:

Is the Mozilla Project switching to Subversion? There have been many discussions in the past few months about the version control system that the Mozilla project entrusts its code to. It's safe to say there's a desire from most of the community to thank CVS for taking good care of our source code - for the most part - and move into the 21st century. Obviously, such a move is a big deal, and impacts the very core of the Mozilla Project: our source code. It's not a decision to be made lightly, or by a limited subset of people. It's a project-wide discussion. The first part of these discussions has already taken place, and a set of Project's requirements for a version control system has emerged. As they wiki page notes, some of these requirements are in conflict, so they represent a utopian ideal of version control systems. But no decision has been made on which version control system to switch to, nor have any concrete plans (schedules, etc.) even been considered.

Read more
Also read the Version Control System Requirements for Mozilla

I got a email the other day asking if it is possible by using my Mozilla addon Launchy to start the Firefox Portable with within the Thunderbird Portable. So when you use Thunderbird Portable and right click on a link you can choose Firefox Portable. And when you from within Firefox Portable right click on a mailto link can choose Thunderbird Portable. And the answer is yes.

Lets say you installed Firefox Portable and Thunderbird Portable on your USB stick. Firefox Portable is installed so that the full path to the executable is something like USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe and the full path to the Thunderbird Portable executable is USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\ThunderbirdPortable\ThunderbirdPortable.exe.

The solution is to use the launchy.xml and and the %GeckoDrive% variable. The launchy.xml file is used by Launchy to add additional applications, besides those autodetected, to the right click option. The %GeckoDrive% variable always holds the drive letter from which the Gecko application was started. So if Firefox Portable was started from the drive letter Z the %GeckoDrive% variable is set to "Z:". Not that %GeckoDrive% also includes the semicolon after the drive letter.

The gives us the possibility to create a launchy.xml file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configurations xmlns="http://launchy.mozdev.org/configurations">
  <application>
    <label>Firefox Portable</label>
    <type>1</type>
    <command>%GeckoDrive%\FirefoxPortable\FirefoxPortable.exe</command>
  </application>
  <application>
    <label>Thunderbird Portable</label>
    <type>2</type>
    <command>%GeckoDrive%\ThunderbirdPortable\ThunderbirdPortable.exe</command>
  </application>
</configurations>

To get it working you have to place the above text in file called launchy.xml in these two directories:
USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\ThunderbirdPortable\Data\profile\chrome\
USB_DRIVE_LETTER:\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\chrome\

This way the next time you start your Firefox Portable or Thunderbird Portable the right click Launchy option will show you the Portable options.

Does the sudden appearance of a Firefox crop circle imply which browser extraterrestrials prefer? We don't know, but it was still fun to make! Constructed by local Firefox fans and the same team that created the Firefox mural from cornstarch and kool-aid and launched the Firefox weather balloon, the Firefox Crop Circle project shows that we have so much passion for Firefox that we want it to be visible from space! Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.

Watch the video
Read more about the project
Picture gallery

I hate Real Player but if it can increase the Firefox marked share then ok. Actually I used to like the player until it got bloated with all kinds of weird applications and functions.

RealNetworks said Wednesday that it has agreed to a multiyear agreement to offer Mozilla's Firefox Web browser with downloads of its RealPlayer, Rhapsody and RealArcade software programs. Real said it has also agreed to extend and expand a similar agreement with Google under which it will offer the search engine's Toolbar and Desktop programs with Real software. RealNetworks partnership with Mozilla comes as Firefox continues to notch steady gains in the U.S. Web browser market at the expense of Microsoft and its dominant Internet Explorer browser. According to Net Applications, Firefox's share of the browser market stood at 11.3% at the end of July, up from 9.6% at the end of 2005 and 4.6% at the end of 2004.

Read more

Google Summer of Code has released the list of the current Mozilla projects being worked on:

- Mozilla and D-BUS Integration
- implementation of APNG
- Rewrite of Cairo's 2D Rendering Library
- Develop a set of js libraries for common TB tasks
- Enhanced Page Info window
- CZilla Translator - tool with user-friendly interface that manages translation of Firefox, Thunderbird and their extensions
- XUL editor plugin for Eclipse
- Application for ZipWriter
- Thunderbird spam filter testing and improvements
- Giving webdevelopers a better JavaScript debugging experience
- Improvements to the Camino tabbed browsing experience

See the list here

NSpluginwrapper is a cross-architecture tool designed to let Firefox users on AMD64 and PowerPC Linux use i386-only, binary Web browser plugins - such as those frequently provided by closed source, commercial interests. Following a protracted delay after its initial, binary-only release back in May, NSpluginwrapper is now available with source code. NSpluginwrapper works with plugins conforming to the Netscape 4 Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI). As its name implies, NPAPI was initially developed in the pre-Mozilla days at Netscape, but today it lives on both in Mozilla-derived browsers such as Firefox, and in a number of independent applications, such as the Opera browser and KDE's Konqueror. NPAPI specifies about 15 data structures and 20 methods that the plugin must expose to the browser, and 16 methods that the browser must expose to the plugin.
Read more

Sherman Dickman writes:
Since the product management role is a relatively new one at Mozilla, I thought it would be useful to outline some of the most important functions that a PM should perform, particularly within the context of product planning. Many of these will be conducted in parallel with the Gecko 1.9 engineering planning efforts currently underway. The end PM deliverable for Firefox 3 will be a MRD that can be referenced by all, but the real value for the Mozilla community will be derived from the MRD development process itself.

Some of activities that are listed are:
- Identifying market and technology trends
- Product vision and strategy
- Key feature requirements
- Why should anyone use our product over another product? Do the benefits outweigh the tradeoffs that a user must endure when switching? If yes, why don't more people use our product?
- Which of our technology assets are clearly superior to the competition? How do we keep them from being easily copied or duplicated?

Read the posting in the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox (using news.mozilla.org).

A long time ago I reported that the Firefox team at Google was working on server side stored state. And now we have the proof:

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. Google Browser Sync is completely automated. The settings you select at startup are automatically synchronized across each of the computers on which you install Browser Sync. You won't even need to log in every time you start the browser. You can change which browser components are being synced – or even stop the syncing process entirely – using the settings panel in the upper-right corner of the page. The settings panel also gives you access to your PIN.
Read more and install

One of the chief selling points (if a free browser can have a selling point) of Mozilla Corporation's Firefox browser has been its reputation of being more secure than Internet Explorer. Preaching to a choir of open-sourcers at the Red Hat Summit, the company said it expects to maintain that advantage. Firefox has won the hearts of between 10-20 percent of the web browser market, stealing away a large chunk of Microsoft's IE monopoly. According to Secunia, those converts are well deserved. The security firm reports that while IE 6 still has 21 unpatched vulnerabilities, Firefox only has three.
Read more

Mozilla Confident of Security Lead over Microsoft
Mozilla Corporation is confident that its Firefox browser will maintain its security lead over Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 7. "In the long run, [Firefox] will always be more secure [than Internet Explorer] because we have transparency and we have external contributors," Christopher Blizzard, a board member for the Mozilla Corporation, said during a session at the Red Hat Summit in Nashville.
Read more and more

Validaty is a Mozilla extension for Firefox, Flock and Netscape 8 that provides you with One Click Validation functionality. Validate a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service with a click of a button. The validation is done without opening a new page or tab. You click click the Validaty icon in your toolbar and the page is validated for you and the icons shows the status of the validation. The W3C Markup Validation Service is a free service that checks web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.

When you click the Validaty button

on your toolbar the Validaty button turns into either
or
depending on if the current page validates. No need to open a new tab or anything. If the page doesn't validate you're giving the option to see the validation report.

The default validator used is w3 but you can change this using the options.

You access the Validaty icon by adding the Validaty button to your toolbar. You do this by right-clicking on your toolbar and drag the Validaty icon to the toolbar.

So go ahead and install Validaty!

Mozilla Foundation has said it is committed to rewarding the community that helps develop its software. Mozilla's suite, which includes the Firefox Web browser, is partly developed by unpaid programmers, often working in their spare time. Mozilla on Wednesday said it could not afford to pay all of its voluntary contributors, but instead may contribute by providing hardware to some developers. "Sometimes [volunteers] struggle on bad machines, or stay up all hours looking for someone with a Linux machine to test a program. Maybe we can provide machines," said Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation chief executive and a member of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors, in an interview with ZDNet UK.
Read more

Despite its success, however, Mozilla's fans are becoming increasingly -concerned that the organisation is moving away from its altruistic roots and becoming a fully fledged money-making operation. The company makes no secret of the fact that it turns a profit. Firefox uses Google as its preferred search engine partner. When a user carries out a search via the browser's built-in search facility, about 80 per cent of the advertising revenue from any associated hits goes back to Mozilla.
Read more

With the release of Windows Vista Beta 2, I want to announce that we will be naming the version of IE7 in Windows Vista “Internet Explorer 7+”. While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics. These features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version.

- IE7+ running on Windows Vista: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
- IE7 running on Windows XP: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Read more and more

Some of you might have noticed that on some of the checkins that are made recently the word coverity has been mentioned.

Coverity is a bug finding system that is capable of detecting defects and security vulnerabilities in the source code. Coverity detects at compile time bugs that will crash the system at runtime. Examples include memory leaks, use after frees, and illegal pointer accesses. Coverity also pinpoints security vulnerabilities in your source code that hackers can exploit. This eliminates serious problems such as denial of service, data/memory corruption and escalation of privileges in the earliest stage of development. Example vulnerabilities detected include buffer overruns, integer overflows, format string errors and SQL injections attacks and many more.

In collaboration with Stanford University, Coverity is scanning the Mozilla source code. This is great news for the Mozilla project. We're getting a free audit of the source code. This will improve the quality of the code and hopefully fix some of the bugs that still exists in the Mozilla source code.

The status of the Coverity scan as of today is:
- 232 total bugs
- 116 open bugs
- 99 fixed bugs

Reliby is a Mozilla extension that provides you with Reload all Live Bookmarks functionality. You can access it using by adding a button to your toolbar. Live bookmarks are RSS feeds inside your browser.

Version 1.1.0 of Reliby has been released and it now supports Places. Places is one of the big new features that will make it into Firefox 2.0. It will replace the History and Bookmarks features - the former keeping a log of pages you have visited in the past, and the latter being pages that the user has bookmarked for whatever reason, either because they are pages that the user visits regularly (favourite pages) or something interesting that the user would like to look at later. Places uses SQLite.

Two years ago I blogged about a similar subject. I discussed the advantages of Internet Explorer (IE) over Mozilla and other web browsers in a corporate environment. I concluded that IE is by far the better choice. Recently we deployed about 250 new computers and so I considered this question again. Now, Firefox is the main rival of IE. The decision was not so easy this time, but IE won again in the end. I am using Firefox myself for a quite while and I really like this web browser. However, when it comes to the question of switching to a new web browser in a corporate network, other arguments have to be considered.

Conclusion:
The advantages of the IE are mainly founded in its tight integration with Windows. Firefox has to run on other operating systems, too. Hence, all features should work on all systems not only on Windows boxes. That's why I'm not expecting too many improvements in this field in the near future. Although projects like Firefox ADM show that better integration is doable and that some Open Source programmers recognized this problem. All in all, I'm still a Firefox fan, but wouldn't recommend it for corporate use in larger networks. There are exceptions of course: If all your desktops use Linux or Mac OS. But if you have Windows desktops, the only reason I could think of, is that you really need a certain feature of Firefox which you is not available in IE.

Read more

The Mozilla Foundation is planning to use some of its millions of dollars in revenues to fund active members of its developer community, the organization said Tuesday. The foundation made $5.8 million in 2004 and is thought to have made tens of millions of dollars last year, predominantly from partnerships with search companies, such as Google and Yahoo. Though much of its money has gone toward increasing its head count, some has been used to bulk up its reserve fund. Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of the Mozilla Corporation, the commercial subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, said Mozilla plans to put some of its excess revenues back into the community. "The Mozilla Group--the foundation and the corporation--has a set of employees that provide a critical mass where things can happen, but it is only a piece of the project. There are vast numbers of things that happen outside our employee base," she said. "We have a commitment that while we have funds beyond our operating levels, some of it should to go to community members. We want to do that in a way that promotes the community."

Read more

A lot of people have asked for more information about Mozilla. Both developer information but also information about how the entire Mozilla thing works. Both in terms of products but also with decisions. A lot of interesting stuff and discussions are now happying at the newsgroups at news.mozilla.org

Some of the interesting stuff found there are amongst other Brett Wilson talking about changes to the URL autocomplete box that he like to make. Ben Goodger also made a lot of postings where he tries to explain where Firefox 2 and even Firefox 3 is going and most importantly why the changes are needed. Here you can get a lot of answers about the whole development of Mozilla Firefox. It's really interesting read.

There's also the mentioning of Microsummaries which are:
Microsummaries are regularly-updated succinct compilations of the most important information on web pages. They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, are regularly updated as new information becomes available, and are linked to the pages they summarize.
Check it out and read more about it

Be sure to read/subscribe to both the general and firefox newsgroups. So head over to the newsgroups and start reading.

From the now removed PowerPoint file of the Google Analyst Day:

Store 100% of User Data. With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user. As we move toward the "Store 100%" reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine. Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user's data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications.

So apparently Google is working on some kind extension that will make it possible to store bookmarks on the server side. Neat!

You can read the comments from the removed PPT file here

Darin Fisher just landed the data collection service on the trunk of the Mozilla code.

The data collection service is used to gather browser metrics. This provides a way to learn more about how users use the Mozilla Firefox browser. Often times, we end up making guesses about usage patterns or typical system constraints. The data collection service can collect data from live instances of Firefox and analyze that to improve the product. This service is disabled by default in release builds. Users will be given the choice to enable this feature "to help make Firefox better" or something along those lines. The collected data is uploaded a collection server periodically and local copy flushed.

Read more about Browser Metrics at the wiki or in the bug report.

Googles Safe Browsing anti-phishing extension released by Google on labs.google.com in December 2005, is going to be landed on the trunk Mozilla code for consideration as the base for an anti-phishing feature in Firefox. It'll be a global extension, off by default.

This is just one of the many results from the Mozilla people working at Google and it shows Google's interest in making Mozilla Firefox the best and most secure browser available.

Read more about Safe Browsning and the design documentation. You can also check out the bug report itself.

The default chrome of Firefox has not been altered since the launch of Firefox 1.0. It would be presumptuous to assume that the way in which users interact with their browsers has gone unchanged between that time and our planned 3Q2006 release date for Fx2, and even more presumptuous for us to assume that we got things 100% right with Firefox 1.0. Ben's been thinking about this for a while, and he and Joe and I got together today to take a good hard look at the browser window with the following goals:
- remove UI elements that aren't useful to majority of users
- increase usability of elements that are useful
- increase focus on web content

Read the thread at groups.google.com

My latest extension Reliby was made because of a request from a colleague of mine. Mr KimBlim had the problem that when he starts Firefox while being offline and then connects, his live bookmarks didn't load because of being offline at start. So he needed an extension to force reload of all his live bookmarks and Reliby was born.

Reliby is short for Reload all Live Bookmarks. The y is added to conform with my other extensions like Linky, Launchy, Slashy and Closy

In Firefox, Live Bookmarks are automatically updated every 30 minutes. That's alright for most times, but sometimes it's nice to force reload them.

And Reliby does just that. It reloads all of your Live Bookmarks with a push of a button.

Reliby can be accessed by adding a button to your toolbar or by using Bookmarks > Reload Live Bookmarks

Note: Reliby does not work with Live Bookmarks in Places since the API is completely changed.

WindowsDevCenter.com have taken a inside look at Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. It looks a bit like Firefox but it has some nice features that I like to see in Firefox.

Last year, I wrote a preview of IE 7 Beta 1 when Microsoft released Windows Vista Beta 1. Since then, six months have passed and the IE 7 team has released the second beta of IE 7. This IE 7 Beta 2 Preview is the first public beta designed for IT pros and developers, and it especially targets Windows XP SP2 users. IT pros and developers can use this beta preview to test their toolbars and ActiveX controls. But what about end users? In this article, I will update you on the features in IE 7 Beta 2 and what has changed since the last beta preview. Overall, I am happy with the new Beta 2 of IE 7. I have been using it for the past few days and it works quite well (it has crashed on me only once). Give it a spin and see if it works well for you.

Read article

Robert Strong and Benjamin Smedberg are working on a new installation system for Firefox 2 which will be significantly less complex and easier to maintain than the current XPInstall-based system. This install system will produce both a full installer and a stub installer. Both the full and stub installers will be QAed and treated as "official" builds. The proposal is to make the stub installer the default download available from mozilla.com. The stub installer has the added advantage that it can ship a single stub installer for all languages and select the correct locale files to download at runtime. Of course the full installer would still be available, and especially useful for system administrators and others who want to make an installer available locally.

View posting

I flere tilfælde har brugere af Firefox ikke udført installationen af Digital Signatur korrekt, og derfor udvikler TDC i samarbejde med Videnskabsministeriet nu en speciel sikkerhedskomponent til Firefox. Digital Signatur fungerer glimrende sammen med den gratis browser, hvis brugerne vel at mærke følger TDC's vejledninger og får indstillet en sikker aktiveringskode i Firefox.

Nogle af de nye brugere af Firefox har haft vanskeligt ved at følge vejledningerne for opsætning af personlig aktiveringskode for signaturen. I de tilfælde er sikkerheden ikke optimal, og med tanke på det stigende antal brugere af Firefox-browseren har vi besluttet at udvikle en sikkerhedskomponent specielt til Firefox, siger Morten Storm Petersen, der er TDC-ansvarlig for Digital Signatur. Komponenten, kaldet PKCS#11, ventes færdig om nogle måneder.

Indtil da kan Firefox-brugere selv kontrollere, om deres personlige aktiveringskode er sat rigtigt op. Det kan gøres på digitalsignatur.dk, hvor man går ind på en af de tjenester, som understøtter Digital Signatur-login. Alt er ok, hvis man bliver bedt om at indtaste aktiveringskoden. Alternativt kan man følge TDC's vejledning til installation af signaturen.

Following a decision to release a standalone version of IE7, browser development at Microsoft has come fast and furious. BetaNews this week sat down with Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management, to discuss the changes coming in IE7, Firefox's growth, and how Microsoft will bring RSS to the mainstream. When BetaNews last spoke to Schare in late 2004, he explained why Microsoft had no plans to add features like tabbed browsing directly into Internet Explorer or update its CSS support. After much feedback, things changed in early 2005. With a standalone IE7 now feature-complete, Schare delves into the reasoning and gives us a look at what to expect when the browser is released later this year.
Read interview

"IE 7 is a pretty good catch-up," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering. "But it does some funny things with tabs and the UI that I don't understand why they did it.". Firefox 2.0's development roadmap lists the main feature updates and additions, and their priorities. Among those at the top are redesigns of the browser's bookmark and history system, security enhancements to extensions, the popular plug-ins, search engine improvements, and changes to the tab-based user interface.
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Check out Firefox 2 features

The Boeing Co. has been discreetly providing feedback to the Mozilla Foundation for the past year or so on features that might encourage enterprise adoption of the open-source Firefox browser. At the top of the list has been a tool kit to help IT departments distribute Firefox with custom configurations to end users. The Chicago-based aerospace company had good reason to express interest in such a tool. Last August, Boeing made Firefox one of its corporate Web browser standards alongside Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) and a version of Netscape Navigator that is being sunsetted. Although Boeing hasn't deployed Firefox wide-scale and couldn't provide an estimate of the browser's usage within the company, the corporate standard decision sets it apart from most of its peers.
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Due to a GUID change in recent versions of Launchy, Linky and Slashy extension you might end up with two versions of the extension installed. Please check your Extension Manager and uninstall the oldest version of the duplicate extension.

The result of the duplicate extension is that you're prompted that the extension has been update over and over again. Just uninstall the old version of the extension.

Netscape release version 8.1 of their browser yesterday. New things in the release is amongst other Anti-Spyware Protection, Built-in RSS reader, Undo tab close.

Read more
Release notes

The open source browser Firefox has been rated alongside Google, Apple and Starbucks as one of the most powerful brands in the world in 2005, according to a study published on Monday. Brandchannel.com, a Web site for marketing professionals run by global branding consultancy Interbrand, asked over 2500 readers during November and December which brands had the most impact on them that year. Firefox was voted as the eighth most influential brand worldwide in 2005 - the first time that a piece of open source software has featured in the top 10 list in the five years that the survey has been carried out.
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See result

Darin Fisher implemented a new ping feature and some users hate it.

I'm sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see the page they clicked on. Many websites will employ redirects to have all link clicks on their site first go back to them so they can know what you are doing and then redirect your browser to the site you thought you were going to. The net result is that you end up waiting for the redirect to occur before your browser even begins to load the site that you want to go to. This can have a significant impact on page load performance.

You can test your browser for the ping feature here. Only nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox has the feature.

Firefox 1.5 was a major milestone on all platforms, but it was not quite what it could have been on Mac OS X. We just didn't have the resources to test for and fix bugs fast enough when release time rolled around. However, not delaying the release was a decision that I was happy with because it was the right thing to do, even if it meant less-than-great Mac OS X support. Firefox 1.5 was still a major upgrade in terms of Mac OS X support, and nothing to be ashamed of. Once Firefox 1.5 was out the door, we got the time we needed to test for and fix some of the major bugs in Firefox 1.5 for Mac OS X. Mozilla's release drivers were great about helping us get the results of that effort into the upcoming Firefox 1.5.0.1 release, and I'm writing this blog post to let you know that Firefox 1.5.0.1 is going to be everything Firefox 1.5 could have been on Mac OS X. You should definitely download it as soon as it comes out.
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More Mac news : Firefox for Intel Macs planned for March

What would happen if Mozilla's Firefox suddenly became the browser that everyone was running? What would happen if it was as big a target for hackers and for virus and spyware authors as Internet Explorer is now. How would Firefox's reputation for security hold up? One has to wonder how secure a default Firefox installation is, and if there are things that can be done to make a Firefox deployment more secure?
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The year 2005 was a banner year for open source Web browser Firefox, a fact underscored by recent market share numbers released by site tracker NetApplications. The company saw the number of Firefox users inch tantalizingly close to the 10 percent figure (9.57 percent, to be exact) in December 2005, a nearly 1 percent jump from November 2005. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) still dominates the browser world at roughly 85 percent of the market. But that figure is a drop from NetApplication's November 2005 statistics, which put IE at 86 percent of the market. Mac-based Safari inched up from 2.78 percent in November 2005 to 3.07 percent the next month; Opera experienced a negligible gain from .53 percent to .55 percent in the same time frame. Netscape dropped from 1.25 percent of the market to 1.24. All other browsers collectively saw a gain from .43 percent to .53 percent. The numbers show that, while there are a number of browsers available today for end users, it's likely going to come down to a two-horse race between IE and Firefox.
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Microsoft Explorer 7.0 looks and feels like Firefox. We were indeed very shocked when we managed to see and feel the beta of Explorer 7.0. The key thing is tab browsing that looks and feels like you are using Firefox. Even the search button at the left hand side looks and fells like this free browser. Just as in Firefox you can ad search engines. There are some extra features as its easier to block the nasty sites and the RSS button is more accusable. Of course you can bookmark tabs as well.
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Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser finished the year with a flourish, a Web measurement firm said Wednesday, and came within half a point of the 10 percent market share that many analysts have set as the bar to long-term success against Microsoft's leading Internet Explorer. According to the latest numbers from Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based NetApplications, Firefox wrapped up 2005 with 9.6 percent of the browser market, a gain of almost a full point over November.
Read more and more

AllPeers is a free extension which combines the strength of Firefox and the efficiency of BitTorrent to transform your favorite browser into a media sharing powerhouse. Regain control! You decide which media files you want to share with whom and to maximise your privacy, communications are encrypted.
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Read the blog

Got a nice surprise today when I installed the new beta of FastStone Image Viewer which is the image viewer that I use. After installing it, it launched my web browser with this page. It's a "thank you for using FastStone page" but it also features a "you should use Firefox" notice. Way cool to see my favorite image viewer promoting Firefox.

No way to build a market: No more Mac users. No more Dell users in the UK. HP's shipping Netscape. Internet Explorer 7 is the ultimate "me too" knock off. And nobody's madder than Microsoft employees and fans. Microsoft employee Rory Blyth: I think IE is horribly behind the times. When every other browser on the planet that's worth a damn supports tabbed browsing, it's just crappy that I still have to have different copies of IE open to have multiple sites open at once. As of right now, my favorite browser on the planet is Apple's Safari.
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Firefox users wrote to us detailing their problems with the browser, and we asked Mozilla for some answers. Before we get too far down that path, however, let's put things in perspective. More than 60 percent of the people who responded to our request for personal experiences with Firefox 1.5 reported they had no problems whatsoever with the browser software. And there is absolutely no statistically valid way to draw any hard conclusions about how many people are having stability issues with Firefox 1.5 based on this small sample size. At a rough guess, the number of people experiencing serious problems is probably well under 10 percent of all the people who have downloaded and installed Firefox 1.5.
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Yesterday Google released 2 new Firefox extensions.

Google Safe Browsing
Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous. That's why it's important to browse safely with Google Safe Browsing. By combining advanced algorithms with reports about misleading pages from a number of sources, Safe Browsing is often able to automatically warn you when you encounter a page that's trying to trick you into disclosing personal information.

It seems that Google Safe Browsing for Firefox is only available for download for users within the US.. But that can be fixed.

Blogger Web Comments
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you're viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you're on.

I have heard rumors of a possible acquisition of Opera by a bigger company. Now again I hear (and read) rumors of a possible deal between Google and Opera which would see the search engine giant taking over the Opera Web Browser company. This makes sense. Google has been lending a helping hand to Firefox. However, it does not control how Firefox is developed. They can of course launch their own Google Browser (or the GBrowser) on the Mozilla's rendering engine, but they have not till now. Opera of course makes a lot of sense considering it is a small company and is very heavily under development.
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Update: Rumors come and go. Google is not buying Opera

SmartFox will enable users, with a single click, to grab a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser. The Center for History and New Media is building an open-source package of tools for libraries and museums that will work right in the web browser, where most research is now done. We are calling the project SmartFox: The Scholar's Web Browser, and it will enable the rich use of library and museum web collections with no cost - either in dollars, or probably more importantly, in secondary technical costs related to their web servers--to institutions. This set of tools will be downloadable and installable on any of the major open-source browsers related to the increasingly popular Firefox web browser: Firefox itself, Mozilla, and the latest versions of Netscape and the AOL browser (all based on the Firefox code base).
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The new artwork centers around an abstract figure resembling a "Sea Monkey", colored in a light, cyan/blue color, standing out from a dark blue circle with a wave pattern in the middle. This design, created by Alex Butin, not only looks professional and polished, but also fits perfectly as an icon on a modern computer desktop and is easily recognizable even in small sizes. Additionally, the look matches the rest of the mozilla.org family (Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, Sunbird) quite well. And while the soft shapes and color shades create a very polished impression, the waves and the figure make people feel the new dynamic the internet suite application has gained through the new project.

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as "Mozilla Application Suite".

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In China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, the default homepage and search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser will be provided by Yahoo instead of Google.
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 has been released. The award-winning Web browser is better than ever. Browse the Web with confidence - Firefox protects you from viruses, spyware and pop-ups. Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use and privacy. It's easy to import your favorites and settings and get started. Download Firefox now and get the most out of the Web
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Download Mozilla Firefox NOW

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 på dansk: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux i386

Identity is part of Firefox 2.0 plan as described by Dan Farber of ZDNet in Firefox accelerating development cycle.

To advance that agenda, the Mozilla team, with more than 40 full-time employees, is going to be more aggressive in delivering new Firefox functionality than it has been in the past. Beard told me Mozilla will move to a more rapid product delivery model, in keeping with the pace the herd of Web 2.0 companies, as well as Microsoft's newfound faster "twitch" cycles. Rapid response to any critical issues. Security and stability updates every six to eight weeks. Major releases every six to nine months - Firefox 1.5 at the end of November, version 2.0 by mid-2006 and 3.0 in early 2007. Release of the Gecko rendering and layout engine every 12 to 15 months

Read more at ZDNet and at identity20

Browser developers including Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera are seeking to create a standard method of providing surfers with more information about the trustworthiness of a website. Several developers met in Toronto last week to discuss ways to collaborate, although the talks are still at an early stage. The initiative aims to use the information provided in digital security certificates to help users identify phishing websites, which try to fool individuals into giving up sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers.
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Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers
Today I want to tell you about both our established plan to highlight secure sites in IE7 but also to tell you about some early thinking in the industry about creating stronger standards for identity on the internet. IE7 will join other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Konqueror in making the experience for secure (HTTPS) sites more visible by moving the lock icon into the address bar. We think the address bar is also important for users to see in pop-up windows. A missing address bar creates a chance for a fraudster to forge an address of their own. To help thwart that, IE7 will show the address bar on all internet windows to help users see where they are. IE7 will also help users avoid fraudulent sites if users choose to use the Phishing Filter to check a site for known phishing activity.
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From the browser developers:
- Mozilla - CAs, certificates, and the SSL/TLS UI
- Opera - A Truce in the Browser Wars: Toronto Ideas Create Common Ground
- Konqueror - Web Browser Developers Work Together on Security

I går var jo en historisk dag. Historisk på flere måder. Det var jo i går at der blev afholdt release komsammen for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 på Øbaren i København.

For det første er det vel første gang at der er blevet afholdt en release komsammen for noget som endnu ikke er udkommet. Jeg var ellers blevet lovet af højt-på-strå folk fra Mozilla.org at Mozilla Firefox 1.5 ville komme før Thanksgiving, som i år er i dag, nemlig den 24. november 2005. Men vi må altså vente et par dage endnu før Mozilla Firefox 1.5 bliver frigivet.

For det andet så er(bliver) Mozilla Firefox 1.5 historisk. Mozilla Firefox 1.5 bliver hurtigere, sikrere, bedre og mindre. I 1.5 er der bla automatisk opdatering af programmet, hurtigere frem og tilbage funktionalitet, meget bedre udvidelsesmodul håndtering, bedre sikring mod popups, helt nyt indstillinger vindue, osv osv. Læs mere om alle de mange forbedringer her.

Komsammen havde fået samlet en stor mængde af de danske kendisser. Blandt de fremmødte prominente gæster var bla Mr Kim Blim himself, Thomas Kenne aka Mr Medion, Andreas Hansen aka Mr CMS, Thomas Andersen aka Mr Captcha, Anders Hal aka Mr TV, Jakob Gertz aka Mr Danish Poker Solution, Ulrik Hindø aka Mr Brazil, Mr Morten.dk, Jan aka Mr Øl, Jesper Stocholm.

Three new super cool features has just landed. But remember it's not gonna be included in Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird 1.5.

- Allow external source viewer/editor
A lot of people have been requsting this. Finally it has landed.

- Improve the alert notification for new mail
Now the subject and message text is shown in the new message alert. Check the screenshot

- Add a way to generate UUIDs
Would be nice if xpcom provided a way to programmatically generate UUIDs

Lucky Mozilla Firefox on Windows users....
Microsoft Genuine Windows Validation process now works in Firefox and other Mozilla browsers. Firefox users can manually install the Windows Genuine Advantage validation Firefox plug-in available on Microsoft's website to complete the Windows validation process.

It's done via a plugin that you download. Read more

By most measures, Firefox has had a pretty good year. The upstart browser celebrated its first birthday this week, less than a month after marking its 100 millionth download. Devoted followers have trumpeted its 8.65 percent market share, mostly at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The response from the Windows empire has been largely a collective yawn. That could change quickly, however, given that Google seems to be sidling up to Firefox, a relationship that could bring back some bad memories for Microsoft veterans.
Read more

Once again a couple of nice checkins happened this week. Here I'll mentioned the ones that I find the most interesting:

I like cleanup bugs. The Mozilla code has a lot of areas that needs cleaning up, so I really like developers who take the time to cleanup the code instead of just adding new code.

• Reduce content creation redundancy in nsHTMLContentSink


• XPTI_GetInterfaceInfoManager is a bad signature, and we should just use do_GetService anyway

Faster, faster, faster. Besides cleaning code I also like developers that check in code that simple put: makes Mozilla go faster.
Provide table-driven QI mechanism
This proves a significant codesize win on all platforms. The performance tests I was able to do are a little bit more ambiguous: Linux was a definite win (close to 8% speedup on a contrived looping testcase)

New unseen features are also very nice. This once will make a lot of users really happy. Folder Pane Popup over folders with unseen messages. A screenshot of the feature can be seen here.

Last but not least, making Mozilla more flexible is good. Add a reusable autocomplete result type that doesn't depend on Mork

This post sets out a proposed product and platform strategy developed over the last few weeks by Mozilla project staff and drivers that aims to enable innovative web experiences for consumers, accelerate the time-to-market for user-facing innovation, and improve the security and stability of our products.
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Ben Goodger and the guys at Google have been doing some usability work on how people are using tabs. And the conclusion is that people are having some problems with them. Therefore Ben plans to make some changes to the way tabs works in Firefox amounts others "Put close buttons on the tabs", "Implement a simple heuristic for z-index handling", "consolidate the preferences for links sent from external applications".
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I wonder why Google are so interested in doing usability studies for tab browsing in Mozilla Firefox?

Basically, my plan is to create a set of generic toolkit files to act as wrappers for commonly used functions, in order to facilitate simpler and more future-proof app and extension code.
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This is want I've been requesting for a long long time. Instead of extensions developers create their own functions to load and save prefs, create URLs etc these basic functions will be included in the tookit. The toolkit is a base which both Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird share.

There are some libraries that already provide function like this. Most known is the JSLib. But since JSLib is an extension it's not very practical. JSLib cant be include inside an extension due to namespace clash. I personally gave up on JSLib in my Launchy extension.

So as a Mozilla extension developer I'm looking forward to having these utility functions available.

Following on from the Foundation/Corporation split and in preparation for the Firefox 1.5 release, we'd like to significantly reorganize our web content over the next few weeks. The big picture is that we want to move to separate sites for the end user (mozilla.com), Foundation (mozillafoundation.org) and developer (mozilla.org) audiences. Much of this plan is a continuation of what we've been doing to better organize our web site presence and to focus our content for specific users. Addons, SpreadFirefox, and Devmo are good examples of where we've made progress in the last year in better targeting our various audiences. mozilla.com and mozillafoundation.org are next in line.
Read more about the proposed changes

Vladimir has the latest about how the merging of the Cairo code is going. Read about the progress. Also read this entry which has some screenshots.

Mobility Email is a powerful new way to use email. At the core of Mobility Email is Mozilla Thunderbird, the popular open source email client. It's loaded with extensions to provide OpenPGP encryption and signing, access to Hotmail, Yahoo!, Lycos and MailDotCom email accounts, and a simple way to quickly access your contacts. The best thing about Mobility Email is that you can take it anywhere with you on an iPod Shuffle (or any other USB device). Simply plug your USB key into any Windows computer in the world and you can start Mobility Email. With no installing or configuration you can use all your email and all your contacts.
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Nu da vores sidste Mozilla Firefox 1.0 release party var en kæmpe succes, skulle vi så ikke få taget os sammen til at fejre frigivelsen af Mozilla Firefox 1.5 når den nu kommer om en måneds tid? Det eneste du skal gøre er at møde op!

Er DU parat? Smid en kommetar eller send en mail til <spam snabel-a gemal prik dk>

Party'et, eller måske nærmere release komsammen'en, løber af stablen Onsdag den 23 november 2005 fra kl 16. Dvs et år og 4 dage efter Firefox 1.0 blev fejret. Du er mere end velkommen til at sende denne invitation videre i systemet, således vi får samlet så mange som muligt.

Release party'et for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 vil, ligesom sidst, blive fejret på Ølbaren i København. Du kan iøvrigt se billeder fra det sidste release party her

Du vil her have mulighed for at møde nogle af de mange andre som bruger Mozilla Firefox og måske også et par af dem der er med til at udvikle Mozilla.

The Oregon State Linux Users Group, with the help of the Oregon Space Grant Consortium (OSGC), launched a balloon satellite to celebrate 100 million Firefox downloads. The balloon carried a Firefox banner up to 100,000 feet before exploding and parachuting back to earth. This was our successful attempt at topping the 50 million download stunt.
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Watch the pictures

Most of the things I miss in the "official" Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird I have been able to get through the use of extensions. Extension rocks!

But one of the things I really miss is Roaming Profile.
A roaming profile is a collection of user settings which can be seamlessly shared between different machines or applications, or different instances of the same application. This can be useful for users who wish to work in a familiar environment regardless of the specific machine or application they make use of, and who have personal data to which they always wish to have access.

I use Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird both at work and at home. So I like my work and home profile to be in sync. So postings in newsgroups isn't marked as new just because I connect from home if I already read the postings at work. And websites aren't marked as visited at work if I already visited them at home. And my bookmarks are the same, etc.

Currently my solution to this problem is very basic. Just before I leave work I copy the files I need to a remote server. And before I start Mozilla Firefox at home I copy the files from the remote server and vica versa.

Roaming profiles are currently available in Mozilla SeaMonkey but it hasn't been ported to Mozilla Firefox yet. The backend for roaming profiles are there (I think) but the UI isn't working on Mozilla Firefox. Perhaps the roaming profile should be made as an extension.

Relavant bugs are bug 249343 and 310158

Not that diskspace matters. It's so cheap, but anyways. The size of my profile directory is now over 13 Mb. This is of course without my cache directory which I moved outside of my profile directory using the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory pref.

For what the directories and files inside of your profile directory are used for, please turn to this page.

For the directories inside my profile directory:
- bookmarkbackups is 4 Mb
- extensions is 1.5 Mb. I have 21 extensions installed.
- searchplugins is 2 Kb
- chrome is 280 bytes

For the files inside my profile directory:
- history.dat is 4.5 Mb. I'm saving 60 days of history
- formhistory.dat is 850 Kb
- bookmarks.html and bookmarks.bak are 800 Kb
- hostperm.1 is 155 Kb
- compreg.dat is 140 Kb
- xpti.dat is 87 Kb
- cookies.txt is 86Kb
- cert8.db is 65 Kb
- signons.txt is 55 Kb
- localstore.rdf is 43 Kb
- extensions.rdf is 36 Kb
- prefs.js is 29 Kb
- mimeTypes.rdf is 26 Kb
- key3.db is 24 Kb
- secmod.db is 16 Kb
- extensions.ini is 2 Kb
- extensions-startup.manifest is 2 Kb
- extensions.cache is 2 Kb
- search.rdf is 670 bytes
- downloads.rdf is 410 bytes
- compatibility.ini is 130 bytes

Netscape on Wednesday released a new version of Netscape 8 to bring the Web browser up to date on security patches with the underlying Firefox software. Netscape 8.0.4 includes the fixes that have been made in the Firefox browser, according to the update's release notes. That means it has all patches through Firefox version 1.0.7, which was made available by Mozilla last month.
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They also seem to have launched getnetscape.com

A public release of the Flock social web browser is imminent. It's coming. Are you hyped? Are you even following the breadcrumb trail back to the Flock base? We covered Flock in early September: Flock - Social Formation Browsing. A fitting title for the browser - built atop the solid Mozilla engine - being vigorously coded by Flockr's running on nothing but blue. I was fortunate enough to try the 0.2 release. Since then, a 0.5 release is migrating across the net.
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SupportSoft, Inc., a provider of Real-Time Service Management software, and Mozilla Corp., have teamed up to add features to the Mozilla products and thus aim to enhance end-user experience. The patented SupportSoft SupportTriggers functionality has been included in Mozilla's product offerings to provide the estimated 45 million individuals that use the Firefox browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client with a better and more reliable user experience, claim both the companies. SupportTriggers provides support organizations, software development teams and service providers with the ability to embed automated technical support capability directly into a business application or service, without changing the source code. Both the products will incorporate the SupportTriggers technology, which is designed to automatically respond at the time application problems occur and then, offers to proactively report the problem to Mozilla.
Read more and more

Brian King writes:
I'm happy to announce that the Mozdev shop is open for business. I wrote a couple of weeks back how we were using the Spreadshirt service. There is a N.American shop and a European shop, but we'll try to accomodate people outside those zones soon. Currrently we have only 4 designs, but will be adding more as we go. Let us know your ideas and preferences for designs. The shops have a good choice of merchandise, including t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, bags, and more. And you can design your own styles and colours! All proceeds from the shop will be going directly back into mozdev.org to maintain and improve the site for the Mozilla community.
Visit the shop

The Firefox Tweak Guide has been updated once again so that all the tweaks in the guide are also compatible with Firefox 1.5 Beta.

Whether you're a first-time user or a veteran, this Firefox Tweak Guide brings together all the major tips, tricks and tweaks for Firefox. From the basic to the advanced, the following 11 pages of information are sure to enhance your Firefox experience. Most of all you can rest assured that the guide is not written by a raving Firefox fanboy - it's a true objective TweakGuides tweak guide, and not a gushing ad for a free web browser.

Read the tweak guide

Now that Google and Sun has formed an alliance with Sun people are talking about what Google is up to. Actually they have been talking about that for ages. But the alliance adds to all the conspiracy talks about Google.

But it would be very strange if Google wasn't doing anything Gecko related, since they now employ 6 Mozilla/Gecko people including Ben Goodger, Brian Ryner, Darin Fisher, Mike Pinkerton and Ian Hickson. Perhaps we'll see a XUL version of Gmail? Or the most talked about Gbrowser? Or a XUL Gcalendar?

So what's the deal between Sun and Google all about?
Currently this is was they said:
The two companies announced simply that they would collaborate on work on Sun's OpenOffice.org, Java and OpenSolaris, and Google's Toolbar. Sun will, in the immediate future, make Google's toolbar a standard part of the package when users download Sun's Java Runtime Environment from the server seller's Web site.

There's plenty to read about the new alliance:
- Google and Sun deal: That's it?
- GoogleOffice: A Microsoft Office killer?
- Google-Sun pact brainchild of Sun engineer
- The Google Office I'd Go For
- Domains Registered to Google Inc.

AOL subsidiary Netscape has signed the first non-IE browser distribution deal with a major PC manufacturer since the late 90s. Starting early next year, Hewlett-Packard will ship Netscape 8 on all new PCs and laptops, with customized tabs leading to HP and Compaq Web destinations. However, Internet Explorer will remain an option for HP customers. During initial setup, an option will be presented to select Netscape as the system's default browser. Icons to launch Netscape will be placed on the Windows desktop and Start Menu. "Netscape 8.0 was designed to give consumers a choice, and we are delighted that consumers who buy new HP and Compaq consumer PCs will be able to choose the Netscape browser for a safer and highly compatible browsing experience," said Jeremy Liew, General Manager of Netscape.
Read more

Opera is looking to mobilise its existing community of users in order to overtake Firefox as the number two browser on the desktop. Last week, Opera decided to give away an ad-free version of its browser for the first time. Jon von Tetzchner, chief exec of Opera Software, said that by removing the inclusion of banner ads from the free version of its browser the company had removed the biggest reason users might have for avoiding its software. The Norwegian software developer claims 2.4m downloads of the ad-free version of the browser since 20 September, when Opera made the big move. von Tetzchner disputes figures from web analytics firms which put Opera's browser market share down at around 2-3 per cent or lower while Firefox has a market share of around 8.8 per cent. These figures can be misleading because users can change Opera to present itself as Internet Explorer to gain access to sites that fail to follow web standards.
Read article

A small collection of some of the most important checkins that has happend during the last week:

Extension manager should use xpinstall crypto hashes
This bug makes it possible for extension developers to add hashes to theirs update.rdf files to protect against mirror network hacks. Basically in your update.rdf file you add a entry like this one <em:updateHash>sha256:3e2fad5911cd757bf8a01f155c3c00db558266d9ed4cb3ba6a59b8d6d3b106b8</em:updateHash>
This is the hash value of the XPI file provide in the update.rdf file. You can specify sha256, md5 and others. Check this patch for more info. More information about this can be found in this and this bug. If you try to update Slashy using the latest nightly build you will be using this feature.

Remove UI for 'Load Images for the originating web site only' pref
Seems like this options confused more people than it helped

Another interesting announcement here at PDC is that Microsoft is creating a subset of their cool, fancy pants UI layer (formerly code-named Avalon, now WPF) on other platforms, including the Mac! In fact, one of the demos involved showing vector graphics rendered in Safari using a Microsoft plug-in. This subset, called WPF/E, will be powered by XAML (their XML dialect for representing the UI) and JavaScript. Sound familiar? Yes, that's right -- Microsoft also announced a Dashboard clone for Windows Vista. Microsoft will never port .NET to other major operating systems, but to have a subset of Avalon available on other platforms is a bit of a curveball. In fact, in light of Firefox and Safari's upcoming support of SVG and Canvas (and in the future, 3D functionality), this move makes sense; Microsoft wants to provide their own proprietary solution to cut off this new cross-platform initiative. Also, Microsoft's Ajax framework, Atlas, will target WPF/E. The WPF/E subset of Avalon will include all of the Avalon features (vector graphics, animations, etc.) less 3D, some of their XPS features (XPS == Microsoft PDF clone), and hardware acceleration. In a WPF/E session, someone asked if Microsoft's WPF/E plug-in will be available in Firefox; the speaker dodged the question ("We hope such support will emerge..."). My first reaction to WPF/E is frankly disappointment that they wouldn't just embrace SVG, though what I've seen of 2D XAML makes it look a while lot like SVG with different attribute names and various other differences. I wonder if XSLT will do the trick there... Lack of many of the Avalon features in WPF/E, notably hardware acceleration, really makes it seem that the strategy is to make apps work on other platforms, but make them work poorly compared to Windows -- motivating users to switch to a Windows platform.
Read more and more

Somehow I cant believe I'm asking this question, since it should be documented and used in almost every extension but there seems to be an almost endless way to get the URL of the current document. So my question is:

What's the recommended way from chrome of getting the URL of the current document being displayed in a window?
My requirements are that the answer works in both the current Mozilla SeaMonkey and Mozilla Firefox. If a page consists of frames or iframes it must return the top URL.

A couple of possible answers:
- document.location.href
- window.document.location
- window.top.content.document.location
- window.location.href
- document.url
- getBrowser().mCurrentBrowser.currentURI.spec
- gBrowser().mCurrentBrowser.currentURI.spec
- content.location
- ?

Can you come up with the ultimate JavaScript code that does this?

Update:
What if I need to scan through all the links on the current loaded document when I right click on a page?

It's time for a updated list of my previous posting here. These are the extensions I use, not just the ones I have installed.

Firefox Extensions

• Console2 - replaces the JavaScript Console with what could be the next generation Error Console
• Copy URL+ - Copies to clipboard the document's URL along with the title or the selected text
• CuteMenus - Adds icons to menus and popups
• Inspect Element - Inspect an element with the DOM Inspector
• InfoLister - Lists installed extensions and themes
• Linky - Open/download/validate links and pictures in tabs or windows
• Live HTTP headers - View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing
• LastTab - Allows tab navigation in a most recently used manner.
• Linkification - Converts text links into genuine, clickable links.
• Location Navigator - Tools used to navigate up/down through the numeric portion of a location
• Link Toolbar - A site-navigation toolbar
• Launchy - Open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Outlook etc
• OpenBook - Allows for customization of the Add Bookmark dialog
• ProxyButton - ProxyButton creates a toolbar button to quickly turn proxy on and off
• RestartFirefox - Restart Firefox with a quick access File - Menu item
• Slashy - Fixes Windows backslash file separators in links and images
• SessionSaver - Magically restores your last browsing session
• Web Developer - Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools

When Version 1.0 of Firefox was released last November (see "Mozilla launches Firefox 1.0 browser"), it caused a sensation as a seemingly more secure and more feature-rich alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s ubiquitous Internet Explorer, which for years had held a market share north of 90% -- and which Microsoft had barely bothered to improve. Since then, Firefox has achieved what no other browser had accomplished in years: It attained a significant market share at IE's expense. Firefox now holds a market share of between 7% and 9%, according to various market research estimates. But as Firefox nears its first birthday, its maker, the Mozilla Foundation, faces significant challenges, analysts said. These include quickly discovering and fixing security vulnerabilities, competing against an upcoming IE upgrade and broadening Firefox's user base beyond its core of technically savvy users. The stream of Firefox security vulnerabilities uncovered in recent months is par for the course for a young software product (see "Symantec report sparks safe-browser debate"). But it may disappoint users who switched to Firefox expecting it to be immune to security holes.
Read the article

Mozilla is in much better shape than Microsoft when it comes to fixing security problems, claims the organisation
Mozilla has reacted to a Symantec report issued on Monday which said serious vulnerabilities were being found in Mozilla's browsers faster than in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The study was conducted over the first six months of 2005. Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, hit back by claiming on Monday that when a vulnerability is found Mozilla's "ability to react, find a solution and put it into the user's hands is better than Microsoft." Nitot said that Mozilla's reaction time was faster than Microsoft's. "If you look at our ability to respond, we are in much better shape. On 6 September an IDN buffer issue was reported to Mozilla. On 8 September it was publicly disclosed. We ask our developers not to mention any problems until we have a fix for them, but for some reason he went public. On 9 September we had a configuration change that disabled the IDN problem, that users could implement manually, or they could use a patch. Within ten days we had a newer version that was fixed completely."
Read article

Opera Eliminates Ad Banner and Licensing Fee
Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download - completely free of charge. "Today we invite the entire Internet community to use Opera and experience Web browsing as it should be," said Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Removing the ad banner and licensing fee will encourage many new users to discover the speed, security and unmatched usability of the Opera browser." Opera was previously available free of charge with an ad banner. Users had the option of paying a licensing fee to remove the ad banner and receive premium support.
Read the press release

Doug has an interesting write up on Minimo support for PPC devices.
We make every effort to produce working builds of Minimo for your Windows CE PPC 2003 device. However, there are some devices that we just can't get to work properly. It may be that I don't have a device like yours to test against. Or it may be that there is some memory map problem which I will describe. The core of the problem is that on this device we run out of address space for some reason. Minimo (including support libraries) today is a bit over 10mb of code, data, text. Each process on Windows CE is allowed 32MB of address space to use. So what gives? My guess is that XIP ROM-based DLLs are laid down breaking up the address space so there isn't a contiguous range where we can load our code.

Doug hopes that bringing the memory usage down in Minimo will not only help Minimo users but also Firefox users:
There are two independent solutions. First we will further reduce the size of Minimo were possible. This will be an ongoing task and one that I hope will benefit not only all minimo users, but also all FireFox users too. I do not expect we will get there over night.

Read the posting

Looking to ease the way customers manage their digital identities, Microsoft has begun working to integrate its InfoCard authentication technology with Internet Explorer and is in discussions with the Firefox and Safari browser developers to have them include the technology on their platforms. According to Microsoft officials, InfoCard integration could show up in Internet Explorer 7.0 even though InfoCard is currently not on the feature list. The goal is to improve security and privacy on the Internet using the InfoCard model, which puts users in control of their personal identity information and would eliminate the need for user names and passwords to sign into a Web site. "We are still working on if there is enough time to get this done" for Internet Explorer 7, says Michael Stephenson, Microsoft's group product manager for Windows Server. "We expect many different applications, smart apps, Web apps and browsers, to use InfoCard. Our own browser will take advantage of it."
Read article

Mike Shaver writes about this and has written about this before.

Currently the backend rendering engine in Mozilla Firefox on Windows is using GDI+. People have been talking about replacing GDI+ with Cairo as the rendering engine. Cairo is a free software graphics library with multiple backends, that provides a vector-based device-independent API for software developers.

Until now the main problem has been performance. Cairo was not as fast as GDI+. But this might seem to have change with the latest release of Cairo. Tim Rowley (tor) has made some new benchmarks which indicates that a switch to Cairo might happen soon.

Tor writes:
Things look quite a bit better than last time, enough that it's tempting to switch from GDI+ to Cairo for Firefox 1.5. It would make all the platforms behave the same, remove the support issue of people without the GDI+ library (anyone pre-WinXP), and fix some rendering issues that can't be addressed otherwise, like the reflect/repeat modes of radial gradients.

Read the blog entry

I'm working on getting both Linky and Launchy updated so that they work with the latest release of Firefox and Thunderbird.
In the meantime you can download versions with an updated maxversion string here:
- Launchy
- Linky

Perhaps the world does not need another web browser -- but it may want Bart Decrem's. Decrem and a small cadre of programmers in Palo Alto, California, have spent this summer quietly readying Flock, an open-source browser, for an early October beta launch. Several members of the team, including Decrem, hail from the Mozilla Foundation, which produced the Firefox browser upon which Flock is built. Flock advertises itself as a "social browser," meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It's a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user.
Read blog posting

Flock has landed. We're introducing the world's most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web. Over the next few weeks, we'll be seeding invites to a few lucky folks.
Visit flock.com

Flock screenshots
http://flickr.com/photos/25419820@N00/42757004
http://flickr.com/photos/25419820@N00/42473857

A little bit about the Firefox marked share.

For the 10th consecutive month, the popularity of Microsoft'' Internet Explorer Web browser has declined. Netscape's browser showed the strongest growth in market share in August, rising 33% to a 2.02% share, according to NetApplications, a Web-site analysis company.
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Firefox still holds clout on Internet
Despite the first hack-attack reported against it, Firefox, the nifty little open-source Internet browser, continues to hold sway around the world, taking users away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, a new survey has shown. According to NetApplications, a website analysis company, Firefox, which is offered through Mozilla Corp., had a market share of 8.27 per cent in August, up from 8.07 per cent in July. On the other hand, the Internet Explorer, continued its slide in the market, dropping to 86.31 per cent from 87.2 per cent.
Read article

Firefox, Netscape, and Safari all gained market share at Internet Explorer's expense
IE lost market share as Firefox, Apple Computer Inc.'s Safari; and America Online Inc.'s Netscape gained. Safari rose to 2.2 percent from 2.13 percent in July, while Netscape posted the biggest gain to 2.02 percent from 1.5 percent. "Firefox isn't the only interesting story in August, with Safari and Netscape on the rise, Internet Explorer faced an offensive on three separate fronts," Phil Vizzaccaro, chief executive of NetApplications, said in a statement.
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MSDN announced last week that it had tweaked its subscriber download site in order to make it compatible with both Firefox and Opera. There are some issues, such as extra work needed in installing the File Transfer Manager, however developers are working on a new version of the FTM that should correct final problems.
Read more

So what's all the excitement about? Well, for one, Firefox is a very nice browser. It's fast loading with a clean look. It's easy to use and comes with some very nice features. The one you'll notice right away is tabbed browsing. That is the ability to have a single browser window hold multiple sites that you access by clicking tabs instead of having multiple windows open at the same time. If you haven't tried tabbed browsing you should download Firefox just to see how nice it is and wonder how you lived without it.
Read article

This page lists the improvements in Gecko 1.8 branch builds (as of September 2, 2005) over Deer Park Alpha 2. One of these builds will soon become "Firefox 1.5 Beta 1", which is scheduled to be released September 8. Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 includes several key security improvements: splitting windows into inner and outer objects, enabling XPCNativeWrappers by default for extensions, and improving the application update system to make it easier for users to keep Firefox up to date. Several security holes have been fixed as well.
Read the Unofficial Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 changelog

Axel Hecht is a member of Mozilla Europe's board of directors, and a major contributor to the Mozilla project, working on XSLT and RDF, among other things. At O'Reilly's European Open Source Convention (October 17-20), Dr. Hecht will be talking about Mozilla as a development platform. O'Reilly Network interviewed Dr. Hecht to find out if the long-held dream of Mozilla as a development platform was about to come true.
Read the interview

The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that organizes the development of the Firefox Web browser said Wednesday it has formed a corporate subsidiary not to make money but to better focus its activities. "The Mozilla Corp. is not a typical commercial entity," Mitchell Baker said. "Rather it is dedicated to the public benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone. With this reorganization, the Mozilla Foundation will look much more like the Apache Foundation than it currently does.". Mozilla Corp. will work mainly on developing and delivering free software products such as the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail program. The foundation will manage the projects, set policies and organize relationships among developers.

Read more

It looks like Mozilla Firefox is gonna get yet another high profile extension. This time it's Skype. While we have no official announcement Nvu developer Daniel Glazman kind of announced the Skyfox extension in his blog today. Who wants a basic Skype integration into Firefox? was all that Daniel Glazman had to say.

Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It's free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers.

Mozilla foundation has decided to increase the version number of the next major release to 1.5 from 1.1, reflecting the sheer number of bug fixes and features that have been worked into the next version of the browser.

We are planning for a Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.5 (September 2005), 2.0 (unscheduled) and 3.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs.

Read more
Mozilla Firefox roadmap

My last blog about UMO was not very positive.

But now it seems that UMO is getting somewhere. Scott Kveton writes:
I wanted to pass along the information that Rafael Ebron is going to be heading up the development of UMO (a.k.a. addons.mozilla.org) effective immediately. Rafael brings with him experience from the Netscape SmartUpdate project as well as being a full-time Mozilla Foundation staff member. He is going to be an excellent leader of this project.
Read blog entry

I never really understood why Mozilla Foundation stopped making zip versions of releases. Using the installer changes my Windows registry and I don't want that! Can I use the installer without it touching my Windows registry at all?

I use the releases to test my extensions with and now I need a zip version of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4 in both en-US and da-DK. Can anybody directory me to a place where I can download these releases? I'm talking about Windows versions only.

According to Gerv's blog:
Mozilla Foundation products now only display IDNs in a whitelist of TLDs, which have policies stating what characters are permitted, and procedures for making sure that no homographic domains are registered to two different entities.
More information in the bug report and in this document.

This is great great news! Perhaps I can add a Launchy overlay to the bookmarks after the rewrite. Today it seems impossible due to the mess of the bookmark code.

Sometime in the next few months, I plan to completely redo bookmarks in Firefox. The current bookmark code is an antique, and not a well-cared-for one. The first order of business is to come up with a list of things that we'd like to be able to do with bookmarks, and then to create a data API that can support all these things in a fairly generic fashion. Gone is RDF; it serves no purpose other than template generation (and code obfuscation) in the current code, and the template generation will be handled nicely in the future with Neil's new-world templating.

It seems like the new bookmark code will be using the super cool Unified Storage (mozStorage) which is a database like storage feature that is going to be used in Gecko 1.9 aka Mozilla 2.0.
There's also been talk about moving both the cache and the cookie data into mozStorage.

Read the blog entry
From the wiki: Bookmarks Data API and Bookmarks Use Cases

I had big hopes for the next generation of Mozilla Update but apparently I have to wait a long time for it to happen. I've almost given up updating umo with my own extensions because of the bad GUI. Alan Starr blogs about UMO 2.0
Read his blog entry

Daniel writes that Nvu 1.0 has been released!

Nvu is a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu is based on Gecko , the layout engine inside Mozilla ; it's a super-fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers. Its remarkable support of XML, CSS and JavaScript offers the best authoring platform on the market. Its architecture based on XUL makes it the most extensible editing tool ever.

Big thanks to Daniel Glazman from Disruptive Innovations for bringing us Nvu!

According to this browser statistic from Adtech, Denmark is behind the other European countries when it comes to adopting the Mozilla Firefox users. Only 5.88% of the internet users of Denmark use Mozilla Firefox. This is very disappointing! Other studies show some of the same. In Danish

So if you live in Denmark, why don't you promote Mozilla Firefox even more at your work, school, home, parents, friends, etc.

No money for e-mail software? You've got three free - and effective - choices: Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or Eudora. If you have Windows, you already have Outlook Express. Don't want it? Well, for no cost or obligation to send money later, you have the option to download Thunderbird from the Mozilla Foundation or a free version of Eudora from Qualcomm. Which of these three you end up using will depend on what you want from an e-mail client.

Conclusion
Outlook Express offers the bare necessities, but if you want to move beyond that, you're going to want to choose either Thunderbird or Eudora. Thunderbird's strongest point is its expandability through user-supplied extensions that you can download. It's also the only application that includes a spam filter, and will be attractive to open-source advocates. However, if you're looking for a strong, full-featured program, don't mind a reasonable learning curve, and can live with the ads, then the Sponsored mode of Eudora is your choice.
Read article

Support for Mac OS X 10.1.x has been dropped. Current CVS code (including the forthcoming Firefox 1.1) will not run correctly if at all on 10.1.x for any Mozilla.org products. See bug 298430 for details. Don't spam that bug with complaints please - its done. This is a great move as far as I'm concerned.
Read blog posting

Hvordan laver jeg min egen extension i Mozilla Firefox? Hvis du har stillet dig selv det spørgsmål, så har du nu, ganske gratis, muligheden for at få svaret.

På tirsdag den 21. juni 2005 kl. 19.00 holder jeg et foredrag omkring udvidelsessystemet i Mozilla Firefox. Jeg vil gennemgå opsætning af udviklingsmiljø, hvordan man bruger overlays, indstillinger i dine extensions, test samt kigge på nogle af de typiske problemer.

Program og anden information om mødet kan findes på http://wiki.sslug.dk/Firefox-udvidelse

Det gratis foredrag afholdes på:
Symbion
Fruebjergvej 3
2100 København Ø
Lokale M4

Slides fra foredraget samt mit extension toolkit kan downloades her

The Debian development community is currently hotly debating whether the Mozilla Foundation's strict trademarks policy violates Debian's social contract. However, in a twist, it appears Mozilla has not received approval for the Firefox trademarks yet, and the Firefox name may already be taken in the UK and Germany. The foundation has not applied for the Thunderbird trademark anywhere yet.
Read article

My extension Launchy is mentioned in this article.

The Launchy extension is a veritable Swiss Army knife when it comes to integrating Firefox with other programs. It provides you with a new context menu for pages, links, and images, giving you the ability to open these items in any of dozens of recognized external programs. On Windows, these programs are all discovered automatically, but you can customize the list and even add your own on any operating system. Launchy is an ideal way to handle all kinds of integration points that are otherwise unavailable in Firefox. For instance, if you want to edit the current Web page, you can use the Launchy context menu to send the page source to Mozilla Composer or NVu. If you're on a page with an extremely large image, you can send it to Photoshop for better viewing or editing with a single click.

If you're moving over to Firefox from Mozilla, you've surely noticed how Firefox is built to be a sleeker, faster browsing engine. It accomplishes this in part by shedding all of its counterparts from the Mozilla Suite, including an email/news client, composer, and chat client. But that doesn't mean this functionality is no longer available. With a few extensions -- or with no work at all -- you can make Firefox integrate with your email client as though it were still part of a suite. You don't have to stop there, either; at least one valuable extension gives you the power to connect Firefox with virtually any program on your system.
Read article

dealnews.com, Inc., a leader in web-based shopping, announced that it is now optimizing its site to better address its growing Mozilla/Firefox client base. While dealnews' site traffic doubled in the past year, its percentage of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser users has increased fourfold and now represents one-third of its total traffic. Firefox, which is produced by the Mozilla Foundation, is a free web browser that has been widely praised for its stability and innovative tabbed browsing feature. John Allen, Dealnews' Director of Marketing, said, "By nature, our site tends to attract a more technically sophisticated audience. Over the past year, we have seen unprecedented acceptance of the Firefox browser among our readers. While overall our site traffic has increased 100 percent in the past 12 months, Microsoft Internet Explorer traffic has only grown 50 percent. Firefox traffic has increased 400 percent. Fully 35 percent of our traffic in May was from Firefox or a Mozilla-compatible client. We feel this is significant trend and have taken steps to ensure our site is fully optimized for use with this web browser."
Read full article

David Bienvenu has done it again. This time with a supernice checkin that many people have requested. New filter actions: Auto reply, forward, bounce

You can now using a message filter forward your email to another account and use a auto reply. The auto reply feature is implemented using message templates. So first you create a message template. Then you create a message filter and use the template as reply template. Way cool.

I use server side filters but some people might not have access to server side filters and now Mozilla Thunderbird support very strong client side filters.

Screenshot of new filter action:

Some really nice fixed for extensions developers has just been checked into Mozilla Firefox 1.1:

Ability to restrict to compatible operating systems
If your extension only works on Windows you can now have this in your install.rdf file:
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_gcc2</em:targetPlatform>
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_gcc3</em:targetPlatform>
<em:targetPlatform>WINNT_msvc</em:targetPlatform>
<em:targetPlatform>OS2</em:targetPlatform>

Allow extensions to ship searchplugins
Search plugins are currently located in the searchplugins directory which is a sub directory of the Mozilla Firefox program folder. So if you wanted to add a search plugin you had to add it there. So if you removed Mozilla Firefox and reinstalled all your user installed search plugins would be lost. But now extensions can contain search plugins. They should be placed in <extensionguid>/searchplugins.

No way of installing platform specific XPCOM components (dll/so) based on user OS.
You can now specify in your install.rdf file which files should be installed on which OS'es. Nice for people who are distributing XPCOM components as parts of their extensions.

I kind of thought this is a bit cool/funny:

Instead of visiting some dry, boring Web site to download your favorite open source software, why not put some spice in your life and get it from Playboy? mirrors.playboy.com is even an official mirror site for Firefox and Thunderbird, says Playboy Unix administrator Tim Yocum. He wanted to give something back to the community from which his company has drawn so deeply.
Read article

I don't really use this but a lot of people have asked for this feature so here it is. Mozilla Firefox, in nightly builds and eventually in Mozilla Firefox 1.1, will support drag-and-drop reordering of tabs. The patch just landed today so the we, the users of nightly builds, will be seeing this feature tomorrow or the day after.

Another really cool and important checkin is the landing of the groundwork for the new Software Update Service. The new Software Update Service will support binary patching and I think it's based on bsdiff and bspatch. This will allow Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird to be updated with security patches without having to download an entire new version. It will be possible to apply patches. Great work from Ben Goodger, Benjamin Smedberg and Darin Fisher. Screenshot here

Mozilla Suite, to some also known as Mozilla 1.x or Mozilla Application Suite, is gonna be renamed to SeaMonkey. The work to rebrand the installer is almost done. Note that it's spelled SeaMonkey and not Seamonkey. And it's not Mozilla SeaMonkey. It's just SeaMonkey.

"Mozilla Mail" is gonna be named "SeaMonkey Mail" and even the executable is gonna be renamed from mozilla.exe to seamonkey.exe.

It doesn't come as a big surprise. The Bugzilla re-organization a couple of months back created just such a name. But incorrectly spelled it Seamonkey. Oh no, are we gonna see another product misspelling chaos. Just like we're seeing with Firefox by some spelled FireFox? Just look at this page. We have both "Sea Monkey" and "Seamonkey"

The Mozilla Foundation has earlier announced that there won't be any more official releases of the Mozilla Application Suite now named SeaMonkey, but they will provide infrastructure for community members who wish to continue development. SeaMonkey survival will need a new team that cares about that product and that will take over the lead for its development. Read more about SeaMonkey.

And for those of you who ask "what is a seamonkey?" Well here's one.

Update: Please read this update

A blog entry at Brendan Eich's blog details the new Mozilla roadmap. There's some interesting things coming especially in terms for the graphics engine in Mozilla.
Read the blog post and understand where Mozilla is taking you in the near future

As some of you know Mozilla Firefox 1.1 is gonna have support for the <canvas> tag. The canvas element represents a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. If you're running a nightly build of Mozilla Firefox or the Deer Park Alpha 1 you should check out this cool demo.

It looks like Firefox is unstoppable. In spite of the vulnerabilities discovered lately, the open-source browser continues to rise in the top of the user's preferences. According to W3schools, a site known amongst web developers, Firefox reached a market share of 25%, while Internet Explorer plummeted to 64.8%. If we take into consideration the entire browsing solutions suite, Mozilla Foundation now owns a market share of almost 30%. A study of the Secunia security company shows that regardless of all the security bugs recently discovered, the users haven't lost their faith in the "Internet's sly fox", but quite the opposite, the speed at which the open-source developers took care of these problems was highly appreciated. In November 2004, Internet Explorer had a market share of 95%, in January this year it had dropped to 84.1%, and now, according to the w3schools website, the "almighty" browser's share of the market reached 64.8%.
Read article

Now that the web developers (the primary users of W3schools) are using Mozilla Firefox we still have a big task ahead of use in getting the normal users to use Mozilla Firefox. People who dont care about security or understands it. People who dont care about W3C standards but just wants web sites to work. People who are not among the 60 millon which the Firefox Counter is now at.

I was trying to update the Launchy entry at Mozilla Update but I kind of gave up. Getting these very unuserfriendly error messages:

Error! The MaxAppVer for Firefox of 1.1 in install.rdf is invalid.
Error! The MinAppVer for Netscape of 0.1 in install.rdf is invalid.
Error! The MinAppVer for Nvu of 0.1 in install.rdf is invalid.
Error! The MaxAppVer for Nvu of 1.0 in install.rdf is invalid.

Why cant it at least tell what the valid choices are? Damn programmers! When will there be a new and better release of Mozilla Update?

Netscape's turn from wonderful to woeful last week set a new Internet speed record for embarrassment. Hours after the once-proud Web browser's Version 8 upgrade hit the streets, it limped back into the garage for an overhaul. Turns out the new browser had old parts from a rival browser, Firefox, and those parts were faulty. The flaws allowed dishonest types to sneak into computers through online connections and snatch user passwords and other personal information. We've all heard reports of browser security trouble before; they're as frequent as rain clouds over St. Louis in summer. But somewhere close to the problem's description usually are the words "Microsoft" and "Internet Explorer." That's what made the Netscape-Firefox mess-up so significant: This time, Microsoft's once and future rivals for the online market were the ones encountering trouble, not its own quirky Web tool. After all, Netscape and Firefox had pinned their reputations on being more secure than Internet Explorer, the dominant browser since 1998.
Read more

A developer on the IE team writes about IE7 tabbed browsing implementation. His role was to re-architect IE to support tabbed browsing. This work began last year and includes building a new frame (top-level window and chrome), sorting out how to host and switch between multiple instances of the browser, and managing communication between the various internal components.
Read the blog posting

Gervase Markham has a nice blog post where he describes the difference between two XML user interface languages. XAML from Microsoft and XUL from Mozilla. The three big differences are: Portability, Localization, Licensing.
Read the blog posting

First they reinvented the browser, now they're rewriting the rules of advertising -- Firefox's guerrilla marketing has gone straight to video, and it's taking over the web. The collaboratively written application has hit more than 50 million downloads, spurred primarily by word-of-mouth advertising. Minus the deep pockets of archrival Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation relies on an army of volunteer marketers to spread the word -- users so loyal they devise their own DIY promotion ideas, from painting sidewalks with the browser's logo to e-mailing sales pitches to the White House. The latest tactic for the 100,000 members of the Spread Firefox movement is to make commercials. Funnyfox, three humorous video clips showing web surfers using the browser for the first time, is the slickest contribution to date. Designed to be e-mailed to friends, the videos -- one of which shows a user's head falling off -- have proved so popular that extra servers had to be set up to cope with the load.
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Extensions developers look no further. Be sure to check New Extension Developer Features in Deer Park Alpha 1.

I fx like to see someone develop an extensions that allows setting priority for HTTP connections. Another really really nice thing is the Toolkit chrome registry change. Bye bye chrome.rdf/overlayinfo cache! Another important change is the New Scriptable Windows Registry Interface which I have to update Launchy to use

Ben Goodger, a former top Mozilla Foundation developer who now works at Google -- albeit still at least part time on Firefox -- used his blog to blast Netscape. Goodger posted a link on his blog to a demonstration of exploit code that the original Netscape 8 was vulnerable to when it first rolled out early Thursday. "If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products," Goodger wrote.
Read article

Another article that quickly concludes Mozilla Foundation to ban Firefox derivative browsers?

But before anybody jumps to stupid conclusions please read what Christopher A. Aillon writes on his blog:
I was able to release patched versions for RHEL[234] within 20 minutes of the official release (builds were done previously, we were doing QA on them, etc.), Fedora[23] within two hours, and rawhide shortly thereafter

Microsoft's Internet Explorer Product Unit Manager Dean Hachamovitch recently confirmed in his weblog that Internet Explorer 7.0 would have tabbed browsing integration, a feature that's also available in Mozilla's Firefox browser. One of the many reasons Firefox has become popular is due to tabbed browsing. It was a different concept that let users open numerous windows in a single parent window. It's useful, it's popular, and it works. But I don't see how this is a major feature in need of promotion. While Hachamovitch didn't intentionally promote it himself, he did confirm it as if this is the next thing in browsers.
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Rapidly forcing IE from desktop dominance is Mozilla Firefox. This open-source browser receives our highest rating, in part because it includes tabbed browsing and RSS feeds, is very easy to use, and is well supported with a variety of third-party plug-ins. Firefox's popularity has recently helped unearth a few vulnerabilities, but we've been impressed with the speed and forthrightness with which Mozilla has patched its browser. In short, we just don't feel as vulnerable surfing the Web with Firefox.
Read why Mozilla Firefox wins over Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 8, Deepnet Explorer, Safari and Opera 8

A lot of people, inclucing myself have, long wanted a way to customize parts of Mozilla Firefox. The old Netscape 6 browser had a Client Customization Kit that was designed for ISPs and others who want to distribute a branded version of Netscape 6. Using the Netscape 6 Client Customization Kit you could easily configure popular customizations such as animated logos, default homepage, bookmarks, and installer settings. You can see screenshots of the Netscape 6 CCK here.
There's a project with the aim of offering the same for Mozilla Firefox and now they have release a document describing a preliminary CCK for Mozilla Firefox.

From Overview of the CCK 0.1 for Firefox:
The goal of the first release of Firefox is to produce an XPI file that when installed customizes parts of Firefox equivalent to the Netscape 7 Client Customization Kit. This document will describe how those customizations are achieved. Note that for demo purposes, we have created a Client Customization Kit that customizes the browser as if it were distributed by A9. This is a preliminary Client Customization Kit - use at your own risk.
The zip file is available here

Using my nightly build of Mozilla Firefox I typed "netscape.com" as was created with an webpage saying:
"Alert: Your current browser is outdated!" Then "blablabla upgrade to Netscape 8"

Well my browser cant be more up to date then a nightly build!

I'm not sure why anyone would want to use the Netscape browser but Netscape 8 has been released. It hasn't yet hit the ftp server but it should be underway. The Netscape browser which once ruled the world wide web, is now full of weird activation stuff and AOL/Netcenter crap. But at least they cleaned up their act since Netscape Browser Prototype. But my advice still is: Just stick with Mozilla Firefox!

Netscape has released the final version of its Netscape 8 Web browser. The browser toggles between the Internet Explorer and Firefox rendering engines as needed to satisfy compatibility and safety requirements. The revived browser is based upon Firefox 1.0.3, bundling Firefox's advanced features with a Netscape interface and many