Tim O'Reilly has posted some stats from the O'Reilly Network logs. Good stuff :-)
Internet Explorer: 54.66%
Firefox: 35.08%
Safari: 3.85%
Mozilla 1.7: 2.70%
Netscape: 1.26%Compare these numbers to the first quarter a year ago:
Internet Explorer: 75.53%
Netscape: 19.89%
Safari: 3.48%
Other: 3.10%
Image courtesy of the amazing Jamey Boj�
Dave Hyatt (co-creator of Firefox and now Apple Safari hacker) has patched up Safari's CSS support so that it now passes the CSS Acid2 Test. Good work!
Today I got to visit NASA Ames and meet with the World Wind team, Randy, Chris, Patrick, and Patrick. These cats are super-cool and have done some really amazing work. Check it out.
There are some new OneStat figures that put Firefox's global marketshare at 8.69%. We're getting awfully close to the 10% marker in their books. I guess we can expect something from WebSideStory soon, then :-)
Firefox is taking the world by storm and we're not gonna slow down 'till everyone can browse the web in comfort and style :-)
Tired of the harassment and the pain of surfing today's web with a browser built for the 1990s? Are you sick of trying to figure out all the scams and security threats? Have you decided that the web is just more trouble than it's worth? Well, join the nearly 50 million others who have decided to try a better browser.
And when you've seen how much nicer it can be, how much simpler it is to get your work done (and even have some fun,) then join us at Spread Firefox as we take back the web from the con artists and the advertising "geniuses" who think we'd rather be fighting with a web page than using it. Get involved with our latest challenge, Blazing a trail to 50,000,000.
Oh, and don't miss Blake's weblog post, either. It's a good one.
According to Janco Associates, Inc., Firefox has achieved more than 10% marketshare in the North America and combined with Mozilla, Gecko has greatier than 14% of the market. Not only that, but their analyst believes that Firefox could have as much as 25% of the browser market within the next quarter. Good times!
Just because I know that you call can't get enough of the Opera and Firefox fun of the last few days :-) here's another round from the Firefox side.
Yep, it's a compiler for greasemonkey scripts. "This is useful if you're a script developer and want to distribute your work to people without having to ask them to install Greasemonkey. It can also be a helpful starting point if you want to write a more advanced Firefox extension." Nifty.
Tomorrow, the Hubble Space Telescope will have been in orbit for 15 years, and will have taken more than 700,000 observations covering subjects from the contemporary to more than 13 billion years old.
I recommend taking a few minutes to get lost in the Hubble Gallery.
Over at subtitles you can find aninteresting article on "bloat" with a focus on Opera and feature clutter. I've read through it a few times now, and while I'm still not completely clear on the intent of the entry (maybe a bit too much "clutter" in the post ;-) I think that the author is praising Opera's move and encouraging further moves toward simplicity.
What I don't quite get is whether Louis thinks this is just about appearances and marketing or whether he is supporting actual improvements.
I remember Opera before it became a "suite of applications" (for those of you who don't know, I was a regular Opera user before I got involved in the open source Mozilla project - I still think that 3.6 was the peak of Opera usability) and back then Opera fans, myself included, praised it's speed and simplicity.
Several years later, we brought m/b-Phoenix-Firebird-Firefox to life, and with it's speed and simplicity it was an instant hit. This new drive for ease of use for the largest possible audience really started to take off just as Opera was feature creeping further into geekland with it's betas of Opera 7 - the Opera "suite".
With the release of Opera 7, the new message I started to hear from Opera fans was "no real internet user would settle for anything less than Opera's powerful suite of applications," obviously a major change from several years earlier when speed and simplicity was all the rage among Opera fans and bundled email and chat was scorned.
As Firefox was being cleaned up, leaned down, and made more usable, Opera was adding features like there was no tomorrow, cluttering the menus and other UI so fully that even Mozilla's suite was starting to look pretty simple and organized. many Opera fans spent all of 2003 and most of 2004 praising this new direction and dismissing our approach with Firefox.
Now, with Firefox making a significant dent in the IE's market share, Opera, with the release of Opera 8, is finally starting to push the rest of their suite behind the curtain and are cleaning up the browser's interface to be a lot closer to Firefox's.
OK, enough with the history and back to Louis' blog post. I think that the overall message there is that Opera's move to simplify is a good thing. However, I disagree with a few of the assumptions and claims along the way and I'm not sure whether or not he's excusing real problems as simply marketing issues.
First, Louis says that the "paradox of features is also that you always want to make things better, to add more - and yet the more you add the more complicated a think can get - and the more you can contribute to an impression of clutter." Well, I don't think that adding features _must_ complicate things. A good feature can "just work" without adding a lot of clutter or complication. See Firefox's find as you type feature, for example. Also, I'd take issue with his phrasing "an impression of clutter." Clutter is real. It's not about impressions, it's about usability and those of us directly involved with the course of browser development should't discount this.
Second, and only a minor nit, Louis is just wrong when he says "Opera's download is *tiny*, well under 4MB, about half that of Firefox." I'm not the best at math, but somewhere along the way I learned enough to say that 3.6MB is not "about half" of 4.7MB. He is right, though, in noting that this difference is probably of quickly fading value as broadband takes off.
Finally, I think that while Louis is on the right track suggesting Opera focus on simplicity and seek a much larger audience, his repeated use of phrasings like "apperance of" and "unfair impression of" bloat and clutter does something to muddy the real point and to take the heat off of Opera for their actual, not appearance of, clutter and bloat. This isn't about successful marketing or creating a certain appearance of simplicity. It's about actual simplicity and real usability.
"[Mozilla's] mewling puking sibling, Phoenix," as the author of this Opera article once described my favorite browser ;-) seems to be leading the way on real simplicity and usability with Opera following about a year or two behind. But, as long as we're all moving toward an improved web experience for more browser users, I'm happy.
I'll be at Gnomedex or a panel or something in late June so if you're in the area, come on over.
Our very own Mitchell Baker will be on Charlie Rose tonight. You can email questions and find local listings by visiting the Charlie Rose link.
If you know people that are interested in learning about what we're doing here at Mozilla, this should be a great way for them to get a first look inside of the Mozilla Foundation.
I'd like to purchase an album but can't find it anywhere. If you know of a source for "Lick My Decals Off Baby" by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band on CD, please let me know. Thanks.
Doug Turner, the Minimo lead developer, and longtime Mozilla hacker, has created a couple of special Firefox builds with an awesome experimental feature called "spatial navigation".
This feature was designed for television remote control style navigation for Minimo (built for pioneer research) but I think it's right at home in a full-featured browser. To use it, just grab one of the Firefox builds from DougT's site and after starting Firefox, just hold the Shift and Alt keys and you can navigate the links on the page with your four arrow keys.
You don't have to worry about the flow of the page like you do tabbing through links, you can just arrow your way around. It's hard to explain but once you've used it for a while, you won't want to be without it.
The feature will be evaluated for possible inclusion in later Firefox releases - after we get more community feedback and settle on some UI issues like color/highlighting. You can help us by grabbing this experimental Firefox build and playing with the new feature (and playing with the feature preferences.
I'm excited about both the increased usability and the improved accessibility that this feature ads to Firefox. What do you think?
I'm happy to report that Opera Software's new web browser, called Opera 8, has continued its movement in the right direction. I blogged on some of their earlier progress with the Opera 7.6 Preview release and much more has improved since then, though most of my specific complaints are still unresolved.
This app is certainly lightyears ahead of Opera 7 and earlier versions. My big complaints are that the installer still has that unnecessary panel describing features, the statusbar is still not part of the default setup, the graphical ad setup is a lot less usable out of the box than the Google text ad setup, the menus, while much improved are still a bit confusing, the text selection cursor is still wrong, and the pop-up blocking doesn't provide any obvious feedback for cases where the default behavior is not what the user wants. That's not bad considering some of my earlier issues with Opera 7.5.
One other thing I'm already starting to dislike that Opera advertises itself as IE 6 [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.0] and so gets handed quite a bit of IE specific content which it doesn't seem to handle all that well. Given how strong Opera's standards support is, wouldn't it make sense for it to identify, as Safari does, as "like Gecko" rather than like IE?
I've only been using it for a couple of days, but like I said, this is a much more usable browser and it's clear that Opera is moving in the Firefox direction. I'm certainly glad to see that Opera is starting to move away from it's niche focus on power-users and toward a larger audience. If Opera can continue to improve usability at this pace, and decides to offer a free version that isn't adware supported, I might consider using it some.
Over the last few days I've seen several stories around the release of the Firefox 1.0.3 update with ridiculous headlines like "Firefox Comes Under Attack", "Firefox Singed By Security Holes", and "Security Holes Bite Firefox".
I understand that sensational sells, and I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news for all of the lazy journalists out there, but Firefox wasn't hit, or attacked, or bitten, or singed, by anything.
I keep reading that as Firefox's popularity grows, so will the attacks, bites, singes, hits, etc. This is not at all what we're seeing here. What we're seeing here is that as Firefox's popularity grows, so does the Firefox community. That community has grown to include tens of millions of new users, almost 100,000 Firefox evangelists, tens of thousands of new bug reporters and testers, and quite a few new and very capable security investigators. We're pleased to have more people working on, testing, and thinking about Firefox -- and most importantly, working directly with the Firefox team to help us improve our world-class browser.
See, that's a major difference between our open process and the closed processes of our competitors. When security experts, many of whom are are in it for the thrill of solving these kinds of complex problems, are ignored or slighted, or attacked by a vendor, they are left with little recourse except to post the exploits publicly in the hope that doing so will shine a bright spotlight on the problem and force the hand of the vendor. With Firefox, those same security researchers and experts can engage directly with our development team, participating in the tasks of investigating, solving, and testing the problems and be rewarded for it with public recognition (and in cases of the most serious issues, financial recognition).
Our open development process welcomes the growing community of experts who are willing to contribute their skills to our project. The more popular the Firefox project gets, the more likely we are to continue attracting these high-value contributors and the result will be a better Firefox web browser and a faster, safer, and more secure internet experience for our users.
So, what should these headlines have read? Well, how about "Firefox Project Attracts More Security Experts" or "Firefox Security Community Grows" :-)
Robert Accettura's Fun With Wordage blog is two years old. Congrats, Robert, on two years of great posting.
I've added a couple of quick thoughts to the slashdot discussion on improved bookmarks management. What do you all want in a better bookmarks manager?
On Friday I showed this awesome Firefox download counter to some of my colleagues around the MoFo office when Mitchell, our Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mozilla Foundation President, and one of the Time 100, world's most influential people mentioned that it would be really cool if someone built a Firefox statusbar extension that ticked off the downloads like the counter at Infocraft.
If any of you are interested in trying to make this happen, now would be a great time since we're just around the corner from 50 million Firefox downloads, and since we've just relaunched Mozilla Update.
This release gives us a a more secure version of the existing site with a new developer section. The UMO team are now working on version 2 of the site which will be a major rearchitecting, focusing on ease
of use, scalability, security and most importantly maintainability over
time.
UMO got off to a somewhat bumpy start, but we're investing significant resources to build out a platform that will make it easy for extension and theme developers to do what they do best; innovate. There is no doubt that this will be an important component of the ongoing successes of the Mozilla products and we're committed to making it a world-class program. Thanks for all your patience, and stay tuned.
Yet another solid introduction to Why everyone should use Mozilla Firefox. Of course I'm a Firefox cheerleader, but it's a testament to how good Firefox is that so many people find themselves inspired to write so much of the same things.
Updates to Firefox and Mozilla Suite are now available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Download the latest Firefox here and the latest Mozilla Suite here. For more information, see the Firefox release notes and Mozilla Suite release notes.
Firefox just past the forty-five million downloads mark and this awesome counter at Infocraft, based on our new counter feed, spells it out :-)
We've taken a few more changes into Firefox 1.0.3 test builds and are looking for another round of Firefox and extension testing. If you've got the time and the interest, we could definitely use your feedback.
Builds are available here:
Windows
Linux
Mac
If you find any problems in these Firefox 1.0.3 candidates that didn't exist in Firefox 1.0.2, please let me know here. If you find extensions that worked in 1.0.2 that don't work in this candidate build, please let me know here (along with any JS errors for non-functional extensions.)
I've already heard that DictionarySearch, Spellbound, and Googlebar Lite don't work. Are there any others? Since the majority of extensions aren't broken by our security fixes and the extensions that are broken should be corrected (they were probably following a bad example in our code - we apologize for that,) we're planning to not rev the extension version and we'd like to work with the authors of broken extensions to get fixed ones up as soon as possible. Thanks.
update: I'm going through a number of extensions looking for failures and I'll note them here as I find them. I'm not really interested in general errors to the JS console unless something is actually broken and that error points out why it's broken.
failed:
Conquery: fails to get the selection (no JS errors).
DictionarySearch: context menu not populated. Error: [Exception... "Illegal operation on WrappedNative prototype object"
It's already been reported around town that Mitchell was selected as one of the TIME "world's 100 most influential people." I thought you all might be interested in seeing the actual magazine. Click the images to see a larger version.
I can't express how proud we all are of the achievements of the last couple of years and there's no one that deserves more of the credit for that than our Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker. Congratulations, Mitchell. Now, how do we get you on Oprah!
So far, we've run across only one extension, DictionarySearch, that's broken in our latest 1.0.3 nightly builds. Since I'm no JavaScript expert (or even amateur) I'm going to be working with others to put together a small technote on how to avoid the problem that's breaking DictonarySearch.
Until we get that written, you can check out Brendan's comment in the bug which explains the change we made and how you, as an extension author, should handle that change.
I'm hopeful that the number of extensions using this hack is small (we haven't heard of any others, yet) so the impact on end users should be minimal. If you know of other extensions that are using this hack, they're likely to be broken as well. If you know the author, it would be great if you could point them at this bug. If you are an extension author and you're doing something like this in your extension, it would be great if you could update your extension so that 1.0.3 users can fix themselves with an extension update.
So far, we don't see any other categories of breakage in extensions with the 1.0.3 builds. If you know of any, please let me know. Thanks.
update: if you do want to let me know about something not working, please include important information like which build you're testing on and on which platform. The version of the extension and any JavaScript console errors (be sure to set the javascript.options.showInConsole pref to true) you see with the extension, etc., etc. Thanks.
Jon Udell says in his latest column, "rewriting is a hot topic that's about to go nuclear."
I completely agree.
Today marks three years for this weblog - more than 1,600 posts, approximately 350,000 words. I'd like to thank you all for sharing it with me. I wouldn't be here doing this if it was simply a monologue.
Yesterday we crossed the forty-four million download mark and we're flying toward that big five-oh faster than any of us could have imagined as little as six months ago.
In just five months, all of you have helped tens of millions of people take back their web experience from the pop-ups and the spyware. You've given people the tools they need to get more from the web and to do it faster and safer than ever before.
We should all be very proud of these accomplishments. But we're not done yet. We're just getting started :)
Today, at SpreadFirefox.com we've launched a new "live" download counter and an RSS feed for the Firefox download count that anyone can syndicate to spread the word about the amazing successes we're seeing. Like the tens of thousands of Firefox buttons around the web driving millions of downloads, we want to see this number spreading out and taking hold in the blogs, tech sites, news sites, mailing lists, etc.
If you can think of creative ways to use this RSS feed to "spread the fire", join us at Spread Firefox with your ideas, your code, or your questions. You can find a couple of early demos including a WordPress plugin and a simple Perl module to help get you started. We hope to see more coming in soon.
Also, check out Blake's post for some great ideas around the syndication of Firefox marketing tools.
According to Lucy Sherriff, over at The Register, we should be seeing tests for some pretty large optical telescopes in the not too distant future. I can't wait for OWL. 100 meters. Wow.
Blake Ross, over at blakeross.com brings the news that out very own Mitchell Baker has been chosen as one of Time's 100 most influential people of the year. Exciting times!
Neil just pointed me to a great Thunderbird extension. I use Forumzilla regularly but other than that, I'm mostly a stock build user. What Thunderbird extensions do you all use/recommend?
We've spent several days with our top devs working on finiding a way to make necessary security improvements without breaking the world of 1.0.x extensions and we think we're finally there. This set of test builds should behave pretty much the same as Firefox 1.0.2 and if you can find any regressions over 1.0.2, including in extension handling, please let me know ASAP.
Firefox 1.0.3 candidate builds:
I thank you all for all the amazing feedback during this last week of candidate builds. I'm overwhelmed by the volume and quality of replies and want to thank everyone that's helped with extension testing. If everything works as we expect it to, extensions should all work with this release. Do let me know, either here in comments, or in an email if you'd prefer, if you find any regressions over 1.0.2. Thanks, again, for all your help.
I didn't get any developer feedback at npm.seamonkey, so I'm posting here in case I've got Mozilla developer readers that don't follow the newsgroups closely.
We're coming into the final stages of shipping the Firefox, Thunderbird, and XULRunner releases. Each of these releases will be following roughly the same schedule which is outlined in general terms below.
For each of our products, we've got three major cycles to complete. The first cycle, scheduled to wrap in the next week to ten days, is all about getting key developer-centric features stabilized and shipped. This release is based on Gecko 1.8b2 and is targeting extension developers, app developers, and web developers. It is intended as a early heads-up to the developer world about the last year of Gecko changes that make the current trunk builds quite different from what we shipped just five months ago as Firefox 1.0. It will also serve as a preview of the latest Toolkit and our first XULRunner preview. If there are changes that need to be a part this developer-focused release, changes that will impact extension, web, or application developers, we need those landed ASAP. This applies for all three products, Firefox, Thunderbird, and XULRunner. In order to avoid a lot of end users downloading this browser release, it will be publicized as the "Deer Park Developer Preview" rather than "Firefox" (Deer Park is the project codename for Firefox 1.1) and we're not going to be shouting loudly about end user features. The Thunderbird and XULRunner releases from this cycle will also be somewhat low-key and targeting the developer and testing community rather than the end user.
The second cycle is scheduled to conclude about five weeks after the Deer Park Developer Preview. That release will be based on Gecko 1.8b3 and should be feature complete for Firefox 1.1, Thunderbird 1.1, and XULRunner. We will be freezing localizable strings with this release (managed by exception) so that our L10n community can wrap up the bulk of their work before we branch. Also, for both Firefox and Thunderbird, it is imperative that we have the infrastructure to ship localized builds from our systems by the time we get to this release. Additional focus for this release will be to get any remaining Gecko feature work landed so that what we deliver to our testers and developer communities here will as closely as possible match what we ship in the final releases. I believe that we'll be advertising this browser release as the "Firefox General Preview", targeting all interested testers - from developers to end users. Thunderbird will have a more public preview here as well, and if we're ready for it, so will XULRunner.
The third cycle is all about getting branched for the final releases. After the General Preview, we will remain frozen on the trunk until we're sure that there are no remaining major problems surfaced by the Preview testing, and until we're sure that we're fully localizable and all risky bug fixes have landed. During this time, drivers will be looking for low-to-medium risk cleanup work for the Firefox 1.1, Thunderbird 1.1, and XULRunner feature sets. We intend to not be accepting any new features at this point. When we feel good about the state of things, we'll create the 1.8 branch (opening the trunk to Gecko 1.9 development) and shortly thereafter we will start delivering Release Candidate builds for Firefox. As we work through the Release Candidates, the fixes we'll be approving will be limited to spit and polish, and responding to any late-surfacing problems from the earlier candidate and preview releases. It's likely that once we're on the branch, our primary focus will be to ship Firefox 1.1, with XULRunner and then Thunderbird 1.1 following afterwards, as was the case with the 1.0 releases.
I'll be posting a more specific status for the current cycle sometime in the next day or two and hope to have regular follow-ups to that post so stay tuned to npm.seamonkey for updates.
If you're having difficulty getting to Mozilla properties like SpreadFirefox.com or our downloads, please bear with us. We're workin' on it.
Thanks everyone for your diligence with all the testing and feedback. We have gotten a lot of great feedback; you guys rock!
It feels like we've finally closed in on things and we're getting ready to wrap up this 1.0.3 release. I'm gonna be very cautious about calling any thing a "final" candidate, but this one feels close.
Also, we think we've got a solution that doesn't break every extension under the sun but we need your help to verify that along with any other testing help you all can give us.
You can get the builds here:
If you've got feedback, please post it here or send me email. Thanks.
Last week, I offered up an extension for testing some improved pop-up blocking capabilities. I got a lot of wonderful feedback and appreciate everyone who got back to me here and in email so quickly.
Today, I've got a slightly less draconian version of that extension which may still let a few evil pop-ups through but hopefully block a lot less of the non-evil pop-ups. Pop-ups triggered from plug-ins will still need to be whitelisted if you need them but most of the other areas where the previous attempt was overly aggressive should work again here.
If you're interested in helping us test this one, you can download it from here. If you have the previous extension installed, please uninstall (or disable) that one before testing this one. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and should help us determine if we can offer this as a minor but effective update prior to the 1.1 release.
Thanks again for all the great feedback on the first attempt and I look forward to reading through all of the responses here. Oh, and definitely thanks to Dan Veditz who wrote both of these extensions :-)
NASA has just announce that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, and support and science teams here on the Earth have been given up to 18 months of additional funding. This is great news for the MER project.
Much of the credit for this extensions surely belongs to the Assembly, Testing, and Launch Operations (ATLO) team who gave us these amazing and apparently unstoppable rovers. Additionally, there must have been strong lobbying effort by current team leadership and, as a huge fan of these missions, I couldn't me more thankful to those efforts.
There is no doubt in my mind, though, that the key factor in this extension was the popularity of these programs brought about by such an open and accessible process.
Thanks to all of the decision makers who helped ensure that the MER missions were so fully public at the websites and on NASA TV. Thanks to all of the engineering and science team memebers who took time out from their "real work" to share up to date news with the public, and thanks to all of the "behind the scenes" people who facilitated that wonderful communication channel -- especially the web team who made sure that the latest and greatest raw image data was immediately available to the world. Oh, and what an amazing product we got from all the great folk in JPL's image processing team who have given us such wonderful views into this no longer so alien land.
You can read the press release about the extension over at the MER Newsroom.
Note to journalists: I'm the QA lead for the Mozilla project and I use this blog to communicate with our testing community. If you'd like official comments from the Mozilla Foundation please contact press@mozilla.org or Rafael Ebron, rebron@meer.net, 510-220-6800
Thanks.
Yahoo! is now officially supporting Mac and Linux Firefox with their new Yahoo! toolbar. The latest rev also has some improvements. I think it's just wonderful the kind of support we're getting from these major players in the tech industry. Send 'em some of your testing goodness over at the Yahoo! Search Blog.
After further consideration (and investigation,) we have decided that it may be necessary to take a rather larger change into 1.0.3 than we had planned. We've run into one of those "fix the root cause or patch around the symptoms" trade-offs and to prevent future security issues, we're leaning towards the "fix the root problem" fix.
The problem with "the right fix" is that it will probably break a number of extensions - we've already determined that features within DOM Inspector will break and need to be patched.
You can get the Windows build that includes this fix here. The Mac build is here. The Linux build is here.
If you're testing these builds, please set the javascript.options.showInConsole pref to true in about:config, run with your JavaScript Console open (Tools -> JavaScript Console,) and note any errors that come up, especially if and when an extension is failing.
I'm happy to see feedback here. If it's about a specific extension that broke between 1.0.2 and this 1.0.3 build, please note that (and the JS errors) at bug 289231. If it's more general in nature, or you don't have specific error reports, then fee free to post here at this blog or in mail to asa@mozilla.org. Also, if you crash, please submit talkback reports and include the crash report ID in your feedback.
Thanks for all your help so far. The sooner we can gather information on this change, the better it will be for our users' security, and our extensions and extension community. It's also worth noting that the extensions that could break from this change were probably a genuine security risk themselves and so this approach should lead to an overall more secure experience for all of our users.
We took a couple of small fixes for minor regressions caused by the previous 1.0.2 security release and have one final round of builds. If you all could help us test these, that would be great. The bugs we fixed in this candidate are 287459 and 288006. These two changes should be near-zero risk, but if you all could look over the bugs, test around those areas, and report back here if you find any problems, that would be great.
If all goes well, these candidate builds will become the final 1.0.3 release.
update: OK, we're not final yet. We've got at least a couple more items to address.
Today I got another email asking me how I pronounce my name so I thought it would be a good time to turn this blog to the personal for a second.
Asa is pronounced a few ways. I like two of them. The first is a long "A" then "suh" like the word "such" without the "ch". The second is "Ace" like the ace of spades and then "uh" like, well, like "uh" :-) In neither of these pronunciation does the "s" have a "z" sound, though I have heard it said that way before.
Asa is a Hebrew name meaning healer or physician. Asa was the third king of Judah. He was a righteous king who corrected the iniquities of his forebears. He ruled for thirty-nine years.
My parents are not Jewish, I think they just liked the name.
Also, I'm a guy. I'm 31 in June. I live in California.
Thanks, everyone for all the testing and feedback. It looks like we've managed to add a couple of fixes without breaking anything :-) I'll have more information for you all on this release (which I anticipate happening rsn) in a couple of hours. Thanks, again, for all the testing help and especially the feedback here and in email. We simply couldn't do it without you.
Do any of you know where I can get a 17 inch SXGA+ (1400x1050) LCD flatpanel?
It seems like every laptop maker under the sun is offering at least one model with 1,050 lines of resolution and I happen to think this is just about ideal for a 4:3 15" laptop screen. Going up to 1200 lines makes the fonts look too small for me and going down gives me a Lego Duplo feel.
My T42 drives at SXGA+. The only problem with this resolution is that I cant find a single flatpanel that runs at SXGA+. If you know of one, please let me know.
This week was so fun I've decided to post two :)
To: asa@mozilla.org
From: Mike Reeves <mreeves10@cox.net>
Subject: FO
Dear ass@mofo,
You guys even screwed up being able to view pix now. Goo Bye, Dum fux. You threw away a golden goose cuz yer dum. I've switched (like millions now) to netscape.
To: security@mozilla.org
From: James
Subject: bar
i have version 1.2. Cannot get progress bar at bottom of screen
We're working on another Firefox 1.0 update and could use some help in testing these bits.
The first thing that we've fixed that we need your help testing is the Windows "Add or Remove Programs" bug that caused a doubling up of uninstall entries. This new build should behave correctly, in that if you install it on top of an older release, it will replace that older release's entry rather than add a new one.
The second area that we could use your help testing is manual installation of plugins. If you can find sites that offer plugins which we don't support with the Plugin Finder Service, then clicking on the puzzle piece or the "Install missing plugins" button in the information bar should result in a Plugin Finder Service dialog with a "Manual Installation" button which should take you to the web page for manual installation. If you can find cases where that doesn't work, please let me know.
Other than those areas, this release should behave exactly the same as the previous releases so if you find any new problems, please let me know as well. Thanks.
Also, we'll have L10N builds soon. I'll add those as soon as they're available.
update: We have a second round of builds. See the new post for links.
As many of you know, the Mozilla Foundation will not be shipping Mozilla Application Suite (Mozilla 1.x) releases beyond the continuing security updates to the Mozilla 1.7 product.
The good news for suite fans is that a group of well known and capable volunteers has stepped up to keep the suite going. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to host this project, providing the obvious infrastructure like CVS, FTP, website space, Bugzilla, etc. In addition to that, the Mozilla Foundation is also contributing some of my time to help this new project team get up and running. As part of the agreement reached between this new team and the Foundation, the suite is to get a new name and version number to help prevent confusion and make it more obvious to current Mozilla 1.7.x userbase that this is a new project and should be evaluated as such.
Today, the new project team has selected its new name. You can read the announcement over at the Mozilla wiki. The Mozilla Foundation legal council has vetted this name for trademark concerns and is comfortable that it will not lead to the same kinds of problems we had with the phoenix/firebird/firefox namaing difficulties of the past.
You can also find the beginnings of the new product website at http://allizom.org.
Just a warning to beware if you hear unlikely or strange news about Firefox or Mozilla today; it's probably just Taily Day celebrations.
