October 2004 Archives

Vfwlkr asked: Here goes: you've kept the current style on your webpage way longer than your average, when's the next update coming?

I hadn't noticed that this style was any longer lasting than the previous styles. It still feels quite new and fresh to me.

I don't have any updates planned for any time soon because I like this one and doing a new style takes some effort and doesn't have much reward.

How many of you read this page in it's HTML form as opposed to the RSS or Atom feeds? I've moved 95% of my blog reading over to Thunderbird+Forumzilla and so I don't pay nearly as much attention to page styles as I used to. If this site makes your eyes bleed (as someone commented when I first rolled out the new look) then I recommend playing around with one of the many gread feed reading solutions available.

From the comments, The Boston Globe is looking for Firefox stories. Let 'em know how much you love Firefox. Be sure to highlight any successes you've in avoiding spyware and adware with Firefox :-)

In 46 days, we've seen over seven million completed downloads of the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Preview Release. We're averaging more than a million downloads a week for that time frame and still getting about 150,000 downloads per day almost seven weeks from the launch. These are amazing numbers.

There is no doubt that this is the most successful release in Mozilla history -- far eclipsing the Mozilla 1.0 release.

Ten days out from the Firefox 1.0 final release, I'm getting twitchy with excitement :-)

WoW! That's all I've really got to say. You all are amazing. Read the SFX blog post.

The Firefox New York Times advertisment effort is still cranking along with nearly 9,000 community members chipping in to buy a full page NYT ad (and maybe more.)

Students can be a part of this once in a lifetime opportunity for a disount rate of only $10. If you'd like to help get the word out, or you just want to see your name in the New York Times, then sign up quickly because we're down to the final days of the campaign.

This evening's lunar eclipse was very pretty. The sky was hazy and the lights of Redwood City didn't help, but I certainly enjoyed it. This is a quick collage of a few of the photos I took as our planet pushed between Sun and Moon. Click the image to get a slightly larger version.

If you see additional photos around the blogs, please let me know in comments. So far I've only found these, this one, this one, this one, and these.

update: Lots more photos linked to in the comments. Check them out.

Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. If all goes well in testing these builds, then we're on target for our 1.0 release in early November. If you're interested in testing these candidates and reporting bugs to Bugzilla, you can get them from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the "feature complete" preview) and you're not particularly interested in active testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.

Things that need special attention in this RC include:

• Application Update! (see below)


• Find toolbar, which received quite a few bug fixes.


• Gecko and website rendering -- we took a few significant layout/css fixes.


• Migration from other browsers on first run (You can just rename your profile directory to trigger migration.)


• Single window mode (load all pop-ups in new tabs,) set in the Advanced panel of the browser Options/Preferences window.


• Focus interaction between tabs, which was changed to fix several security vulnerabilities.

The release candidates include about 250 bug fixes since Firefox 1.0 PR and we'd appreciate any feedback around any of those areas. If you can help in verifying (feel free to skim the bug titles and find ones that interest you) that would be great!

With this release, we're also featuring Mozilla Foundation builds for up to two dozen locales (slowly trickling in. if you don't see your language, try back in a bit.) These builds are hot off the press and haven't received as much testing as we'd like so if you're a non-English user, or speak any non-English languages, we'd encourage you to download one of the new localized builds and hammer on it some. The more testing we get at this stage, the easier time we'll have releasing all these localizations when we ship the en-US builds on November 9.

If you do find regressions from the Preview Release, please file bugs in Bugzilla and nominate them as Firefox 1.0 blockers using the "blocking-aviary1.0?" flag on the bug. Thanks for your help in testing Firefox!

8,257 Firefox users have chipped in either $10 (student) or $30 each to the community-driven New York Times advertisment effort. That's just amazing!

There are still two days left if you want to get your name into the New York Times and be a part of history. Students can be a part of the effort for a disount at $10, the standard price is $30, and there's even a "family plan" that lets you get "The name Family" listed in the advertisment for $45.

With over 8,000 contributions from all over the world (and nearly 3,000 outside of the U.S.) you all are changing the way open source projects communicate to potential users. Join the campaign and help Firefox make history.

We're getting oh so close to shipping the first release candidates. We've taken a couple more last minute fixes and have a new round of builds that, if all goes well, will become the first release candidate tomorrow. You can get the Windows nightly build here and you can get the Linux nightly build here. Mac coming later.

update: We broke profile migration with one of our changes today. We'll be having at least one more round of builds.

Voyager cameras were blind in just the wrong place for us to see the Titan surface. Cassini is changing things.

Live streaming program at NASA TV. The high resolution views are going to have an enormous level of detail. Tune in!

Still waiting :-)

First images coming in now!

(If you haven't seen the earlier low-resolution view from yesterday, check it out.)

Wow. Very cool images coming in. Dramatic edges between light and dark surfaces. Wild.

The Firefox NYT ad campaign is taking the world by storm. With over 7,500 people listed so far, Rob has posted a cool map of where in North America many of the donations are coming. Note that a full 1/3rd of the donations are coming from outside of the US.

If you want to get your name in this ad, and you'd like to help me in my goal to become a "Community Champion" so that I can get a cool Firefox t-shirt signed by none other than me ;-) please take a minute to join with the thousands of others and become a Firefox sponsor.

We'll be sure to notify you the day the full-page NYT ad hits the streets. Only three days left, so make your contributions today.

If you're interested in helping us with the last few hours of testing before we ship the Firefox 1.0 release candidates, you can get them here.

IEholics Anonymous

The Register has a nice story on the upcoming release. (It's not quite correct about the release being today. I suspect that tomorrow or Wednesday would be much more likely.)

I keep getting this question so here's an answer that I hope will satisfy a number of people looking for Firefox artwork to make desktop wallpapers, banners, buttons, etc. You can get high resolution bitmap images here.

Foxylicious.

Today we've achieved three major milestones on the road to Firefox 1.0. First, we hit 6 million downloads! This is the most downloads we've received for any Mozilla product release ever -- averaging about 1 million downloads per week. Wow. Second, we've seen over 6,000 of our community advocates pool over $125,000 dollars -- in just4 days -- to put a Firefox advertisment in the New York Times. What an amazing community effort this has been. (You still have time to get your name added to the NYT ad.) Finally, this morning's nightly builds are looking an awful lot like RC builds to me and if everything still looks good after a couple of days of testing, we'll be shipping a Firefox 1.0 First Release Candidate real soon now.

Rob Pegoro, in the Washington Post, has this to say about the Google desktop search:

After trying Google Desktop for a week, I'm almost ready to make that leap. Why "almost"? Google Desktop needs to search through more than just the files created by Microsoft's own programs. To start, it must expand its Web and mail-search capabilities to such popular non-Microsoft applications as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and Qualcomm's Eudora. It also ought to be able to index the contents of Portable Document Format and Rich Text Format files, plus instant-message chats carried out in non-AOL software.

I never should have committed to doing the Ask Asa bit because I just won't make the time to answer a half dozen questions. I did enjoy the series and I get regular requests to bring it back, so here's my plan. I'll open a thread to take questions where I encourage any of you to help answer any that you can and after a few days I'll pick one question and try to give a decent answer. If you're interested, post your questions here (feel free to bring forward unanswered questions from previos installments of Ask Asa.)

Rael Dornfest, CTO of O'Reilly Media, says,

What if someone threw a browser war and nobody showed up? Om Malik's "Microsoft's Worst Nightmare" in Business 2.0 is a nicely written chronicle of the current odd chapter in the now-outmoded "browser wars." This feels more like a browser hand-over, with Internet Explorer offering no resistance as home and business users download the Mozilla-based Firefox browser and (to borrow the Firefox slogan) "take back the Web."

So far, 5,223 Firefox fans have pooled their money for the NYT advertisment effort. Will you be a part of history and get your name in the NYT?

update: c|net News.com takes notice of the phenominal success of this grass roots effort. The story also mentions the Firefox 5 million downloads and a 95% approval rating at the ZDNet reader ratings (In the ZDNet version).

We're very, very close to zarro boogs on the Firefox 1.0 blocker list. If all goes well this evening, we might have our first candidate build tomorrow. If that happens, we'll need a few days to test out over the weekend and could have the Firefox 1.0 release candidate shipping early next week.

We expect these upcoming RC builds to be complete and if we don't find anything new and scary, they'll become the Firefox 1.0 builds.

With 1.0 close at hand, these candidate builds are not intended for general Preview Release users. If you're interested in helping us test these near-final bits, then we're glad to have it but we certainly don't expect PR users to migrate to the RC builds with 1.0 just around the corner.

Stay tuned here for more information. We're getting very, very close.

Over 4,000 people have contributed to the Firefox NYT ad campaign. Amazing! If you'd like to be a part of this once in a lifetime event -- and get your name published in the New York Times (we'll notify you the day the ad runs,) then head over to the donation page and give $30 to help fund the full-page ad.

If you've been waiting for "official" Firefox localizations and language pack XPIs to become avialable, it's happening!.

It would be really nice if we could ship some of these builds with the Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate but we need some testing of these new automated builds. Grab a build and let me know if it works.

Om Malik in Business 2.0 writes

Blake Ross is lounging at his parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to "take back the Web" from Microsoft (MSFT).

You might think the shy 19-year-old is outmatched. Think again. Ross, a software prodigy who interned at Netscape at age 14, is the lead architect behind Mozilla's Firefox -- a revolutionary new browser that's catching on the way Mosaic did in 1993.

In the first day of our Firefox 1.0 NYT Celebration Advertisement campaign, over three thousand people have contributed tens of thousands of dollars toward this full-page ad. If you'd like to join thousands of other Firefox users in taking out a New York Times full-page advertisement for the Firefox 1.0 release and get your name included in a news paper which reaches world-wide audiences, click here to contribute.

"Join us over at Spread Firefox as we raise funds for the most ambitious launch campaign in open source history. A portion of each donation will go towards taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating the release. All donors will be listed in the ad, the signatories of a declaration of
independence from a monopolized and stagnant web." - Blake

We're being slashdotted right now so response time at SpreadFirefox.com is a bit slow. If you'd like to jump straight to the donations page, click here (that link records that you came via my blog. if you'd rather I didn't get credit for referring you, click here.)

The San Diego Union-Tribune is running a very positive Firefox article:

Firefox is a better Web browser program than Internet Explorer.

It's a better way to use the Net.

It's safer, immune to many of the viruses and hacks that target the flawed IE. Just last week, Microsoft released more patches for IE after new vulnerabilities were discovered.

Firefox is faster, putting Web pages up in less time.

It's easier, with inventions like "tabbed" browsing that use your on-screen windows more efficiently.

It's more flexible, with lots of special "extensions" being created by programmers all over the world. This is possible because Firefox is an "open source" program anyone can open up and tinker with. IE is only open to programmers at Microsoft.

And it's getting better all the time � again, because it's open-source, so lots of people are busy trying to improve it.

Now that's how you write a Firefox story ;-)

We passed the five million downloads mark yesterday. Downloads averaged over 125,000 per day this last week. Amazing!

I think we've made progress on the installer issue. We'll know more when I get a round of tinderbox builds to test. Thanks for your help on that.

The next but that is in desperate need from the community is bug 260869. If you remember crashing the first time you started Firefox after you upgraded to 0.10, please take a look at comment 10 from bryan ryner for the information we need to help track down this problem.

We're seeing a lot of crashes coming in through our talkback automatic crash reporting tool but we can't reproduce and so we're reaching out asking for help. Please take a look at the bug and see if you can help us solve this mystery before 1.0. Thanks.

update: please only comment in the bug if you did experience this problem or believe you can add real technical value. "I don't see this" comments aren't necessary :-) Thanks again. Firefox 1.0 is gonna kick such ass!

As probably most of you who are using Firefox have seen, we've got a bug in the final panel of the installation wizard. The space behind the labels for the two checkboxes show bits of the Firefox image and it looks just awful. Ben says it's a Windows bug and he hasn't found an easy fix. If any one out there has any experience with windows installers and would be willing to take a look at this, I'd be really, really grateful.

Firefox is making the rounds. Check out the latest photos from the new Spread Firefox campaign.

Trustworthy computing strikes again. Read more at The Washington Post (use the bugmenot extension, it's awesome).

Microsoft Corp. yesterday released an unusually large number of software security updates to fix flaws in its products, some of which could be exploited to remotely take over computers running the Windows operating system.

The free updates, available at Microsoft's Windows Update Web site, are designed to fix at least 21 vulnerabilities, several of which reside on nearly every version of the Windows operating system and affect hundreds of millions of computers.

Microsoft rated seven of the flaws as critical, its most dire warning, saying they could allow attackers to take control of computers when certain Web sites are visited. Three of the flaws are associated with the company's Internet Explorer Web browser.(emphasis mine)

If you use Windows, you want this update, and if you haven't already, then you should seriously consider replacing IE with Firefox -- the safer choice.

Pike one-upped me. Great photo, Pike. They are absolutely the cutest animals on the planet.

Mitchell is working on it and she says she'll be posting updates.

If you're spreading the word about firefox by wearing your t-shirt out in the streets, hanging posters at your office, handing out flyers or CDs on your campus, displaying a bumper or window sticker on your car, or other creative marketing efforts then get a photo of it and join our Around the World in Seven Days campaing over at SpreadFirefox.com.

update: a screenshot of your desktop is not a photograph of firefox in the wild.

update2: and neither is a webcam shot of you sitting in front of your PC with a Firefox wallpaper.

Browsers are very complex pieces of software. I think that is often overlooked by even power users. (I don't expect normal users to have any thoughts about software complexity at all.) Testing such complex beasts is a major undertaking and all of the browser makers, Mozilla included, need to improve.

As Georgie makes clear, security would probably be the best place to start.

I heard tonight that Christopher Reeve has died.

The super hero he played on the silver screen was but a shadow of the hero he was in real life to so many with spinal cord injuries and other disorders of the brain and central nervous system.

Rest in peace, Christopher Reeve.

SUPERMAN starts down the tunnel for the door. Suddenly panels open on both sides filled with machine gun barrels. They open fire simultaneously in a withering, deafening barrage. SUPERMAN walks forward calmly as thousands of bullets ricochet off' him.

If you're a privacy nut, or you're just curious about covering your tracks on the Web, take a look at 007 Stealth Browsing with Firefox/Moz.

It's also worth heading over to John Haller's Portable Firefox project and get yourself "a complete, removable drive-friendly browser."

Sometime yesterday we broke 4 million Firefox PR downloads. All of that in just 25 days. Awesome!

We're getting a fair amount of email to webmaster about XP SP2 IE users not being able to see the download links on the front page of w.m.o and the Firefox product page. The div that contains the download links is generated by a (now) inline script. IE on SP2 users are saying they don't see that content at all and it sounds like clearing IE's cache fixes this. Anyone out there on SP2 see this? Do you see any JS errors on the page loading? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Spirit seems to have healed her wheel problem. This is great news. Not only that, but we've got more evidence of water, possibly a second water event at the Opportunity site. Exciting stuff. I'll try to get a more in-depth update posted this weekend.

Live Bookmarks, Firefox's great new feature for keeping track of RSS feeds in the browser, received a lot of great press with the Preview Release. If you are one of the people that loves this new feature and you're in a position to help Vlad, the live bookmarks creator, with a World of Warcraft beta test key, please let me know.

Is it the end of the road for the Spirit Rover? I sure hope not. Space.com is reporting that Spirit's got a steering problem. The good news is that they're likely to find some workaround, even if it means more limited mobility.

These two rovers have far exceeded expectations and a catastrophic disability at this point would not be a "failure" in my book. Nevertheless, I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that Spirit gets back on the road soon.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll probably know I'm a big fan of user styles and I've been a cheerleader for the URIid extension and the new Gecko work (not in Firefox 1.0) which obsoletes that extension.

Here's a nice example: Skinning Gmail by Mihai Parparita over at [persistent.info]. We can use AdBlock, and manually edit userContent.css, etc, but I can't wait until we have some WYSIWYG editor for all of this.

Just think; you visit a page, turn on "style mode" and your browser turns into a WYSIWYG editor letting you redesign the page to your liking and save that information for when you next visit the site.

Wouldn't that be cool! Well, as you can see from Mihai's example, we're headed that way -- and boy am I'm excited.

Firefox takes home yet another award, EasiestToUse �, EasiestToSee� and No Reading
Glasses Needed �:

Redwood City, CA (PRWEB) October 6, 2004 � EasierToUse.com�s
publisher, Alistair Davidson announced the awarding of its highest
rating to the open source Mozilla web browser today. Mozilla�s Firefox
web browser has been rated EasiestToUse �, EasiestToSee� and No Reading
Glasses Needed �, the highest ratings assessed by the web site and
newsletter (http://easiertouse.com/software.htm )

I wonder if we're collecting these anywhere. Firefox wins another award.

David Tenser's great Firefox Help site has moved to mozilla.org.

I think this is a great move and will be a big help to Firefox users. Great job, David!

Jim Ropoza's got some interesting things to say in his article, IE Strategy Backfires, including this gem: "I fully expect that, a year from now, IE's market share will be below 75 percent."

It's certainly a good read if you're a Firefox fan and Rapoza even mentions Opera briefly so maybe some of you Opera fans will appreciate it too.

We've got a critical update available. Help us test our update mechanism and get a potential dataloss fix at the same time.

And while you're reading this, let me take a second to plug this interesting IE article.

This is big. Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, CNET News.com, has dumped IE for Firefox and he tells us why. Go read his article, Why I dumped Internet Explorer. "... the product won me over in short order." Nice :-)