July 2004 Archives

I've just made the overdue updates to the Mozilla release schedule over at Brendan's Roadmap document.

Drivers have been working on some changes to the release schedule to try to avoid 1.8 colliding with the aviary 1.0 releases. With the recent 1.8 alpha releases, 1.7 Seamonkey branch releases, and the Firefox and Thunderbird releases all happening around the same time, we were stretched too thin and this schedule adjustment should help us avoid that next time around.

The change is fairly simple. We're slotting in a third 1.8 alpha release and so pushing out the beta release and the creation of the 1.8 branch by 6 weeks.

I'm always trying extensions and seeing how long I can cope with them. To date, I've really only stuck with one for longer than a few months and that's the Link Visitor extension which allows you to modify the visited/unvisited state for links.

I find this extension comes in really handy for keeping track of which pages, articles, bugs, etc. that I've read. For example, if I was just looking at a bug a few days ago and I do a search to find it again, it'll stick out as visited in the buglist. That only works until you've read as many bugs as I have. Now, I just mark as unvisited any bugs that I'm not interested in keeping an eye on right there on the bug page. It's also useful at sites like The Register where they keep loads of links to other articles all on the same page and make updates really regularly. I can mark the whole page as visited when I've read all I care to and the next time I visit the page, only the new articles are linked as unread.

Next on my list for almost holding on to is Linky which I find myself needing in bursts and then not wanting to have cluttering my menu for a while. Being able to uninstall or disable extensions sure is nice.

Other than those two, I haven't really held onto any Firefox extensions for very long. For the most part, Firefox does exactly what I need it to do. It really is a quite powerful browser "out of the box."

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the SpellBound extension and I'm still holding on to that one but the pain of having to do a fresh install with every new daily build is getting to be a bit much so I don't know how much longer I'll keep it. It's nice to have but I rarely use it and it's a pain to repeatedly install.

I think I forgot to mention another extension that I installed at that time and that I'm pretty sure I'll hold onto for some time and that's the MiniT (drag+indicator) extension which is a very clean, very well done, nearly perfect extension. It does what it's supposed to do, does nothing else, it's out of your way when you don't need it, and I haven't found any bugs in it yet. If you want to drag and drop reorder your tabs and you don't want to deal with extensions that break the Web (like TBE) I highly recommend this one. (note: the drop indicator icon is one I made and dropped in. I'm constantly replacing icons in extensions because so few fit in with the default theme.)

Today, I installed two more extensions that I can see holding onto for a while, the Translate and TinyURL Creator extensions. Both are fairly clean and seem to work just fine. I've made my own icons because the ones I find in extensions usually don't fit well with the default theme, but other than that, they're functioning quite nicely.

If you know of good extensions, let me know. I'm always up for trying a new one.

update Paul, the Translate developer. has a new icon that's much nicer and I've scaled that down a bit to better fit in with my default Firefox theme. This really is an area where we need to come up with a better solution. I'd recommend that Firefox themes include a few "generic" icons like the document and maybe some arrows and other shapes, that extensions can overlay with their image. That way, for example, Paul could build his icon by just overlaying the "EN" on top of one the generic icon. It would lead to more seamless extension integration, I think.

Today I read one more story about pop-ups getting past our blocker (though I saw no pop-ups at either of those sites) and decided that given the recent spate of these claims, it was worth trying to do something about it. We are still #1 when it comes to defeating unwanted pop-ups, but we'll have to keep a close eye on the enemy if we're going to stay ahead. So if you're using the latest nightly branch builds of Firefox and you see pop-ups happening that you didn't request, please visit Bugzilla bug 253831 and provide information about the site where you saw the problem. If we find there are new and common techniques that are getting around our blocker, we'll try to seal off those avenues of attack.

Check out Blake Ross' blog for the latest on the Firefox community marketing effort. While not an official "weekly effort" right now we're looking for people to help us get CD bundling deals.

You know what to do. Answers sometime next week.

Sometimes we suck. We think we're adding useful features but we're also breaking people.

It looks like Geek Grrl triggered the Firefox (Gecko) Midas editing mode which is used for things like Blogger.com's HTML editing features. How she triggered it, and why it's available on Google, I'm not sure. I suspect it's a bug in our code that allowed some other page to trigger it and have it carry over to the next page she visits or something crazy like that. (Surely we don't have a keyboard command to invoke it arbitrarily!?)

This feature, the HTML editing capability, is a feature, but users unexpectedly finding Google.com or any other normal site as editable is surely a bug. (Mabe bug 198155 or bug 209836? maybe those reports are the same problem?)

After weeks without any major changes, Gmail, the Google webmail system, just got a massive feature update -- a new favicon (site icon) . With awesome improvenents like the addition of this new M-velope icon, it'll be no time before people are storming the gates to get an account.

This parody of firefox is great. "Firedfox programmers will stop producing bugs once it reaches its 1.0 state." :D Kudos to its creator.

Thanks to The Midnight Blog for the pointer.

Vlad has released Bugwrangler 0.1+ to the masses (of people who want more out of Bugzilla). With the ringing endorsement of his fine work, "If it crashes your browser and sends your web history to your mom, don�t blame me" how can you miss this ;-) But seriously, this has a lot of promise for those of us who spend our days in Bugzilla and I'm happy to ride the bumpy road for a while and give feedback to help make this a great Bugzilla tool. You should too.

(Since I don't do this daily, I guess it's not really "tip of the day" but why quibble over the details ;-)

If you're like me and you don't use bookmarks very often, instead relying on bookmark keywords and address autocompletion, this tip is for you. When you get bogus items in your Firefox address autocomplete list, you can easily delete them by just arrowing down to the bogus one and hitting shift+delete on your keyboard. Cleaning up your address autocomplete for common sites every once in a while will make your browsing experience more pleasant.

Blogger.com has some Firefox users (and are some Firefox users) according to this.

Oh, and we're their "recommended" browser, too.

This article by Graeme Philipson is getting to be pretty typical of the tech press lately. I think this is a really good sign.

If you appreciate well thought out op-eds that deliver facts along with opinions, send graeme@philipson.info an email and let him know what a great job he's doing.

This looks super-cool for all of us that spend a lot of time in Bugzilla. Vlad's looking for feedback from us regular Bugzilla users so head over and let him know if you've got suggestions.

Go read the latest update on Firefox development from Ben Goodger.

Via Redemption in a Blog, this extension, Google Preview, is one you've got to try. It looks like it uses Thumbshots to slot in a screenshot of the site next to the Google search results. It'll also pull the image from Amazon results if one exists and seems to do a pretty good job pulling stock graphs. Very nice extension. Good work

Doug asked, "Do you personally have any 'pet' bugs in any Mozilla products?"

Yeah, Doug, I do. There are a couple of bugs that I'd like to see fixed and several features I'd like to see added. Before Firefox and Thunderbird, things were a lot worse. I had at least a couple dozen bugs that bothered me and about 15 features or feature changes that I desperately wanted. My only pet bugs today are things like the address field dropdown not closing on second click (bug 192577), the "hidden window" showing up when you use Expose on Mac (bug 223779), and various inconsistencies in creating and loading Bookmarks from different locations. My pet feature requests have gone down dramatically as extensions fill in those gaps and the only ones that I still hope for are the ability to delete attachments from emails (bug 2920 - the extension still doesn't work right for me), Gecko improvements to cache the DOM and JS context so we can get some of that fast back button speed like Opera (bug 38486), and maybe plugin controls like we have for cookies and pop-ups (bug 94025 or similar). Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the application and think that Firefox 1.0 will be the best 1.0 release ever.

Jack asked, "Does Mozilla.org give any money to Mozillazine to help support the huge bandwidth costs they face ? If not do you not agree this would be a nice gesture as they have a hugely positive impact on the community, especially the bug finding/triaging side."

Jack, Mozillazine is an extremely valuable component of the Mozilla community. I consider Mozilla.org, Mozillazine, and Mozdev to be the three visible stars in the Mozilla community constellation and we certainly wouldn't be where we are today without the years of support from Chris Nelson, Jason Kersey, Alex Bishop and the other that have contributed so much of their time and energy to making Mozillazine a great resource that we all use. That being said, we don't give them a dime :-) Actually, both mozilla.org and the Mozillazine team have always appreciated the value in these two organizations remaining independent from each other. The Mozilla Foundation staff realizes the importance of Mozillazine and we will do what we can to make sure they are able to continue providing those great services, but to date, there hasn't been a financial or editorial relationship and I believe everyone would still like to keep it that way.

Ali said, "On July 7th you mentioned that there are over 100,000 registered Bugzilla accounts. I'm wondering how many of these accounts are still active, and how many of them contribute on a regular basis."

I had hoped to get some detailed and contemporary statistics for you but I'm having trouble with my SQL queries so I'll have to push this Ask Asa item to the next installment. Next time I run these queries, I'll see if we can't get something set up to do regular reporting of these statistics. To hold you over until then, here are some stats from my developer day presentation (the data is about 6 months old) earlier this year. About 60,000 people have Bugzilla accounts with activity. Over 50,000 people have reported a bug in Bugzilla. Slightly more than 18,000 individuals reported at least one bug in the last year. We've had 9,000 individuals report at least one bug in the last six months. There are about 2,000 testers with advanced Bugzilla privileges. Some stars in the Bugzilla world include Henrik Gemal who leads the pack with more than 2,500 bugs filed, sspitzer and timeless both with over 2,000 bugs reported, another two dozen people have reported greater than 500 bugs each. BZ has resolved (a combination of fixed and other) 7,700 bugs, matti and R.K.Aa, more than 5,000 each, and dozens more have resolved over 1,000 bugs in Bugzilla. David Baron has attached nearly 950 testcases to bugs, Mats Palmgren 922, BZ 907, Jesse Ruderman over 300, and nearly two dozen others have attached more than 200 testcases each. So we've got a very active community and this was before all the great Firefox press of the last six months so the numbers are probably a good bit higher today.

Jesse asked, "Which is worse, voting Republican (US) or using Internet Explorer?"

Well, Jesse, I really can't say with any certainty, but I will say that talking a lot about security doesn't actually make things more secure. People who are satisfied with that now will one day probably come to regret not asking for more than just talk.

Joey asked, "This kinda sounds like a dumb question but... about how many downloads of firefox/mozilla/thunderbird are there per day, per hour, and so far? I'm just curious."

Joey, it's really difficult to calculate this with any accuracy and it changes depending on how recently we've released products, but I'd estimate that combined, Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird are responsible for between 100,000 and 200,000 downloads per day at the mozilla.org FTP servers. My quick and dirty math says that it's about 75% Firefox and Thunderbird and about 25% Mozilla application suite.

(reminder: name calling, trolling, flaming, and other rude behavior will not be tolerated here. don't expect your comments to stick around if you can't keep it civil.)

Today we kick off week three of the Firefox community marketing initiative. The previous efforts have demonstrated what a large and capable community we have and that it can be an effective counter to the big budgets those other guys have.

This week we're looking for Firefox 1.0 advertising donations. Blake puts it best.

We have an ambitious goal this week: fifty donations of advertising space in print or high traffic web sites. If you own a popular site, print publication or other medium, we need your help. If not, your mission is to pull out the old Rolodex and dig deep among your social network. Find that old friend who now works at Maximum PC or that guy who dated your sister's boyfriend's dog and now runs about.com. Work your charm or call up old favors--just do what it takes make them cough up that ad space.

If you've got space to donate or know someone who does, please send them or their contact information to blake AT cs DOT stanford DOT edu and rebron AT gmail DOT com, and we'll handle the logistics from there. (Please make sure they're interested before sending their information on to us so we're not cold calling.)
We know that some of these will be one-time contributions so the plan is to try to schedule all of the advertising around the 1.0 release but we know that getting this stuff all lined up can take some time so we're trying to get an early start.

I keep intending to find some way to do a blogroll here but I'm just not getting around to it. If I did have a blogroll, I would certainly put The SpaceWriter's Ramblings right up at the top.

This inspiring weblog, by Carolyn Collins Petersen, is without a doubt one of the best on the web. Please take a look. You won't be disappointed.

Some day when I wrap up this blog and look back on what I accomplished here, knowing that I turned a few people on to The SpaceWriter's Ramblings will be wholly satisfying.

Carolyn is not only a great writer (buy her book, Visions of the Cosmos) and a top-notch educator, she is also a genuine enthusiast whose appreciation of the glory of our cosmos will infect all who share in her work.

Visit her blog. You'll be glad you did.

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has a nice Mozilla and Firefox review. Check it out.

There's a new Internet Explorer team weblog up at msdn. It looks like they even have comments for their posts. I'll bet they'd like feedback from web developers.

Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler (our fearless leader) launched her blog last week with a Mozilla Foundation one year anniversary post and now has another post up titled "Why Pay for Staff?" which I guess covers me since I'm paid staff :-)

Don't forget to register for Mozilla Developer Day if you're going to be in the neighborhood on August 6th. There's a great line-up of speakers so you won't want to miss this one.

update: And I'll be there. You can't get a better reason to come than that ;-) I won't be speaking this year but I'll definitely be around and hope to meet some of you that I've only talked with in blogs.

Jesse Ruderman, for those of you who don't know him, is one of Mozilla's top security experts. He's responsible for a huge number of exploits discovered and fixed. In addition to that, he runs The Burning Edge, a daily view into what's new in Mozilla Firefox. And if that wasn't enough, he's also the master bookmarklet writer. Today, I see he's created a new bookmarklet that just kicks ass. The new bookmarklet, called flash seek bar, adds a nifty seek bar for Flash animations.

I challenge you to give it a look and not find yourself poking around Jesse's site for the rest of the day :)

Opera's look and feel can be changed with one-click setups. These setup files bundle popular browser settings so you can select a style that suits you best.

I, having had a less than pleasant experience with Opera 7.5 when I last tried it, decided that these "one-click setups", which claim to make Opera look and feel like IE/Firefox, might improve the experience enough to try again.

To compare the initial user experience and see if this IE/Firefox Opera change made things better, I first removed all traces of Opera and Firefox from my system. I then downloaded and installed both the latest 0.9 branch Firefox build (20040717), and Opera 7.52 (Build 3834) and did fresh installs of both. I installed and launched both, adjusted the screen size to something not huge and restarted. I took screenshots of second launch on both, then updated Opera with the IE/Firefox one-click setup, restarted Opera and took another screenshot.

As you can see, the initial Opera experience is pretty painful. I'm not sure why they decided that the second launch needed to spam the hell out of the browser window with pop-ups, but I guess they've gotta make money and I suppose selling ads in the toolbar just wasn't enough.

The IE/Firefox (which neither looks nor feels anything like Firefox) setup is a fairly large improvement to the stock Opera setup. At least all the pop-ups seem to have disappeared, but it still suffers from toolbar overload, having very nearly twice the vertical space taken up by toolbars as Firefox (ignoring that vertical toolbar which is just an artifact of my arbitrary window sizing).

The IE look, even though it hides that strange side toolbar thing, actually seems to use up even more of the available screen space with toolbars than the stock Opera look (though a quick calculation shows that to not be the case). The menus aren't really much better with this setup and the IE-style buttons have a horrible mouse-over highlight that goes in exactly the wrong direction, getting brighter, lower contrast, and much lighter rather than slightly darker with more contrast. This makes them painfully difficult to recognize when you hover over them.

All is not lost, however, and if this IE Opera "set-up" was tweaked just a bit more, and was the "out of the box" experience for new users, then I might just find myself using it a bit more, and so might a lot of other Opera "watchers" out there. After about 30 minutes of playing around, I came up with this configuration which feels a lot closer to IE (and Firefox) than the official set-up. If anyone from Opera is listening, maybe you can update that setup to look more like this:

flame prophylactic: I use Opera semi-regularly to compare layout results with Gecko browsers and I appreciate the fast and standards-supporting layout engine as well as the multi-platform consideration. I'm not an "opera hater" but I do think that an overwhelming majority of people on the web would be totally overwhelmed by the heavy and chaotic application interface. This is meant as constructive criticism and not rival bashing. If you want to flame me for offering this criticism, don't expect a response.

Today I found this Microsoft SBS article written by Kim Komando which gives 5 steps that IE users can take to help cut down on spyware and browser hijacking. Well, Kim, I can give 1 step that takes less effort (probably even less effort than reading Kim's article) and will have considerably better results -- drop IE and Switch To Firefox.

For all of you Blogger users who have been having problems with Firefox (especially the crashing during compose) I just wanted to pass on a note that we're all looking into it. Blogger has just posted an update:

Blogger Status

Saturday, July 17, 2004

We've just pushed another update to the WYSIWYG editor. This will increase the stability of the new post editor under Mozilla/Firefox on the PC. Previously, longer posts would tend to crash those browsers in Compose mode.

As an additional note, we're completely committed to resolving the cross-browser issues with this new feature. Most of us here use something other than the latest version of IE and we want to make sure that everyone can take advantage of the enhanced editor. Thanks for letting us know about the problems you encounter and for your patience as we fix them.

Posted by Jason at 6:13 PM

A revised agenda has been posted for the upcoming Mozilla Developer Day on August 6th, with two more speakers added to the agenda. Mike Shaver will give a talk on The Road to Mozilla 2.0, which should of interest to everyone who is curious about where Mozilla is headed. Aaron Leventhal will give a talk entitled Accessibility Intro for Mozilla hackers -- Why, What and How. His talk will include showing how Mozilla works with various technologies, including the first ever demo of Mozilla with a screen reader (Window-Eyes).

Please check the Developer Day web page for more detailed information about the talks and to register for the event. Don't forget to register early - we expect a good crowd as this Developer Day promises to be one of the best ever! We look forward to seeing you at the Googleplex in Mountain View.

2004-07-16 22:33 - vladimir%pobox.com - 174265,173762,228862,117895: wrong favicons in bookmarks, favicons not being saved, favicons killed my dog; r=shaver

I know this will be a hugely welcome set of fixes to many in the Firefox world. Two of these bugs are the most voted for in all of Firefox bugs and combined, the votes on these four bugs combined are more than three times the next most voted for bug in the Firefox world (and account for over 75 duplicate bugs in Bugzilla.)

Vlad is my hero ;-)

Taking a cue from the thousands and thousands of people who made the effort to make Mozilla better by scouring through literally hundreds of thousands of Bugzilla bug reports looking for the good, the bad, and the ugly, we've kicked off another action week to sign up a team of volunteers to scour through the press and play a key roll in identifying and responding to the scores of Firefox related press stories that happen every week.

We are looking for individuals who enjoy digging through various news outlets, flagging relevant articles, and working with a large team of volunteers to respond.

Some articles out there have factual inaccuracies that need to be corrected. Others articles, on spyware for example, should mention Firefox but don't. And some really well written articles that help deliver the Firefox message should be receiving positive feedback and aren't.

The big guys have huge budgets for just these tasks. They have staff that delivers their message to all of the tech press, that jump right on negative or inaccurate stories, that lobby writers to spin articles in their favor. They have reporters on hand that act as little more than stenographers, delivering articles that basically amounts to free and scripted advertising. We don't have the budget to hire a building full of PR folks to take our message to the press, but we do have a community that can outperform even the largest media relations department.

If you're interested in being a part of this Firefox fact checking and media relations team, head over to For the Record and sign up. We've got lots to do so we'll be wrapping up the subscription piece in just a few days, and moving quickly to put the new For the Record action team into action -- "working" the press like no software organization ever has.

The Firefox community won't be stopped. We're huge and growing. With your help, we will take back the web!

It's time, once again, for another installment of Ask Asa, where you all ask lots of questions, and I pick out a few to answer. I'll look over the questions from the previous answers post, so no need to repeat those. If you've got a new question, please post it in the comments here. Ask away!

From time to time I mention new extensions I've acquired and something about how well they work. Today I want to mention the Gmail Notifier extension from Doron Rosenberg. I've been using this on and off since he first published it but now it's sufficiently matured that I'm adding it to my list of "permanent" extensions (along with Linky and Link Visitor). The extension is pretty slick with a toolbar button/notifier, a statusbar notification, a slide-up taskbar notification window (like Thunderbird or Firefox's download notification), automatic login, and some nice preferences for how often to check as well as where to load Gmail if you click the icon -- the same tab, a new tab, or a new window. The extension inherrits the users' theme style quite well and I've got no complaints with the feature set. If you've got a Gmail account (and several dozen of you should, since I gave them to you) then go give it a try. I think you'll like it.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Mozilla Foundation. Happy day! Oh, and Mitchell's blog is off to a good start. It's nice to see her get such a positive response to her first post ;-)

Blake Ross has a great post over at his blog where he suggests that Firefox themes could be a real opportunity for Firefox to better target potential constituencies. I agree that if we could get some well targeted themes like unversity themes or athletic team themes (you get the idea), we'd likely see some good uptake from those students or those sports fans. What other kinds of themes would people like to see and who among you could help with something like this. I imagine that it could be team efforts, given that designing the theme, finding iconography or graphics, and assembling the theme don't necessarily have to be a one person job. Tell us what you think.

In order to test the new livemarks (RSS bookmarks) in Firefox, I'll eventually be setting up some test feeds but in the mean time, it would be nice to get some real world feed testing so I'm looking for the most frequently updated feeds available. Does anyone have any suggestions for feeds that update on the order of one or more per minute? If you know of any, please let me know in the comments here.

Go to SpellBound and install the extensions if you need spell checking in Firefox. I just did and so far it seems to be working. I spellchecked this post :)

Well, early this morning I decided to do my part to make some marketing images for Firefox. I'm not the professional that those guys over at SilverOrange are so this isn't quite as polished as the new Firefox artwork and iconography, but it's the best I could do. Note, do not follow this link if you're not over 18 :-)

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. CSS columns are coming to Gecko! I will soon redesign this blog around that feature ;-)

Once again, I have to say it, you all are amazing!! It took you less than 5 days to push our reviews from 80 to over 1,100 and drive our overall rating up to 96% from 1,200 votes.

You smashed through our goal of adding 1,000 new reviews and with two days left we we'll surely get some, as they say in Louisiana, lagniappe (pronounced lanyap) -- a little something extra -- and maybe hit 1,200 reviews.

Keep spreading the word and let folks know that this is just the first step in taking Firefox to the masses. This first effort has been a smashing success, well beyond what we imagined when we first started talking about it. Thanks to everyone who posted reviews and helped to spread the word on blogs, and in conversation and emails with family, friends, co-workers, and classmates. This is grass roots at its best! Laissez les bon temps rouler! :D

Man, Mozilla's got two features up at slashdot.org today. That makes 19 Mozilla-topic slashdot items in the last month. Maybe it's time for them to create a http://mozilla.slashdot.org. They've done apple.slashdot.org for Apple-related stories which seem to average about 1 a day (though I highly doubt they were posting that many Apple stories before it had it's own section). I wonder what that magic level is. I should send another email to Rob and ask. If we get our own top level, then we'd need a good batch of Mozilla-related topics. I'd start with one for each of our products. That would probably be Firefox, Thunderbird, the Mozilla application suite, Bugzilla, and possibly another for Mozilla Tools. Tools might include Bonsai, Tinderbox, Doctor, and any other webtools we have. After those, maybe there'd be one for Mozilla-based 3rd-party apps and extensions or themes. What do you all think? Should we petition for http://mozilla.slashdot.org ;-) ?

Just an update. You all have added over 900 new Firefox reviews already bringing the grand total up to 1,000 reviews for Firefox. At this pace, we're on track for meeting our goal of adding new 1,000 reviews as early as tomorrow! I really had no idea we'd make such awesome progress so quicky.

You all rock! Let's take this thing to the next level!!

I know it's completely silly to mix and match studies, polls, and other datapoints but since I don't have any comprehensive statistics about Mozilla and Firefox market share, I dig through what I can find and try to find the places they all agree. I use Google's zeitgeist graph as one data point. My thechnique there, hackish as it is, is to open that image in photoshop, sample it up and try to get some measurements from it. Another datapoint I look at is the semi-regular Onestat press release on market share. I also follow W3Schools for a peek into what web developers and aspiring web developers are using. The good news is that in all of these datasets, we're moving up. The bad news is that it's hard to tell by how much or how many users that represents.

Given that difficulty, it's nice to have additional datapoints and this week we got one more from WebSideStory which says that we've moved from 3.21% to 4.05% at the same time that IE lost exactly one percentage point. It's not clear to me if they're taking about worldwide, English speaking, or US market share. If it's just the English speaking Web (about 290 million users), which I suspect it is, then that works out to a gain of something like 2.5 million new Gecko-based browser users in one month. If it's just US internet population, then it's about 2 million new users. Not bad for 1 month :-) If it's worldwide (which I don't think WebSiedStory tracks) then it could be as many as 6 million new users in one month. That seems just too high to me, though.

I assume I'm not alone in trying to divine some stats from a lot of incomplete data. What sources do you use?

Blake Ross, Firefox partner in crime, gets his machine learning blog post featured on slashdot.org. Good for him. Now I just have to figure out how to get my blog posts picked up at /. :)

We're three days into the action week and you all have added over 800 new download.com reviews of Mozilla Firefox! Firefox is just a few votes away from the 1,000 vote mark and the overall approval rating is an awesome 96%!!

To keep this going, we've got to reach out to the remaining people we know who haven't yet reviewed. Tell your significant other, your children, your parents, your grandparents (they're all using Firefox, right?), your neighbors, everyone on your buddy list, your orkut and friendster circles and anyone else you can think of to take a minute to register at download.com and review Mozilla Firefox.

My wife, a recent Firefox convert (from SeaMonkey) just added her review, and I just posted a follow-up over at the Orkut Firefox community and sent out 5 more emails to old friends that have been using Firefox for a while. Dig deep in that addressbook and get the word out. I just know we hit 1,000 new reviews by the end of action week.

I've said it before, but it's just difficult for me to restrain myself so I'll say it again. You all are amazing!

WTF? I'm not sure how many of you are aware of the security firedrill we had this week, but if you are a Mozilla, Firefox, or Thunderbird users, you should certainly check this out.

I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the press but somehow some of them failed to realize what actually happened this week and jumpted to some pretty negative and alarmist conclusions.

I've been in this line of work for about 5 years now,and I've never seen a better turnaround on fixing a software vulnerability than what we did this week. Our security team, in conjunction with other security researchers, identified and fixed a vulnerability in how the Mozilla applications hand off requests to the Microsoft Windows operating system and our QA and release team (which includes me) delivered an updated release and a less than 1K patch in about 24 hours time. I call that a huge success.

Apparently Jay Wrolstad doesn't agree, wasn't paying very close attention, or was simply opting for the sensationalism that seems to sell more papers these days. Well, I think he's wrong and I think that pretty much anyone who looks at the facts will agree that he's wrong.

What can be done? Well, the Mozilla Foundation press folks are gonna try to contact this fellow as soon as the week starts. Before that happens, though, a lot of people are going to be reading his alarmist headline and walking away with the wrong idea about Firefox and the amazing response we mobilized to solve this security issues.

You all can help prevent the spread of this false impression by reading the article here and down at the bottom where it says "Post/Read Msgs" and "Ratings: Would you recommend this story?" letting Mr Wrolstad and his editors know what you think of this. It sure didn't take me long to find the big "1" rating on that story. I'd have found it sooner if I wasn't looking for a "0".

update: name calling of any kind will result in your post being removed and your access to post at this and other mozillazine weblogs being revoked. please keep it civil, here, in the mozillazine forums, and in comments at other websites. thanks.

update2: I've read some comments that are suggesting that this is a fair and balanced article. I disagree. I don't think it's really fair to title or allow your article to be titled something as misleading and sensationalist as that. I don't think it's fair to suggest that one quickly fixed flaw will make people who are fleeing the vulnerability beleaguered IE decide not to -- nor should it. (Now if the author had mentioned IE's scores of unpatched IE vulnerabilities that have been sitting around for ages or had mentioned that the recent hole in IE that still allowed Scob to get rip off untold numbers of IE users' bank accounts is still unpatched and can be exploited using the alternate activeX control, shell.application...)

You can disagree, and feel free to do so vocally (though politely) but you're not going to convince me that this news item is "objective". I'm sure I'm not the only one and that's why I'm pointing this out to my readers so they can judge for themselves.

C|net posted an article a few days ago covering Alternatives to Internet Explorer in which they cover Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera. Here are the juicy bits:

Although it's still in beta, Mozilla's new Firefox browser has so far lived up to the buzz surrounding it... Designed primarily for Web designers, Mozilla has a friendly enough interface for even the occasional Internet surfer... Netscape isn't dead yet, either... Despite its somewhat cluttered interface and the occasional requirement for a security patch, Opera has held its own...

You all continue to amaze me. Just two days into the take action campaign, you have added nearly 700 reviews of the Firefox web browser. The reviews are great reading and will really help to inform all of the download.com viewers.

What's so great about this effort is how much people have put into all of these reviews. I've read each and every one and the overwhelming majority are honest, thoughtful, and informative. One of my favorites was from Steve England:

Changing from IE has never been more attractive.
firefox has been my primary browser since v0.7 and is now simply indespensible. with each revision the whole browsing experience has become smoother and sleeker and v1.0 is shaping up to be a quality product. it's more secure than IE, it gives you more control over IE, it's easier to use than IE, and with extensions (plugins) like All-in-1 gestures and Tabbed Browser Preferences you can make your browsing experience something special.

If I was allowed to review Firefox, I would say that you all are why I love Firefox. We aren't a 'user base', we're a community and that's what makes Firefox the best browser in the world. Keep up the great work everyone. We're taking this message to the masses.

update Please do not add reviews for software you do not use. If you don't use Firefox, then please don't review it. If you don't use Opera, then please don't review it. Specifically, please do not go to other browsers on download.com and down-rate their applications. Seriously. That's just dirty -- we're above that. Besides, Opera has a great rendering engine. So does Safari. The three of us should be allies, not enemies. Thanks.

Jakob Perry, creator of the wonderfully designed Firefox Switch site, dropped a note in the comments to let us know about the awesome Firefox Switch site. The Firefox Switch site is seriously cool. Everyone go check it out now. I said now! ;-)

This is the kind of high-quality content and design that we should have in the official website. Great work Jakob! You're my featured site of the day!

You all are simply the best community in the world. I can't believe that less than 48 hours into this effort, we're already half way to our goal of 1,000 reviews. I just checked the numbers and we're up to exactly 500 new reviews added since the effort commenced. That's simply amazing. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but wow!

This is how we're going to take back the web. They may have the money, but money can't buy love and we've got a product that people love. We've got a product that really does change the way people use the web. We've got a product that people are proud to stand up for.

You all have already made us the most reviewed product this week on all of download.com and we're making great progress in climbing in the overall standings. Let's keep this going so that we can be download.com's most reviewed product ever for Firefox 1.0!

It's time to push the message out past your immediate co-workers, classmates, friends and family. Start asking around to find those Firefox users you don't talk to regularly. Ask on your blogs, in your email lists, post to your bulletin boards and forums. If you've run out of people to ask for reviews, that means it's time to convert more IE users. We will hit 1,000 reviews. You all are unstoppable :D

On today's edition of the Gillmore Gang, a radio panel with Steve Gillmore, John Udell, Dana Gardner, and Doc Searls, Brendan Eich discussed topics from the WHAT WG to security to the browser market and Mozilla market share, and much more. Have a listen. It's very informative.

You all are AMAZING! In the first day alone you all have added over 400 reviews! And the testimonials and reviews are just awesome. We don't have the millions (probably hundreds of millions) of dollars that the other guys have and we don't have a desktop monopoly to take advantage of but what we do have is a great product and an even greater community.

We can and we will hit 1,000 reviews. I read a lot of comments about losing all your hard work when they updated to 0.9.2. Well, the Windows version has been updated to Firefox 0.9.2 and the reviews are all still there.

If you've already contacted all of your Firefox using friends and family, then it's time to get some more converts :-) You all are unstoppable :D In less than one day, you've made a real quantifiable difference. You've added hundreds of great reviews, pushing Firefox up to the most reviewed of all of the popular browsers at download.com. You've pushed the rating up to 96% giving us 3rd spot in the browser listings and with an average rating of 5 (the best)in features, ease of use, and performance.

Some of you may have thought I was kidding when I said we'd get 10,000 reviews by 1.0. That's a pretty large number, but how many of you would have guessed that we'd have added nearly 400 reviews in the first day? We just need to keep spreading the word -- getting people to try Firefox so they'll fall in love, pointing them at the download.com listing, and then getting them to go after their friends to switch to Firefox. Let's keep this rolling right up to 1.0!

We've had over 100,000 people sign up for Bugzilla accounts. We've had tens of thousands of unique bug reporters file a quarter of a million bug reports in Bugzilla!! We get millions of downloads of releases that each result in tens of thousands of TalkBack crash reports. Hundreds of thousands of beta testers download our pre-release milestones, and even as many as several thousand people have downloaded a single nightly build. Community QA and testing, this massive organization of dedicated volunteers, have made Mozilla and Firefox what they are today. There's just no doubt about the huge impact that our community has had on the quality of our products. You are all to be praised and you deserve more credit than I can possibly give on this little blog.

Today, Blake Ross and I are launching a new series of community actions. We've seen the advantage of a massive community of testers and now we're going to try to build a similarly powerful community of marketing volunteers who help us get the word out about Firefox with the same vigor and consistency that we've seen from the QA and testing community for more than 4 years.

If you've been looking for that opportunity to do something more for the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox browser, we hope you'll join us in this new and exciting effort.

The first action we've decided upon is to recruit as many people as possible to tell download.com what they think of the Firefox browser. We know from talking to folks at c|net that applications that are getting noticed with reviews and ratings are the applications that get featured and we think being featured at download.com will help Firefox adoption.

For this first push, our goal is to get 1,000 (yes, you heard that right, 1,000) new reviews and ratings at download.com the Firefox listing by next week :) This is going to take some real effort and it won't be sufficient for each of you to just add your review. You'll need to get your friends and your family to join you in telling download.com what they think of Firefox.

We're not suggesting any comment for these reviews and we're not telling you how to rate Firefox, but we're confident that Firefox users love the application and if all of you who are using Firefox and reading this blog will add a review and if you each get a handful of friends and family to do the same that the Firefox listing will be absolutely buzzing and our friends over at c|net will take notice and that will earn us feature status and the eyeballs that brings.

So grab your friends, your family, all those people praising Firefox in their blogs, in their offices, and in their classrooms, and head over to the download.com the Firefox listing to add some Firefox reviews.

update: We've added 200 reviews since this post went up! That's amazing! Keep telling people about Firefox and don't forget to tell them to spread the word and to share their experiences with download.com. Wow! 200 new reviews and the first full day isn't even over yet. That's just awesome! Make an effort to tell a couple more people today. Look through your sent mail folders and find all those people that you pushed to try Firefox. Follow-up with them and ask them to follow-up at download.com. Have lunch with a co-worker and suggest they post a review. Talk to your classmantes and try to get at least one more person to try firefox, letting them know that if they like it they should pass it on and they should let others know at download.com. You all rock!

Blake landed his new Find Toolbar on the Aviary branch and it's showing up in builds today. You can read more about it over at the Burning Edge and you can even see a screenshot there if you're not downloading nightly builds. Note, please, that those icons were my creation and they are nowhere near as nice as what we'll eventually get from the real theme artists. They're just some placeholders that I threw together on short order so Blake could land the toolbar. I know they're not great and the blame lies here and not with the Winstripe theme.

I know that my page is already loading slow with all these large images, but I just can't help myself. This EWeek cover just makes me happy. Not a good EWeek for Microsoft.

There are browser switch articles linked on the front page of Slate, CBSNews, and many more ezines. Google news has more.

Ben's released a Firefox Roadmap update with new information about the road to 1.0 (and beyond). Included in that document is the latest version of the diagram I previewed here a few days ago. I took all of your feedback into consideration and here's what it looks like:

If you've got further suggestions for how I can make the roadmap more clearly represent the information that Ben has provided in the document, please let me know.

Does anyone know what the font is that's used in the Firefox buttons? I don't see any fonts on my system that match it and I'm trying to make a Firerfox banner. Here's my first stab at the word "Firefox" which will appear in the banner.

I've hand-tooled the font but I'm not that talented and I'd rather just find the real thing.

There were a lot of great questions in this week's Ask Asa. As I said earlier, I don't really have the time to answer all of them so I'm picking a few based on how much time I do have and how much I think I can actually inform with my answers. So, here it is. Feel free to use this blog post to ask questions for the next installment of Ask Asa.

Doug asked "Is it the intention of Mozilla.org to release Tb 1.0 at the same time as Fx 1.0?"
Doug, it's been a few weeks since I talked to the product teams about this but last time we spoke about it the plan was to release both Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 at roughly the same time. Almost all of our efforts are focused on getting Firefox to 1.0 and thanks to mscott's hard work, I haven't had to pay as close attention to the Thunderbird release planning. I believe that we'll be seeing some updates to the Firefox and Thunderbird roadmaps some time soon. I'll certainly post more as we get closer to the releases.

Riscky asked "I�m going to basically steal this question from Grev, How is it that one man (Asa) is blessed with so many gmail invites that he could stand on a busy U.S. street corner doling them out."
Well, for a couple of weeks Google was handing out lots of gmail invites to me. I had a couple of gmail accounts (one I use to back-up my Mozilla mail, and the other is for personal mail) and each one was getting 5 or 6 new invites every couple of days. I know some people who were sitting on 50 or 60 invites :-)

Ludovic asked "I would like to know what OS most mozillian use ? (based on d/l numbers)."
Ludovic, based on download stats from Firefox 0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.7, about 84% of users are on Windows, about 6% are on Mac, and about 10% are on Linux. Is that about what you expected?

Fred asked, "Can a complete computer klutz such as myself use Firefox?"
Fred, not only can a computer klutz use Firefox, but a computer klutz should use Firefox. With all the worms, viruses, trojans, pop-ups and whatnot, a computer klutz can't afford to use IE. Today's internt isn't what it was eve just a few years ago. If you're not extremely savvy with computer security, it's just too dangerous to use IE. The good news is that no only will Firefox help keep you safe from all the dangers on the web these days, but it's also a very easy migration for IE users. Firefox will automatically import all of your IE favorites, history, cookies, form data and passwords and once you get up and running, you'll find a very comfortable browser that looks and feels a lot like IE, only better :-) I recommend that you give it a try and see for yourself. Firefox is a tiny 4.7 MB download (about 1/5th the size of the recommended IE install) installing is a breeze. You can download it at the the Firefox product page. If you have any difficulties getting it installed and up and running, feel free to ask for help at the mozillaZine user forums.

Lloyd and Thomas both asked about non-developer contribution opportunities. Well, you guys came to the right place. I actually got my start with Mozilla about five years ago asking that exact same question. A few folks working on the project pointed me to Bugzilla and said "go there!". My answer is basically the same :)
Actually, it's my job to give a better answer than that so I'll try. If you use Mozilla products and find problems, report bugs. If the bugs are already reported, or reporting bugs isn't your thing, you can help us triage the 100-150 bugs that get filed in Bugzilla each day. With so many bugs coming in to the system, developers can get overwhelmed. A quick example of this is the Firefox product in Bugzilla. There are about 10,000 bugs in that product. Of those, about 6,800 have been resolved as duplicates of other bugs, unreproduceable, or non-bugs. Nearly 1,100 have been resolved as fixed. About 1,200 have been triaged as legitimate and still open bugs, and the remaining 1,000 or so need to be looked at by someone like you :)
Given that a majority of incoming bugs are not of much value to the developers (dupes, invalid, and worksforme)and with tens of thousands of bug reporters filing more than new bugs each day, you can see where your help in this effort would be appreciated. You can read more about helping out with the Mozilla testing and quality assurance effort at the Helping with QA page.
If you'd like some hands-on help getting started, we hold "BugDays" every Tuesday on IRC. You can find us on the server irc.mozilla.org and the channel #mozillazine. Most QA activities are perfect for someone who only has a few minutes here and there to give. Hope to see you in Bugzilla or at BugDay!

And for Larfnarf, no, you may not "huggle" me.

I've just passed the 1,000 post mark at this old (not)blog. Now seems like a good time to poke my head up and ask you all what you're interested in reading here.

I've posted over 230,000 words in the last couple of years with about 100,000 words posted on Mozilla related topics, about 100,000 words on Mars related topics and about 30,000 words on various other subjects from birds to vacations.

I don't intend to limit my posting to any single topic and will continue to post about things that are, first and foremost, of interest to me. That being said, I realize that there are a non-triavial number of people spending at least some time reading what I have to say, so here's your chance to tell me what you like and don't like about this (not)blog.

If you're interested in checking out a visual history of the Firefox browser, head over to SeBlog and enjoy the screenshots.

Here's an early draft of the Firefox roadmap diagram that I've just started work on. It follows the basic design of my Mozilla roadmap diagram. Think of it like a zoom into the Mozilla diagram to just show the Aviary branch.

I've got a few minor tweaks before I'm done. I'll be adding release dates, release names (if they're different) and possibly resizing the image some, then hopefully getting it posted soon. Let me know what you think.

I just read over at The Security Mentor that there's still debate about whether Microsoft actually closed this ADODB.Stream ActiveX hole, recently exploited by Scob, with their recent software update patch. With a little digging, I found this NTBugtraq item on an unfixed Scob variant and this Bugtraq post saying "THE VULNERABILITY STILL WORKS AFTER TODAY'S PATCH". If this is still a problem, and it looks like it is, then Microsoft hasn't closed the hole at all.

It sounds like they've known about this variant attack on ActiveX for just as long as the ADODB.Stream hole. So why didn't they patch it with the Friday software update too? The only explanations I can come up with are that either they just thought that an incomplete fix now was better PR than a more complete fix later or they have customers who depend too heavily on this Shell.Application ActiveX control so they decided they couldn't disable it like they did ADODB.Stream.

The good news is that even though Microsoft seems content to leave IE vulnerable to this Scob attack, the Windows Registry change to close the rest of the hole is available at the NTBugtraq link above.

How did this mess happen? I'm no security expert so I may be completely accurate on the technical details, but I think I've got the basics and the timeline correct and this is what I think happened:

ActiveX, combined with Windows security zones, makes it possible for IE to automatically download and install software without user intervention, that is, without the user seeing any dialogs or giving any explicit permission to that download and install. This is quite scary, and I don't think there's a Mozilla equivalent. There are several mechanisms available to ActiveX programmers to do this but all are supposed to be restricted to the safest Windows security zone, supposedly open only to intranet pages, but not the internet. It turns out, however, that zones are broken and pages on the internet can use a couple bits of ActiveX as if they were supposedly safe intranet pages.

Microsoft was informed of this problem nearly a year ago and failed to fix it. After the Scob attack broke (June 10), Microsoft spent about three weeks apparently unable to fix the real problem, so talking to important customers (big companies that standardized on IE and ActiveX) about just disabling the ADODB.Stream feature. By Friday, they had gathered enough data, and seen enough bad press, that they decided to push an update that disabled ADODB.Stream with a simple registry switch that had been publicly available from an independent security research group for the better part of the month (but not something Microsoft was loudly advertising).

Having left IE users open to this known exploit for almost a year, and then left their customers open to the "in the wild" Scob attack for about three weeks, Microsoft finally pushed out an update that worked around (rather than fixed) only part of the problem!

So, IE "features" which have been known to be insecure for quite a while, and which were being actively exploited by bad guys using high-profile banking and ecommerce web sites were partially disabled by Microsoft when the pressure from bad press (and hopefully customer complaints) got sufficiently high. This is what Microsoft calls "Trustworthy Computing"?

Some of why the United States exists:

The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World...

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

You can read more of the document we're celebrating today at our National Archives

Happy 4th of July. Be safe, especially on the highways.

A post over at Gerv's weblog says he's in the hospital again. If you know him, or even if you don't, I'm sure that he would appreciate your keeping him in your thoughts.

Get well soon, Gerv.

His permalink is broken, but for a little while, at least, you can find the post at the top of Scoble's front page. Robert, a highly visible Microsoft employee, has been a consistent Firefox advocate for some time. Before I got in front of a preview of Longhorn, it was Robert that pointed out that Firefox was working just fine there.

I like a lot of what he has to say, but today it seems like he's taking the easy way out. Since that permalink is broken, I'll take the liberty of excerpting large chunks (hope he doesn't mind):

Now, I know that many people will use this as an opportunity to pitch their favorite products and try to get people to use them. But, ask yourself: "can you guarantee that the product you are recommending is 100% secure?" And, if not, why should I stick up for you when the criminals come after you?

Another bit that bothered me was Robert's claim that,

But, the other is that most people don't want to switch so what then? Look at myself. I use Firefox about 40% of the time right now (that means I use IE 60% of the time).

All complex software has bugs. No Web browser is 100% safe. The US Department of Homeland Security didn't say that IE was 100% unsafe and Firefox was 100% safe when they recommended that people "use a different web browser". What they said was, "There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME-type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different Web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites" (emphasis mine).

Robert does his readers a disservice by hiding behind the (paraphrasing) "people don't like change and why change when the alternative isn't perfect" arguments. I hope when he's had a bit more time to digest the seriousness of all of this that he'll push through the obvious dissonance and consider the computing safety of his readers to be of more importance than whatever conflicting force has pushed him to these specious arguments.

According to reports at BBC News and a dozen other outlets this morning, Hubble has discovered as many as 100 new planets orbiting stars within our galaxy. If this proves out, Hubble will have done nearly as much planet finding in about a week, as all other approaches have done in the last decade.

This study strongly suggests planets are quite common around sun-like stars. Wow!

Hubble and her research teams have done some amazing work. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that NASA won't let her die before her time.

I've had a number of requests to get "Ask Asa" going again. I'm pleased to hear that some of you all enjoyed that. The reason I slowed and then discontinued the regular feature was that it was taking a fair amount of time and I wasn't convinced that it was of real interest to many of the readers of this blog. While I still hold to that first bit, I guess that second part was wrong.

So here's what I'm going to try. I'll return to doing semi-regular Ask Asa posts but rather than trying to answer all of the questions, I'm just going to pick out one or two questions and try to respond to those. I can't commit to consistently thorough answers, and they'll probably vary quite a bit depending on how much time I have, but I'll do my best.

Here it is; Ask Asa is back. Post your questions in the comments here and I'll try to get some answers up by the weekend.