April 2004 Archives

My wonderful host, mozillaZine.org now has an atom feed, so if you read this blog in a feed reader (like Forumzilla) and you're interested in getting more frequent (and probably more important) Mozilla news, then grab the new feed and stay informed.

Did I just hit cnet at a bad moment? Is my IE browser broken? This evening I was doing a little browsing in IE -- trying to remind myself why I love Mozilla and Firefox ;-) and I came across several sites that didn't look quite right. The most blatant rendering problem I found was at cnet. Here's what I see in win IE on my XP system:

and this is what I see in Firefox:

What's going on here? Has my IE install broken or is cnet coded to render in Gecko better than in IE?

update: duh, font size was set to larger in IE and cnet just doesn't handle font scaling (in any browser) well at all. Nevermind. Screenshots removed since it's not worth my bandwidth to point out my own mistake ;-)

From the
(that was the test)

update I was testing a possible bug in how forumzilla escapes (or doesn't) message bodies.

This weekend, while I was spying on my backyard birds through the camera lens, this little visitor was spying back at me :-)

Steven Garrity, over at Acts of Volition, has a nice article on the (hopefully) emerging trend of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software. This is, I think, an important recognition and worth thinking about. Head over to AoV and give it a read -- and share your thoughts in his comments section.

It's still BugDay, so if you've got some time to spare and a recent Mozilla or Firefox build, please join #mozillazine on the server irc.mozilla.org and help us dig through all of the Unconfirmed Firefox and Browser-General bugs. We're making good progress today in cleaning up those buglists and with your help we can make it great progress!

After much research and several really good suggestions (and pointers) from some of you, I've finally purchased a rechargeable battery system for my little digital point and shoot.

I ended up going with a Maha NiMh system that I expect will work well. The kit I purchased came with a 4 battery Maha MH-C401FS Intelligent Charger and 8 2200mAh AA Powerex rechargeable batteries.

The charger has 4 independent circuits (so you can charge 1 to 4 batteries independently of eachother), performs a 100 minute fast charge or a 5 hour standard charge, and utilizes what Maha calls a "next generation FLEX negative pulse algorithm which significantly enhances battery life." They claim 1000 charge liftetime on the batteries, a fuller charge, and no "conditioning" cycles.

I haven't even got the batteries cycled up to their full capacity yet (the manuals all say at least 4 or 5 cycles) so I'll report back with more of my experience when I've got them operating at full capacity.

Thanks again to those of you who gave suggestions and pointers. It was a big help and I've no doubt that I'm going to be highly satisfied with this system.

So now that I've got this wonderful extension, URIid (and am looking forward to the day that we have @ rules for matching on URLs integrated into Gecko,) I'm doing a lot of customization of the sites I visit regularly.

I don't think I've ever really tried to learn CSS except by experimentation with the specs when I wanted to achieve a specific look here at my weblog or in tracking down a Mozilla bug. What I'm looking for now is a tutorial or other hand-holding document which will give me a better grip on using CSS. I'm not looking for links to the specs. I already have bookmarks to all of the w3c CSS specs.

What I'm really looking for is a guide that will teach me the most efficient ways to select a bit of random web content and modify its display. An example of the type of questions that I need answered woudld be something like "how do I select on and modify HTML table padding and cell spacing attributes using CSS?"

So, do any of you know of any tutorials or other documentation for the practical modification of other peoples' web pages with user style sheets?

Happy astronomy day!

redemption in a blog has a really nice article on various Firefox searching techniques and modifications. It covers the basics of addressbar searching, custom keywords, context menu searching, and find as you type. Even if you're familiar with those features, the article has some nice tips and covers some modifications you might be interested in as well as giving a bit of coverage to upcoming improvements to the Firefox search features.

I just wanted to take a minute to give a big thanks to a few developers who have, in the last year, made my internet experience a dramatically better. First, a huge thanks to Ben Goodger for all his work on Firefox and to Scott MacGregor for Thunderbird. I honestly believe that these are now the best web browser and the best e-mail client on the planet.

One of the things that really makes these apps shine, in my opinion, is that they don't try to do everything -- to satisfy every oddball user on the face of the planet. They focus on being clean and fast with a very solid featureset that would satisfy most users. Niche features are left to extensions.

I, being one of those oddball users, am hooked on a few extensions so I also have to thank Henrik Gemal for Linky, Myk Melez for Forumzilla and now Chris Neale for URIid.

I've used a lot of extensions, but Linky and Forumzilla are in a different class from all the others. They are permanent and I use them as integral parts of Firefox and Thunderbird. Without the efforts of Henrik and Myk, my internet experience wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable.

This evening I spent a couple of hours re-writing my browser and mail (for Forumzilla) userContent.css files to take advantage of the new URIid extension and even though I've only had this for a little while, I can already tell that this is going to be a permanent addition (at least until bug 238099 is fixed). URIid gives me the web browsing satisfaction that other features like pop-up blocking and junk-mail controls do and I think this functionality is something that I just won't be able to do without.

So a huge thanks to Ben, Scott, Myk, Henrik, and Chris. You all rock!

Get it while the gettin's good and please do send in those TalkBack reports if you crash Mozilla. They're really helpful to the developers working on Mozilla's stability.

update: and now the big dog has the story.

update2: and now mozillanews too.

I'm going through the last bit of testing now and all looks good for kicking out the first of our testing candidates from the 1.7 branch. If all goes as planned, we'll have a couple more of these and hopefully be able to fix some of the higher profile crashers we discover from talkback before we ship 1.7 final.

While we're waiting on the changes to Gecko's CSS handling which will add an at-rule for matching on URL, you can get Chris Neale's new URIid extension for Firefox or Mozilla.

(Chris, can you please make this work for Thunderbird too, or give me some tips on how I can modify it to work there? I really need this for enhancing my Forumzilla experience. I have a three vertical column layout and very few weblogs fit well into the message pane in this configuration. I've got a massively hacked and ugly userContent.css file trying to specifically select on all these horrible table layouts but I subscribe to enough feeds that I'm starting to break one when I go to fix another.)

I actually wrote this post yesterday and forgot to move it out of draft but now he's got some new content so I'm re-writing it :-) Ben Goodger now has a Firefox blog here at mozillaZine.org. He jump-started it with all of the old Firefox content from his personal weblog. Today's post is about improvements to Firefox's bookmark keywords. I'm not positive, but I think that I authored the first Mozilla bookmark keyword document (besides the bug report where I discovered the feature) that was available on the web. The feature sure has matured in Firefox.

I just read, over at Coleen Fishcher's 'Composed' that blogger.com account holders can now sign up for gmail accounts. Go get 'em.

And it's here! The new Thunderbird artwork has shown up at // hicksdesign :: journal. Sexy!

update: Steven has more.

Join us today for a BugDay focused on top site testing and tech evangelism bug triage! With the upcoming release of Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 1.0, it is extremely important that we discover any outstanding top 100 website blocker issues while we still have time to get them fixed. For more information, see the Top 100 triage howto, and be sure to join us this Tuesday on #mozillazine for BugDay.

I missed it. A week ago was my 2 year blogoversary. Wow.

This post is my 912th blog entry and I've written about 225,000 words at adot's notblog* over the last two years. Thanks for reading.

Are you a blogger? How long have you been doing it? How frequently do you post and how lengthy are your posts?

I know that we're still experiencing problems with comments here (and at other mozillazine-hosted weblogs) and kerz says he's going to look into it as soon as he has some free time. I apologize for the problem but it's not my fault. It's not kerz' problem either, I suspect. My guess is that it's a problem with the movable type throttling which doesn't handle multiple blogs across different time zones or something like that.

Phil Rignalda has a possible solution if this is indeed the problem. It might also be possible for kerz to just disable the throttle, though the movable type people haven't made that easy and it may entail solving the "throttling easterners" problem and then setting the throttle to zero.

Apparently, we're not the only ones experiencing this problem. A quick search of the MT support forums turns up these discussions on the problem: Turning off throttling?, Comment throttling woes, and Comment Submission Error, Possible Commenting Flaw (Bug).

For now, if you can't get through, send me an email and let me know if it's cool to post your comment to the blog and I'll try to get your comment into the comments section (though often times I can't comment either, but I could hijack another comment and edit it to include multiple comments :-)

update: It sounds like Kerz has made a few changes to hopefully help the problem with commenting. Let me know if things are better (or worse, or no different). If you can't get through in comments (things are worse or no different) please email me. Thanks.

Gerv's got a blog. Adding his two cents to the Mozilla blog pot, Gervase Markham, of mozilla.org staff, has just started up a blog called Hacking for Christ. If you're interested in "Mozilla, Bugzilla, hacking in general, and other things of importance in [Gerv's] life" then you'll want to bookmark this blog or grab his rss feed.

Welcome to the world of blogging, Gerv.

Since I haven't gotten around to doing an Ask Asa, I thought I'd try an Ask Asa's Readers instead :-)

I have a small inexpensive digital camera (the one I'm using to take all those bird photos). Today it was raining and fairly dark out and when I looked at the 400 or so photos I took this afternoon, almost all of them were a bit underexposed. That wouldn't be so bad except that I went through 8 double-A batteries shooting those photos.

Shooting the birds, I keep the camera on a lot and exercise it's zoom motor quite a bit so it really chews through the batteries. So here's my question, what's a good rechargeable battery solution?

My camera takes 4 double-A batteries. I don't know anything about rechargeable, how long they last, how long they take to charge, or even what they cost. I never go through a set (4) in less than about three hours so I suppose I need at least 8 batteries and a charger that can recharge in less than 3 hours -- if such a thing exists. Any help would be appreciated.

update: I realize now that it might have been helpful if I'd included information on my camera. It's a Canon PowerShot A60 and it takes 4 double-A batteries.

Normally I can get about 500 photos (or even more) by not using the LCD and keeping it turned off most of the time. When I'm shooting through my little telescope, though, I need the LCD and the setup is a bit painful so I keep it on a lot longer and under those circumstances, I chew through batteries after only two to three hundred pictures. I think I use the zoom quite a bit more, too, and that probably has some impact on battery life.

Thanks for all the tips so far. I think I'm off to a much more informed start in my hunt for a better solution than regular disposable batteries.

update2: is this a good deal? 24pk Rechargeable AA NiMh 2250mAh Batteries for $32 shipped.

Somehow when I was toweling my hair dry yesterday, I stuck my thumb in my left eye and it's been irritated and sore all day. I've no doubt that my physical well-being is of little interest to most of you but, well, this is a blog, afterall, so I don't feel too bad about boring you with minutiae like that.

Actually, I did have a point in bringing that up. I had intended to spend some substantial time in the garden and taking some more photos of my backyard birds but this eye thing made it kind of difficult to shoot the birds. Deanna got a fair amount done in the garden and I did manage to take a few photos, including several shots of our happy golden orange house finch (who is getting more orange and less gold these last few weeks) and one shot of his girlfriend. I also took a few shots of the golden-crested sparrows and a visiting scrub-jay. As it was getting dark, I managed to get a shot of a tiny little chestnut backed chickadee in one of our persimmon trees, too.

As with the earlier batch, these are sized down quite a bit from the originals because my bandwidth is fairly limited. If you're interested in larger versions, feel free to mail me.

hicksdesign :: coming soon

Today I was made painfully aware of the opportunity cost in using Thunderbird (or Mozilla) junk-mail classification. Had it not been for the great folks over at The Register, I'd have missed out completely on this work of art. Damn you spam filters! What other wonders are you keeping from me!

What I want from movable type is a better "new entry" template. The current template has a text area that's about 500 pixels wide which is about exactly half as wide as I'd like (and because of how poorly it was implemented, I can't even use my simple enlarge textareas bookmarklet).

I run across this same problem with content at an uncountable number of blogs and other sites; the authors assume a font size and screen resolution and then lock in the text area or content column to some hard pixel value that yields the 10 to 15 words per line they think will be most readable.

Well, I've got about 1400 pixels of horizontal real estate and run with my fonts jacked up two or three levels. The MT text area, which gives about 15 words per line at Firefox's default font size, gives me about 7 words per line at my preferred font size.

I'm reading most of my "regular reading" weblogs in Forumzilla now, with the exception of my big "Mozilla blogs" bookmark group. (I'm trying to avoid a vertical scrollbar in the server pane in Thunderbird/Forumzilla.) Out of the twenty or so Mozilla blogs that I read, there are three exemplary blogs which help to describe my predicament.

The first blog, by James Cox, demonstrates "the problem". If you visit his blog, Home is where the heart is. Apparently, and zoom your fonts up about 3 times, you'll see that the number of words per line drops significantly. For me it goes from about 15 down to something under 10. James' "content" div is locked in at 600 pixels so if my fonts get larger, fewer fit on each line. His page layout looks quite nice and is fairly easy to read -- if you're viewing it at his resolution using the same font and font-size that he is.

The second blog, by Henrik Gemal, tries to be better by using ems to define the widths of the various sections of his blog. Unfotunately, this ends up working against me because he defines padding and margins in ems and so if you zoom your fonts up several times, the margins and padding grow dramatically. To see what I'm talking about, go to Gemal's Psyched Blog and zoom your fonts. Watch the main content column actually shrink in width as your font size grows. When I view at the default font size, I get nearly 20 words per line but if I zoom my fonts three times, that drops to about 5 words per line.

The third blog in my little Mozilla blog tour, by Chris Blizzard, gets it right. He uses a table but the effect is exactly what I expect when I zoom my fonts. At the default font size, I get about 14 words per line and zoomed I still get between 12 and 14 words per line. Check out Chris' blog and see for yourself.

I'm certainly not without guilt on website usability issues and I don't mean to pick on James or Henrik -- who both have very attractive blog designs -- but I do think that as screens get larger (and particularly, wider) that this is going to be more and more of an issue.

And, yes, I'm aware of the myriad of usability studies that say 10-12 words per line is most readable and I'm not even suggesting that websites give me the 20 words per line I'd like (and that I can often afford with my resolution.) I am suggesting, however, that they keep in mind that my font size may not be the same as theirs and try to give folks like me, who have the resolution to afford a larger font size, a similarly pleasant experience with at least as many words per line.

If you're a fan of the new Amazon search tool, A9 and you're a firefox user, then you might appreciate this A9 search plugin.

Just to see if it gets noticed, here's another link to ubiquitous minghong - Mozilla Firefox, a Firefox wiki that popped up in my Firefox blog scanning today :-)

I hope to be able to put some time in later this week to give a big update on the status of the Mars Exploration Rover missions which are still charging ahead, conducting some great science and sending back some amazing photos. Between work and not felling well for a the better part of two weeks, I just haven't had the time to put a post together.

I also hope to get Ask Asa up and running again. I've collected about half a dozen new questions from the last few weeks and I'll try to get a post together soon. If you'd like to get in on that action, use this blog post to comment your questions.

I'm apparently not well yet from whatever cold virus I picked up last week and so I'm probably going to be taking a day off and trying to recover a bit more.

To hold you over until I return to normal posting, here are a few more interesting blog posts and other Mozilla-related stuff that's been gathering in my temp bookmarks folder over the last few days.

Le Breeze themes for Firefox and Thunderbird have been getting a lot of good blognoise and I can definitely see why. Nice work, Kevin. Themes this complete are a rarity.

TweakHound has a nice article titled A Look At Mozilla For Windows Users that does a nice job of guiding new users through a introduction to Mozilla.

redemption in a blog tells us about a couple of new features in Firefox.

blog null has an informative article on Getting Java Plugin Working in Firefox

We're a few days later than I'd hoped, but today the tree branched for 1.7 and the trunk opened to 1.8 Alpha development. If all goes well, we'll be doing the first of several 1.7 testing candidate releases this week.

This weekend Deanna and I were both still suffering the ill effects of a cold virus we caught last weekend in Louisiana (or on the airplane) but I managed to drag myself out to the back yard for a few hours today to enjoy the spring weather and to supervise Ptolemy (our cat). The wonderful golden-orange tinted house finch hasn't shown himself for about a week now, though I still hear his joyful song from a few houses away.

Today we were visited by several scrub jays, a mockingbird (he's been around for a few days now), a couple of california towees, a titmouse or two, one of the northern flickers (who landed in the yard!), one anna's hummingbird, and quite a few golden-crowned sparrows.

The hummingbird and titmouse were too quick for me and so I didn't get a chance to put the binoculars down and pick up my camera to get any good photos of those guys but the sparrows were content spending long spells lined up on the fence watching me watching them so I took a few snapshots. You can click the thumbnails below to see larger photos.

I know that most people don't spend much time looking at sparrows (probably any birds, for that matter, but especially sparrows) because they consider them so common and not particularly attractive -- especailly pecking around on the ground outside of restaurants and such. For house sparrows (not technically a sparrow) I tend to agree. Not only are they an invasive, non-natives responsible for driving away one of my favorite locals, blue birds, but in cities and even sub-urban areas, they tend to be dust and dirt covered and so their markings don't really stand out.

It's a different story with these golden-crowns and the occaisional white-crown I see hanging out with them. They can be strikingly beautiful . We've got a couple of small bird baths in the back yard which they take full advantage of so they stay fairly clean of dust and grime and when the light's right, you can really see some wonderful details and you certainly won't miss that striking shock of yellow on the top of their heads.

If you're interested in seeing the full resolution, full color versions of any of the photos I post here, just let me know. My bandwidth is limited so I crop and scale them down to "medium" jpg quality and about half-size or thereabouts.

Clearing out this weekend's temp bookmarks, I decided to plunk a few down in a blog post.

A cool boxes demo (via dealmeida.net)
Another migrating from IE to Firefox article.
Mark Pilgrim has the low-down on GMail accessibility.
Grack.com on Thunderbird
Mark Words says, "writing Mozilla/Firefox extensions is about a hundred times (113.7 to be exact) easier than writing IE plugins.
A very nice "topographic" bookmarklet from make-believe.org

I was wrong in one of my earlier comments when I responded that it might be a while before we had public access to crash data. It looks like Jay's been working overtime to get a public look-up tool set up and today that work is sufficiently completed to make available to our testing and bug triage community.

The new tool is located at http://talkback-public.mozilla.org. From this page you can look up individual talkback reports . The reports contain the stack signature, product and build IDs, the time of the crash, the platform and OS, the code module, the user-entered URL and user comments, the trigger reason, trigger line number, and stack trace for the crash.

The stack lines in the stack trace are each linked to a bugzilla query for existing bug reports with that class and function in the comments. This makes it easy to discover if your crasher is already reported. Just look up your talkback ID, click the top line of the stack trace and have a look at the resulting bug list to see if one of those reports matches your crasher.

In addition to the individual incident ID look-ups, you can also look up our talkback "smart analysis" reports from that same page (1.7b example). These reports give some aggregate information and include our current list of topcrashes.

With the good news of this long-awaited triage tool comes some bad news that we lost a large number of previous crash reports because of some database problems we were having. So if you go to look up your incident from a week or two ago and don't get a report, that's the reason.

This morning, I'm told by leaf (our build magician,) that starting today all of the official Windows nightly builds have the TalkBack crash reporting utility included. If you've been waiting for Windows zips with TalkBack (I know a few of you have been avoiding the installer builds) or you've got a crash that can't be reproduced with 1.7 beta, the nightly builds await you -- get 'em while they're hot. The zip builds aren't yet configured just right so after initial launch, you have to shut down, delete the compreg.dat file, and restart to get TalkBack to register. After that initial registration, it should work fine. Hopefully we'll have a fix for that soon.

TalkBack, for those of you who don't know, is a small utility that ships with Mozilla (and Linux Firefox -- more builds to come,) that will send a reports of most Mozilla crashes, along with a stacktrace of the crash, to a Mozilla Foundation server where a team of permissioned QA folks can view them individually and in aggregate to identify the "top crashers" and get bugs filed on the most high-profile stability problems in Mozilla.

In addition to generating, deciphering, and converting the aggregate data into bug reports, which is limited to just a few people right now, we can all use TalkBack when we file crashing bug reports that need stack traces. Before filing your crashing bug report, be sure to send in the TalkBack crash data. When filing a crashing bug, note in the bug the specific steps required to trigger the crash and add to your initial comment the ID of the TalkBack report you submitted. You can get this ID by running the TalkBack executable located in your install directory. The ID looks something like TB9501L. If you have permissions to do so, also add the keyword "talkbackid" to the bug and one of the people with access to the TalkBack reports will pull that stack trace and attach it to the bug report.

I'm hopeful that it won't be long before users can look up their own crash reports to save duplicate bug reporting and remove the bottleneck for reporting new crashers that include stack traces. Getting TalkBack into the rest of the builds and working properly is the first priority, though. If you have any questions about TalkBack, you can ask in the comments.

If you've got a friend or family member who you're afraid will become the victim of a phishing scam, this extension, SpoofStick, might be helpful.

I just came across another account of how painful computing is for users of IE and Outlook express with all of these pieces of ad-ware and spy-ware targeting those systems. After deailing with similar problems on my in-laws' machines, I have decided to perform an experiment.

I'm going to install a clean copy Windows98SE on one of my spare machines at home and try to use it for various of my regular personal surfing and email activities to see how long it takes for the system to deteriorate. I suspect that I won't put enough hours on that system to see it go south as quickly as it does for full-time windows/ie/outlook users, but the experiment should be interesting.

I don't plan on running any windows updates because, from my admittedly limited experience (see the two links above), regular users don't do it either. At the end of each week, probably on Saturday or Sunday, I'll run Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy, but I won't actually, clean anything. I'll just record what they find.

Based on my conversations with Deanna's father, and how long it took his new laptop user experience to degrade, I'm predicting that it will take less than 6 months for things to become painful. I'll post updates to the blog as things progress.

So I got set up with a GMail web-based e-mail account today (thanks Pat) and my initial impressions are favorable.

The promise of lots of space (1 GB) is a welcome reprieve from the "you get 5 MB and we delete it all if you don't touch it regularly" web-based e-mail systems I'm used to (Google apparently gives you 9 months of inactivity before taking action).

The interface is simple and straight-forward without a lot of bells and whistles (yet). The text ads are unobtrusive (though it might be nice to userContent.css-hide that table containing them.) The "flagging" UI behaves similarly to the orkut ratings with a little star image that behaves like a checkbox. Folders are replaced with "labels" that you can define and attach to any message. I don't have enough mail yet to evaluate the threaded sorting or the archiving features so I'll post more when I've got more.

update: Blonker suggests in the comments that I post my gmail address here to get some mail for further testing. Sounds good to me. Especially if commenting is broken (as it seems to be most of the time these days) just drop me a line at asadotzler@gmail.com :)

I've been playing around with it some more and I'm really starting to appreciate some of the UI touches. The spellchecking is quite nice, all in place without using other windows and popups. The reply and forward UI is clean and simple too, expanding the current view rather than replacing it. So far, this is really nice.

update2: well, hiding the ads was pretty easy. table[class="metatable"]{display: none !important;} in userContent.css seems to do the trick just fine. Thanks to those of you who are sending me test mails.

This blog post, by Rich Skrenta at Topix.net (vai Brad DeLong) is really interesting. I had no idea that Google was that deep into hardware and OS work.

I'm back. Deanna and I had a wonderful visit with her father and his wife.

I posted a few days ago about my experience using IE for a few days. Well, after this visit with Deanna's father (I believe he's about 65 or 66 years old) I'm even more convinced that IE sucks.

Deanna's father and his wife use AOL and IE on two machines, an older desktop and a relatively new laptop. Both machines had become so infested infested with adware and spyware that they literally were rendered unusable. I had taken with me my USB keychain with my Firefox and Thunderbird installs (and profiles) and a copy of both Ad-aware and Spybot S&D.

After several hours of adware cleanup and Windows updates, I believe that I've returned their two machines to a usable enough state that next time they won't miss the email telling them we're on the way to Louisiana to visit them (seriously).

They're not geeks like us (he's a retired oil man and she's an elementary school teacher) so I left them with a Spybot S&D shortcut on the desktop labeled "Pop-up clean-up" and simple instructions about avoiding spyware and how to clean it up if they do get invaded. I hope, but don't have any great confidence, that they'll be able to maintain normal use of their machines for a while.

Why didn't I just install Firefox? Well, two reasons. They use AOL for their connectivity and most of their web browsing and all of their email (though I'm told that a couple of their other applications occasionally launch IE and so they use that some too). Using AOL to gain the connection and then using some other web browser seemed to be too confusing to them. Also, their older computer only has 16 MB of RAM and so running AOL and Firefox together is a bit much.

They were very impressed with the pop-up blocking and the banner image blocking. Deanna's father seemed to like what he saw of tabbed browsing too. I actually did leave Firefox installed on their laptop but with no shortcut on the desktop to confuse them. If they get into really bad shape again, so bad that they can't even open IE to download clean-up tools, I'll phone coach them on finding it and launching it from the Program Files directory.

I don't know much about AOL and how it interfaces with MS DUN but what it seems like we need in Firefox is the ability to use the AOL or Windows dialer without launching AOL at all. Even better would be if the Firefox installer could notice that it was replacing AOL and offer up a custom bookmarks toolbar that takes you to an AOL start page and has additional links for AOL Webmail and maybe "Search" -- the idea being to try to give AOL users something that covers their basic needs without actually starting up the AOL client.

If these two wonderful (and intelligent) people who literally just stopped reading email and browsing the web because they were so infested with adware and spyware are representative of a larger population, I think that Firefox and Thunderbird have a very good opportunity here.

Expect light or no blogging this weekend. Deanna and I are headed to Louisiana to visit family and I'm leaving the laptop behind.

Can you believe it? I have a hard time accepting that it's been six years since the Mozilla project launched. Pretty amazing. It's been about 5 years since my first bug report, and it's very nearly 4 years since I went to work for mozilla.org at Netscape. Time flies when you're having fun :-)