It looks like we've got some new forums over at mozillaZine.org for the new stand-alone mail app, minotaur/thunderbird. In addition to the new forums, there's been some restructuring of the old forums. Check it out.
In other news, I think we've finally got the fixes we need for 1.4a and hopefully we can do a release one of these days :)
Well, we almost got 1.4alpha out this week. We saw a few more crash bug reports in the last day than normal and decided to take a few days to investigate and maybe fix some of them. Hopefully early next week.
We're nearly wrapped up with 1.4alpha. I've spent a good part of the day getting my temporary machine configured to work with the mozilla.org docs tree. (Not that any of you could possibly care, but) it certainly is a lot easier to get a build environment set up on linux than windows and the only trouble I had was gettin apache configured for server-side includes. That part was necessary because our release notes, which I'm in the middle of updating for 1.4a, use includes for ease of sharing among vendors like Netscape who contribute to and consume that doc. I had a simple typo in httpd.conf that escaped my notice for an hour or so while I tried changing every other possible setting. Now that I've got it all set up I can finish off the release notes and move on to update the rest of the release documentation. If all goes well, we'll have a 1.4a ready for you shortly.
When we moved from the CFM builds over to the Mach-O builds for Mac OS X, a few things broke. The most visible of the problems we didn't get fixed for Mozilla 1.3 was XPInstall which is used to install mozdev add-ons and other extensions. Because XPInstall was broken in unknown ways, we decided to disable it for Mozilla 1.3. That also disabled theme install for Mac Mozilla.
Well, I just verified that this is all working again and should be in pretty good shape for Mozilla 1.4 Alpha, which is due sometime late this week. Thanks to Sean for staying on top of this problem and getting us the fixes (bugs 186088 and 195109.)
We're just about 24 hours from the freeze for Mozilla 1.4 Alpha. This release has seen lots of great bug fixing and a few key feature improvements. If checkins for the next day don't set the tree aflame, we could have a release as early as Thursday or Friday. But this will be an alpha release and is likely to be very rough around the edges.
I'd mentioned some days back that I was building and using Minotaur. Minotaur is the codename for stand-alone Mozilla mail. Today Scott and Kerz formally announced the Minotaur project. Hopefully we'll have pre-compiled binaries soon. Scott and Kerz deserve many thanks for picking up this project and moving it forward.
Spent much of the weekend working on the cars. The corolla needs a new radiator and I'll probably put that in sometime this week. The 325 needs a new starter (I think) but access is limited so that's gonna be a real pain in the ass - maybe next weekend. Both cars will hit 200,000 miles this year and I owe them each some attention as they approach that milestone.
Had another great meal at Fuki Sushi with Deanna this evening. The Madai was very, very good. I think we'll settle down to as many of the 10+ hours of Dune and Children of Dune that we can handle.
Sushi and TiVo, how did I ever survive without them.
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the Davis (CA) Linux Users Group, also known as LUGOD. I think there were 40 or 50 people there and lots of great questions, especially about our tools. My presentation slides were incomplete and hastilly thrown together from several previous talks I've given. The slides by themselves are not that great. Regardless, I've posted them for anyone that's interested.
If you haven't given the Eric Meyer and ESPN interview a read, head over to devedge and check it out. I was really impressed with a 730 terabytes/year bandwidth savings using standards-compliant code. That's a pretty amazing statistic even in isolation.
This, and other information available at the Strategy Central are just what we need. Let's hope that more large organizations reach similar conclusions about supporting the standards.
I'm guessing that at least some of you run websites or have web pages or blogs. ESPN claims that an overwhelming majority of its traffic comes from clients with significant support for web standards. What kind of traffic are you getting? Do you still code for 4th gen browsers? If so, do you think you still will be in a year? In three?
One of my favorite features of Mozilla, for several years now, has been custom keywords which allows users to name bookmarks for faster access. I, for example, have named my bookmark for mozillaZine.org "mz" and typing "mz" into the address field takes me to that bookmark location. A second, and lesser known, feature of of Mozilla's bookmark handling is the %s wildcard flag. Users can use %s as a variable in URLs and when combined with custom keywords it becomes a very powerful tool.
A good example of this is for searching like at Bugzilla or Google. I have the bookmark http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s which I've given the keyword "bug". Now typing something like "bug 12345" in the address field is interpreted like this: the "bug" keyword gets resolved as the bookmarked URL http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s and then the %s variable gets replaced with "12345" yielding the new URL http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12345 which loads up the bug I was looking for. A similar example is my custom keyworded Google bookmark. The bookmark is http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&btnG=Google+Search and my custom keyword is "g". Typing "g foopy" does a Google search on the word "foopy".
Why do I bring all of this up again? Well, master of bookmarklets and all-around-great-guy, Jesse Ruderman has posted another batch of bookmarklets that combines this Mozilla custom keywords feature with another powerful Mozilla feature -- that the address field can interpret and execute arbitrary JavaScript and return results in the browser window. These new bookmarklets, along with scores of others available at Jesse's Squarefree website, should be extremely useful to JS and Web developers. Check it out and if you've got any creative uses of Mozilla features that you'd like to share let me know by clicking on the "Comments' link below.
update:I really should also point out that these features can go a lot further than what I've suggested here in this post. Check out grayrest's page on Mozilla bookmarks to see some more of this powerful feature.
We're in the home stretch already. Little more than a week remains in the 1.4alpha cycle before we lock down for a couple of days and kick out a release. I'm hopeful that we can do alpha in short order but it's also likely to be _alpha_ quality.
All will depend on whether or not we experience the traditional "crash landings" the night before the freeze. If things get badly broken then we'll be frozen for a while to recover. If things go well and people get their changes in early and with care, we could have 1.4a as soon as late next week.
Today I built a pantry. As regular readers will already know, Deanna and I moved into a new place. It's a '50s home with strange closets everywhere (and even a hint of the original green paint scheme in some of them). One large closet sits across the hall from the kitchen and today we cut, sanded, finished and installed some nice C-shaped shelving for storing our assorted dry foodstuffs and whatnot. It was about a 3 hour project and very rewarding. It just feels good building something that organizes a piece of your life.
Today (and last night too) I put some more work into the "why use Mozilla" pages (only the index and the Users pages are my content. Myk, Marcia, Andreww, Arun and others made the really useful docs). Since we're not using the normal site wrapper, I created a little convenience footer for each of the pages that contains a link to edit the page (using Doctor, a web-based editor for CVS) and a link for document history (as seen by Bonsai). I also created a draft alternate stylesheet for the index page, which I'm still working on, that you can see in Mozilla by using the View->Use Style->yellow&blue menu item.
I'm having a blast learning CSS and putting it to use. I find it quite intuitive and where not intuitive, pretty easy to learn with not much more than a causal glance at the spec. I literally guessed my way through the styling of the Users page and only had to look at the spec a couple of times. I'm pretty happy with how easy it was to create the Users page with basic HTML and CSS 1. You can do some really nice positioning and styling that degrades well in non-css or buggy css browsers by writing clean table-less HTML and keeping mostly to CSS 1. Maybe I'll train my sites on this site and see if I can make it more visually appealing. If you have suggestions just poke the comments link and let me know.
Mike Pinkerton, lead Camino developer, comes out swinging at the rumors of Camino's death. Judging from the comments at his blog, people really like the little Mac browser that could. I'm split on my Macs. I use Camino about 30% of the time, Mozilla about 50% of the time and the remainder gets split up between the unofficial Mac Phoenix build and Safari. Boy, it sure is nice to have a choice.
Dave Hyatt, of Mozilla, Chimera, Phoenix and now Safari fame, points out the flawed argument that innovation in browsers is over.
I was in the middle of a long-winded post on "Browsers 10 years later" but Dave covers a lot of the same ground so rather than blather on about how the web and web browsing have changed, I'll just quote him.
You want better "breadcrumb"-style back navigation? Try SnapBack in Safari. You want better "threaded" navigation? Try tabs in Phoenix, Mozilla, Chimera, Galeon, NetCaptor, CrazyBrowser, Opera, Epiphany, or Konqueror. Sophisticated ad blocking? Try Mozilla or OmniWeb. Popup blocking? Safari, Mozilla, Phoenix, etc. How about smart searches using bookmark keywords? Typeahead find in Mac IE or Mozilla? Link prefetching? QuickSearch in History and Bookmarks? Bookmark groups using tabs? Tab home pages? How about the sophisticated user controls of Opera? What about site navigation controls in Mozilla and Opera?
Mars Odyssey continues to deliver. I mentioned in an earlier post that while the major media outlets' Mars missions coverage seemed pre-occupied with the failures of Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter, if you dug a little deeper you'd find that amazing successes were unfolding with Odyssey and Global Surveyor.
Well, today Dr. David Whitehouse, science writer for the BBC, has devoted a column to the work of Tahirih Motazedian (University of Oregon) which seems to point to contemporary flowing water on Mars. Once again, our amazing Martian orbiters have delivered data which is changing the way we view the red planet, this time showing strong evidence for water flows.
New black streaks becoming visible between photos taken only months apart look a lot like water flow down the side of Olympus Mons. Ms. Motazedian says, "This demonstrates the existence of a currently active, short-term process of surface change on Mars," and the streaks are "highly indicative of dynamic fluid flow." This is the most conclusive evidence to date and suggests that in certain areas there exists enough thermal heat to melt the frozen sub-surface water ice that covers large areas of the Martian surface.
Thanks to Sci-Fi Today for the heads up.
Well, in Mozilla at least. It's done. Get your hands on Mozilla 1.3 and let me know what you think in the comments here. I know most of you have already moved on to 1.4 for all the new goodness (and some alpha badness) but what do you think of the 1.3 release compared to 1.0(.x) and 1.1&2?
We've taken a few more fixes and have another round of candidate builds. New to these builds are several important fixes that could use lots of testing.
Mitchell's article on browser innovation which was posted on the www.mozilla.org website last week and soon after highlighted on mozillaZine has just made slashdot. (also liked to from dave hyatt's weblog)
We've been hard at work cleaning up the last of the blocking problems with 1.3. Today we have our first set of candidate builds and are looking to get as much usage/testing on these builds as we can. If you want to help make Mozilla 1.3 the best release to date, please grab one of the builds linked below, use it, abuse it, and let us know if you find any nasty problems.
This morning I made my first working build of minotaur/thunderbird on linux from mscott's minotaur branch (off of the Mozilla trunk rather than the 1.0 branch where sspitzer did his initial take). Thanks to bryner for the patches to get linux building. Scott's made a great start with standalone mail, cleaned up menus, and customizable toolbars. I can't say how pleased I am to see this effort revitalized and moving forward.
I've returned the link to Andrew Wooldridge's CogWorks weblog to the blogroll. I lost it in the upgrade. If you're into anime, CG, games, Mozilla, OS X and other interesting news, you'll want to check it out regularly.
I've just finished reading through Scott Collin's Konfabulator tutorial and I'm darned near ready to go write a widget myself. Unfortunately I don't have any good widget ideas :-) If you use OS X and you haven't seen Konfabulator, you should rush right over to their site and get it. I particularly like the fullscreen clock, scc's tinderbox status, the to-do widget and yellow submarine :)
Camino 0.7 is out. If you're an OS X user, you should definitely check this out. It's got everything you need and nothing you don't. It's lightning fast at rendering pages (faster than _all_ of the competition in my experience) and it's got a very powerful but simple UI with a great pop-up blocker and tabbed browsing. Best of all, it's free and open.
I read over at the mozillaZine Phoenix Forum that Phoenix has been named the "pick of the week" in c|net's Download Dispatch newsletter. We really should do a new milestone release, let folks get a look at the new features and testdrive the new name.
Mike Lee (the creator of the amazing mozBlog) hasn't posted to his blog in a while. Mike, if you're still alive, how's mozBlog for Phoenix coming along?
Looks like the folks over at LinuxQuestions.org think pretty highly of gecko-based browsers. Mozilla and friends took over 70% of the votes for best Web browser. I thought it was interesting that even though KDE won best desktop environment pretty handily over Gnome (59% to 36%) Mozilla and Galeon both beat Konqueror and Mozilla with nearly three times the votes. Did a few KDE users vote for gecko-based browsers?
from the mZ front page (via Blogzilla): "Matthew Haughey, creator of Metafilter, has written a step-by-step guide to using Mozilla." Matthew says, "I use IE for testing only now, and can't see any reason to move off mozilla anytime soon." and goes on to provide a nice summary of several key Mozilla features.
With 100 years on this planet I could not make something so beautiful. That billions of trillions (a total guess) of such works of art come and go every year is nearly incomprehensible. What a wonderful universe to be living in.
