September 2005 Archives

Today my new keyboard arrived and I'm very pleased. I expect it's going to take me a while to get used to it but the keys feel wonderful and the shape and placement is perfect. If you're looking for a reasonably priced keyboard that will help you get your mouse into a much more comfortable position, I definitely recommend the Key Ovation Goldtouch keyboard.

Thanks to Alan for the pointer and to everyone else for all the great suggestions.

web pro news brings news of an MSN search plugin for firefox. Nice to see that they're thinking of us '-)

Brian King's got a Firefox article that he put together for O'Reilly. Check it out.

Today I came into work at the new office for the first time. There's still hammering, drilling, and other construction, especially on the first level but now that I'm half unpacked, it's starting to feel pretty comfortable. I forgot to bring my camera today but given that we won't be in the "moving" state again for some time I decided to snap a few low-quality camera phone pictures and I'll get those posted shortly.

update: and here they are.

It's been a while since my last developer interview (Mike Shaver, in May.) These developer intervies work like this. First, you all tell me who you want to hear from. Then I beg that developer to agree ;-) Then I solicit questions from you all and pass those on to the developer. Eventually, I post the results here.

OK. So who do you all want to heare from?

I'm looking for a keyboard with no number pad. My current setup is a Logitech wireless keyboard but it's so wide that my mouse sits well to the right of where it's comfortable. If I could find a keyboard with no number pad, I think I'd be able to move the mouse to a more comfortable location. Do any of you have suggestions for a keyboard (with fullsized keys) that doesn't have a number pad? I don't need it to be wireless but I need USB. If you know of such a beast, or even better, if you've had a good experience using one, please let me know.

The Google Toolbar for Firefox has exited beta. The super slick part of the updated release is you can customize where the buttons live in Firefox's UI. More at the google blog. Oh, and it's got Google Suggests built in (not available for the IE version, I understand.)

If any of the fine folks over at Eurocom are reading and would like to send me one of these to play with, I'd be happy to let you all know how Firefox performs on it :-) Please contact me at asa@mozilla.org for shipping information. I think I've even built a decent configuration for less than $6,000 :-)

Wow. This was one of the biggest Ask Asa installments ever. I know some of it is just a result of my taking so long to get to it, but 68 posts (many containing multiple questions) is still a lot. Because of the volume, I've tried to keep my answers pretty short. Without further delay, here are my answers for Ask Asa #18

When can we expect to see a built in spell checker (like SpellBound) become a standard feature in Firefox?

Aaron, I'm not sure. I think it's a fine idea, but there are costs in terms of development, testing, download size, and possibly performance. This is certainly one of the most requested features -- especially among bloggers and others who publish online. I'm sure you're already aware, but just in case others aren't, you can get the Spellbound Spellchecker for Firefox which gives you spellchecking for web forms. Another consideration here is that many web applications are starting to include their own spellcheckers. I personally hate the user interface for most spell checkers so I'd want to see a lot of care put into making spell checking something that's easy to do and most importantly, that stays out of the users way unless she needs it.

When did you change the title from "Firefox, Mars and Cats" to "Firefox and more"? Any particular reason? :)

I changed the title because the Movable Type software that sends me email alerts when ever people comment or trackback was appending the blog title to the front of the email subject and it was so long that it cut off the actual subject of the comment or trackback. :-)

Hi, What's the ETA for a release of TBird 1.5 and what about lightning? Any more details on that project available yet? Thanks.

Well, we're going to try to release Thunderbird 1.5 shortly after Firefox 1.5. For 1.0, the difference was about a month. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do a bit better than that with 1.5 but it takes a lot of resources to pull together major releases. The good news about Thunderbird 1.5 is that we'll be releasing it simultaneously in all of our available locales -- just like we did for Firefox 1.0 (and will be doing for Firefox 1.5.) We've still got our Beta 2 releases for both Firefox and Thunderbird, and then probably a short series of candidate builds. The schedule is firming up and you can follow it at DevNews the developer news blog.

I'm going to ask a cat question again since I got such a good answer the last time. Once again, the sometimes odd behavior of Tiger is the subject. :) Very often, just before he's about to drink from the water bowl, Tiger starts digging on the floor next to and around the bowl. I've seen this behavior on other cats as well, but I've never got a good explanation why they do it. My mom once guessed that it's an instinct to dig up water holes, but it just seems stupid to do that when the water is right in front of you, doesn't it? This digging can go on for about ten seconds, then he quietly starts drinking. As a side note, Tiger loves drinking water from other places, such as the bath tub, the washbasin, or a glass of water standing next to the bed. I would guess that's just because he's adventurous and just enjoys the thrill of doing something different.

David, nice to get another Tiger question from you. Our Ptolemy performs some similar behavior. Her behaviors are slightly different though. The first is that she paws with one paw at the floor around food items (hers our ours) as if to bury them. This is the result of some clearly instinctive behavior (not something learned from her mother) and probably represents a desire to cover up any food remains to prevent predators from finding or following them. The second scratching digging behavior that Ptolemy exhibits is usually with both front paws and she does this to the bed or sofa in the spot she's about to sit or lay down. She does this to prepare the space and seems to get the most enjoyment out of it when she can actually bunch up the blanket some and make sort of a cradle for herself. Now I suspect that Tiger's behavior is much closer to the first, as it's related to eating/drinking. My first thought would be that drinking after eating might be a normal routine and he's just performing that instinctual digging in between. It might also be that he smells food near his water dish and this triggers the burying behavior. Do you have his food dish next to his water dish? I've also heard of cats pawing the ground while drinking. I certainly wouldn't be bothered by this and would take it as a sign that he's just protecting his home (and you) from potential predators :-) Our Ptolemy also loves drinking water from other than her dish places. She loves the toilet, the shower floor after I get out, the bird bath in the back yard and any dishes that might catch rain or the sprinkler. This is pretty common cat behavior and I'm just glad we don't have a fishbowl :-) (BTW, the little tuxedo cat at your gallery looks almost exactly like one we fostered last year :-)

Following on the cat question, why your specific interest in Mars? And what do you think Mars holds for us? (i.e. What do you think we'll find there - or what are your hopes for near-term space findings?) I don't really need an answer, I'm just curious. I love the blog, keep it coming and thanks for sharing!

Hey Step. I've been interested by Mars since I was about 7 years when someone pointed to the rusty "star" and explained to me that it was actually a rocky planet, much like Earth. My fascination exploded when the Mars Pathfinder Spacecraft and Sojourner Rover mission first showed up on NASA TV and then started making it into the nightly news broadcasts. Since then, I've followed, as closely as I have time to, all of the Mars missions. As far as my hopes go, I most hope that we keep exploring. We've already solved so many amazing puzzles and there are plenty more to go. We have strong evidence for longstanding, large bodies of water on Mars. We see an active and dynamic planet with amazing weather systems and beautiful seasons. We've come to understand some of the local (to our landers) geology and geologic process. We have an amazing capability on the ground and a swarm of wonderful orbiters all streaming home megabytes of data. It's just thrilling to me in about every way :-)

I know SVG will be part of Firefox 1.5 but I really know little of it and I'm wondering will Mozilla corp have some demo sites that show off Firefox 1.5's new SVG capabilities to coincide with its launch ? (I'm aware there are third party sites with SVG content but I do not know if these are suitable for the average user, curious about this tech)

Ken, I'm not sure about that. If we do, I expect you'll find them at our Mozilla Developer Center. Keep an eye on the SVG section.

a current status of Tbird 1.5 and Firefox 1.5 ... when will the first real beta be released and the follow up as to a proposed released date (Oct or Nov)?? Also, will both be released at the sametime or is it possible that Tbird will be released before Firefox. Are there to be beta (Sept), then RC (Oct) with final release in late Oct or more likely early Nov?

Well, we've already released the first Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5 betas. We'll have our second round of betas on October 5th (Thunderbird might be a day or two behind that) and we should have 1.5 release candidate builds before the end of October. I think it's very likely that the final releases will be in early November.

What kind of Animal is Mozilla?

Mozilla is a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Firefox is a Red Panda.

That was a dumb question.. ;) Since Firefox has gained alot of share and getting so much publicity, Do you think Firefox can be too popular for it's own good?

No. I don't :-) I believe that Firefox can and will become the number 1 most used browser on the planet. We're already exceeding 30% market share in some parts of Europe.

I'm wondering in what way the new features of Firefox 1.5 will be highlighted, it would be cool if that would be done some Apple-like. It would be great to see well-documented new features, and a good guide for companies how-to-switch-to-firefox. Perhaps it's a good time to diversify, focus on two different groups: Regular People and (Big) Businesses. My question therefore is: do you know something / have some plans already about the new campaign to promote the next version of Firefox? I can imagine generating a buzz can start off a week before the Mozilla Corporation/Foundation unleashes the latest and greatest version of Firefox. O yeah, and why not putting Firefox in beta now (1.4), all major bugs are fixed right now (according to the burning edge)? ;-)

Yes. We are working on our marketing campaigns for 1.5. I know that we're going to be highlighting both new features, as well as extensions. When we get a bit further we'll start talking more about it over at Spread Firefox so join us there and be a part of the effort rather than a spectator :-)

Muah, why are you the most blogging person at mofo... sorry, moco... except to the burning edge probably, but that's not a real blog, is it?

The burning edge certainly is a real blog. I read it every day. Yes. I do try to blog as much as possible. I'm a very interested in the Mozilla communities and I think that having this blog helps me stay in touch with a lot of what's going on with Mozilla. It's as much for my learning as for any one else :-)

I have a few questios regarding netscape 8. 1. shouldn't netscape release the source code of netscape 8? 2. netscape uses the term "based on firefox" in the about window. this is illegal concerning the trademark policy, when you read the section "Serious Modifications". do they have some special admission from mofo? 3. in mitchell baker's post about the employment of several new people, she mentioned that one of mike shaver's tasks will be to investigate new technologies like instant messaging. does that mean that the mozilla foundation thinks about creating an instant messaging software (or plugin)?

I'm not particularly interested in the source code for Netscape 8. They are required by the terms of the license to release source code for any Mozilla files they modified but not for any features or code that was wholly developed by Netscape. I'm not very happy to see them using "based on Firefox" but that's up to the trademark authorities at MoFo to evaluate. As far as what Mozilla is thinking about creating, I sure hope we're not planning on adding a lot more products to our lineup. Firefox and Thunderbird are already a huge commitment and stretch our resources thin. You'd have to ask Mike what he's investigating but I don't foresee an IM client coming out of Mozilla any time soon.

Are there any plans at Mozilla to start agreements with PC/laptop OEMs to ship Firefox pre-installed on their products? Are there any in place right now even? I read somewhere Acer was either starting to or planning on it. I've yet to find proof though. I'd also like to see Firefox / Thunderbird CDs available freely at electrical retailers (I work for a UK chain), just like you can walk in and pick an AOL CD up from an AOL FSDU (free standing display unit). It would be great for Mozilla, customers and the retailers themselves. Do you think that could become a possibility? If 1.5 is ripe enough I don't see why we can't try. I think I asked too many questions... lol.

Craig, we've been working on this for years. It's finally starting to bear some fruits and I think you all will be pleased to see what kind of progress we're making. I also heard about Acer shipping Firefox. I haven't seen any proof either. The CD distribution idea seems pretty expensive to me. Perhaps we could do something community-based around the Firemonger project where people can distribute CDs individually. I would love to see Firefox and Thunderbird on retail shelves. Until that happens, you can always buy them at the Mozilla Store

If most of the coding work I do for Mozilla is wasted because of lack of reviews, why should I even bother?

Jason, we've always had more patches than reviewers. I don't think this is likely to change. I'd suggest that if you want to ensure more and prompter reviews that you work on bugs that are important to the people doing the reviews. Bugs that a module owner or peer care about are probably the most important bugs to fix, as well.

Sebastopol? Did Nat Torkington invite you to his office, now? :)

Yes, I was at O'Reilly's "FooCamp" event thing.

Would you revisit Aardvark (which is still at v1.0) and comment on whether it has any basic problem working with recent releases? I'm in that vague post-meta-branch-pre-stable condition where some extensions work, others won't work nor update nor install no matter how many times I try, and taking a break myself knowing it'll be a week or so before things sort out.

I'm unable to make Aardvark work with my 1.5 branch testing builds.

Which do you find more exciting, colonisation of the Moon or a manned trip to Mars? What's the current timeline on each?

I don't find the moon exciting at all. I think it's a huge waste of effort and money and would much rather see a manned Mars mission be the beneficiary of all that effort and money. It looks like under the current plan, NASA will be putting people back on the Moon before 2020 (at a cost of probably 100-200 billion dollars). I believe that for a similar price tag, we could probably put our first footprints on Mars in a similar time frame (even assuming we continue with our relatively cheap robotic exploration of Mars.) This focus on the moon, though, certainly delays any planning for a serious manned Mars mission.

When are you going to stop talking about all this boring Firefox crap and get to the intersting stuff (cats, space, etc.)? :-)

Read up the thread ;-)

What a pity you don't blog about cats anymore. I've wanted to sahre a few of them with you;-)

OK. I'm getting the message :-)

Why were the plans to create the Mozilla Corporation kept secret until August? Why not tell people what you were planning?

Creating this new organization was something that we knew we needed to do but we didn't know enough of how it would work, how the various pieces would fit together, to really talk about it until we were very nearly done setting it up and that's when we did start talking about it. Had we announced it earlier, the announcement really couldn't have been a lot more than something like "we think we need to make some kind of organizational changes but we don't exactly know what those are and we can't really answer any of your questions about it until we do understand more." Today, as we're approaching the end of September, we still haven't figured it all out don't have answers for lots of questions. The website is a perfect example. We're still working out how we handle a www.mozilla.org and a www.mozilla.com. It wasn't secrecy as much as it was that we didn't have anything coherent enough to say early on.

@ guest ref - what kind of animal is a Mozilla. Legend has it that the name Mozilla is made up from two other words, I won't post here what those two words are. I'll leave that to Asa should he wish to ;)

The legend of the naming of Mozilla has been handed down from generation to generation and was explained to me as a sort of contraction of Mosaic Killer.

Any internal competetions going on at Mozilla, like guessing the date of when 1.5 is being released, the day Firefox hits 10% marketshare aso.

Not that I know of.

hat skin do you use in Fx and Tb? Hablas/entendes castellano/espa�ol?! :D (Do you speak/understand Spanish?)

TaSK, I use the default Firefox and Thunderbird skins, y solamente un poquito Espa�ol

Is XUL 2.0 going to be ready for Firefox 1.5? And will it have better support for remote apps(example: getting rid of the tree limitations, etc..) or will it be even more strict?

XUL 2.0 and much of our "platform" story will not be complete for 1.5. Expect to see our platform really start to fill out with Gecko 2.0.

I am probably just misunderstanding the information on the about screen that states "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050819 Firefox/1.6a1� But according to the roadmap firefox 1.1 Beta 1 would be running the Gecko rendering engine 1.8b4 (Final says 1.8), but the latest nightly builds seam to be using a newer version (1.9a1). Is this correct and if so what�s the differences between 1.8b4 and this version. I also find the "Firefox/1.6a1� version number confusing as I would expect the final release to say 1.5 which is lower then the current release number.

The build you are running is from the tip of the development trunk which is already on the road to Firefox 2.0 (based on Gecko 1.9 or later). The Firefox 1.5 release will come from a stability development branch that was created about six weeks ago. That branch has the older 1.8 Gecko.

What's the main factor resulting in a quite noticeable difference of quality regarding UI design between firefox and thunderbird? Will MoFo plan to level up the UI quality along the line? I was, and still is, quite puzzled, hope you can/will answer.

Mathieu, I don't think it's a difference so much in quality of design as it is a difference in approach to design. Firefox's approach was really to start from the ground and build up to an acceptable level of complexity while Thunderbird's approach was to start with Mozilla Mail and work to simplify some while adding new features. Main is inherently more complex in terms of primary UI and I think that it will get better, but the resources for Thunderbird aren't the same as the resources for Firefox and I think we're doing a pretty good job with the resources we do have. We've made some big strides in usability with the upcoming 1.5 release and I expect this to continue with 2.0.

I don't know if you can answer this, but what is going on over at the Calendar/Sunbird project?

I can't answer that. I haven't been following closely. The latest progress report is available here.

I'm perplexed. I was sure that you recommended Aardvark in May, on this page-- http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/008129.html Reading it today, where I remember it saying Aardvark, the text refers to Platypus, except there's one remaining use of the name Aardvark. Page is closed to editing so I couldn't ask there.

Hank, I'm pretty sure I was talking about Platypus. I've also talked about Aardvark in the past.

Hi Asa, Would you mind giving some statistics on your blog's traffic? Number of hits per day, browser statistics, for example? :-)

Rishi, I don't have any comprehensive statistics because all I ever tried to monitor was the front page of the blog. Last I checked, I was seeing about 75% Firefox, about 10% safari, about 10% other Gecko and the remainder was split between the lesser known browsers.

Will the mozilla team continue to deliver security updates for Firefox 1.0? - I'm very happy with Firefox 1.0 right now, but most of my extensions and settings will probably break in 1.1.

Jazzomatic, we continue to deliver security updates for Firefox 1.0.x. The latest is Firefox 1.0.7 and I encourage all of you on 1.0.x to get the new version.

Given the popularity of Firefox (and Thunderbird, for that matter) on virtually all major platforms, will we see official Mozilla support for systems other than Windows, Mac, and Linux? Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, the BSD's, etc. have working ports (I believe), but these unofficial Firefox builds seem to stay hidden in their respective packages/ports collections, although a few are yet again hidden in the Mozilla "Contributed Builds" page. Likewise, will there be Mozilla releases for particular Linux distros (e.g. Debian packages or Red Hat RPMs), rather than having the distributions compile their own versions? It seems to me that official Mozilla support for more platforms -- most of which already have fully functional ports -- is worth more than just quieting the Opera fanboys who claim that Opera is more portable. One more thing: I haven't tried the latest TB trunk yet, but will Thunderbird contain valuable offline help (using the Mozilla Help Viewer) like Firefox 1.0 does? If so, do you need content contributors?

I don't think we'll be seeing this any time soon. We've got a big enough workload with the three platforms we officially support.

Asa, I've been testing the new update system, and I have to say that I'm very imprssed. I recall that at one point there was talk of patched updates instead of downloaded the entire application. Is this feature still planned for 1.5 release?

Yes. We're offering them already on the 1.5 branch nightly builds. My update this morning was about 200K :-)

This question is probably related to a couple already posted: is shaver still leading and working on the lightning project?

I believe that he has new responsibilities since joining the Mozilla Corporation.

Asa, can you tell us about download statistics of localised builds like you did before? Thanks.

Our new mirrors system doesn't give me that kind of granularity. Sorry.

Asa, you also said in your linux speech that simplicity is the key. Is Bugzilla going to be simpler ? Even searching a bug is quite complex. I know about the QA blog, but even if you can report a bug in a coment, it has not the same purpose.

I'm torn on this one. Bugzilla is not an end user product and shouldn't appeal to, for example, my mom. She should be using hendrix or the reporter tool rather than bugzilla. I'd love to see the Bugzilla interface improve, but I'm not sure that simplicity is what it needs most. Every Friday, Myk Melez is working with the Bugzilla crew to address usability issues. I'm trying to participate in that event as much as my time allows, but I don't think it's reasonable to put a developer tool like Bugzilla into the same category as an end user tool like and operating system.

How do you deal with the votes, number of dups and number of CC's to items in bugzilla? Take for instance bug #45375. It has 221 votes, has about 40 dups and has been opened on 13-Jul-2000. So aparently people see this as a real problem en like to see this fixed.

I use votes and cc's to help me evaluate the interest from the most vocal people in our community. That alone does not say much about the real need for a fix, change, or feature. Considering that we've got 217,417 Bugzilla users who could vote on a bug, seeing 200 votes wouldn't tell me much about even just the interest of our Bugzilla participating community and that's far from any representative sample of our tens of millions of end users. Votes are useful, but they're not the only, or even the most important factor I consider when evaluating the impact of a particular bug.

Hi Asa Will Thunderbird 1.5 is going to get new default theme (Pinstripe) in Win platform? (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=291173) Cheers

Nope. Not for 1.5.

What will be done to ensure that patches that land on the branch also land on the trunk (if they are supposed to). It would be nice not to have to re-merge branch and trunk again after 1.5, and also to have everything that is fixed on branch to be fixed on trunk. Thanks.

Patches land on the trunk before they land on the branch. Most are first verified on the trunk before being considered for inclusion in the branch. This won't be like the 1.0 release where we spent nearly six months on a branch. That's a much different situation and you have to deal with a much more significant divergence in code over six months. This branch won't be half that long before we're locked down for 1.5 final so there's not much to worry about. If you'd like to keep an eye on this, you can query for all bugs that have the keyword fixed1.8 or verified1.8 and are not resolved as fixed (general bug Resolved status refers to the trunk). That would give you the set of bugs that were fixed on the branch but remain unfixed on the trunk. I don't think you'll find much there.

David Tenser: based on my cats, I suspect that the "digging" is actually scenting... Asa, do you get that impression too?

Limulus, that's possible. They do have scent glands on their feet. I tend to think that the digging behavior is a bit different from the scenting behavior though.

Asa, I'm curious about Mozilla security practices. Everyone knows Mozilla beats M$ when it comes to speed of response when security holes are uncovered. The policy of paying for disclosure of security holes is also excellent. But what about other things? For example, can you elaborate on how you go about planning design securely, and what security practices Mozilla products use at the code level? Whether you perform threat models, whether you plan to eradicate all known reproducible crashers per release, how you go about fuzz testing, whether you use automatic code check tools to detect common integer overflows, automated regression testing, etc? Unfortunately it seems to me (if only from the lack of blogging by Moz people compared to other aspects) that Micro$oft is finally understanding all these issues far better than Moz - that you are much better at applying duct tape, but their product is designed to be less leaky. Is this viewpoint justified?

I'm not a developer so I can't really go into detail about how software is designed. We do fairly heavy code reviews, security audits on new features, and we have a set of tools that help us find bugs and crashers with possible security implications. We also have a pretty smart set of people who can identify when we're seeing a class of problems that requires a design change rather than a bandaid. Like I said, development isn't my area so I can't give you a lot of detail but perhaps in one of my upcoming Developer Interviews, I can invite someone who can talk more about that.

more sugestion than question now that we are getting a Dot EU eurid.eu is not time for EU locale! example: nl-EU for the Netherlands / en-EU for English speaking but keep the current nl-NL / en-GB

I don't know the first think about the specifications and standards around naming and identifying locales. You'd have to ask someone else.

Nutshell question: What's the plan for extension versioning (app.extensions.version) between now and the FF1.5 release? The transition from FF0.9 to FF1.0 went somewhat roughly for existing FF users, because the version number was bumped from 0.9 (IIRC) to 1.0 at a rather late point. Many extensions didn't get updated for weeks, and a few sites went so far as to start distributing modified popular extensions with a bumped maxVersion. As a result, lots of existing FF users didn't upgrade to 1.0 until weeks after the release. Deer Park went fairly well, as there was a heads-up email sent out early, and otherwise announced online. And, of course, it wasn't targeted at end users. But it seems now that there's talk of the 1.5 betas(?) being released soon, and something about the extension versioning being first changed to 1.4, then again to 1.5 for the final release. But I haven't seen that spread very widely, and can't seem to find more info that what I vaguely remember hearing. It seems to me that a repeat of the 0.9 -> 1.0 debacle is likely, but with 80+ millions users. Something about this just seems wrong. For example, releases of Sun's Solaris OS don't get a version change at the last minute. Incompatible changes are only allowed very early in the development cycle, otherwise they have to wait for the next release. I presume that even Windows operates in a similar role -- I've never heard of problems caused by a last-minute version change. Why must Firefox be so different?

The main issue here is that we've got a community of developers building on an set of unfrozen APIs and we cannot fully commit to never changing our application UI (many extensions depend on our UI as if it was a frozen API). To work around this, we have versioning and we assume that unless an extension says it supports our version, then we don't load it -- better to disable the extension than have it break the browser. For 1.5, this should be a lot easier. Extension developers simply have to test their extension and if it's not broken by changes we've made in the apps, then they just rev their compatibility version information and it will work. Right now we're at extension version 1.4 which will change to 1.5 as soon as we're sure we won't introduce any more extension breaking changes. As soon as that happens, we'll announce to the extension community and hopefully we'll have all of the major extensions either fixed to work with our new code or version revved if they were never broken.

Which Firefox releases are going to be long-lived branches that get security updates even after new versions are released?

Firefox 1.5 should be a lot easier for us to maintain and ship security updates for -- now that we've finally got a solid update system in place. I suspect that all major releases will be long-lived and get security updates. That would include 1.5.

vfwlkr: "When did you change the title from "Firefox, Mars and Cats" to "Firefox and more" Any particular reason? :)� Similarly, how come it's no longer a notblog*? That there be good branding.

Yeah, I dropped the adot's notblog because too many people were asking me what it meant (for those of you who don't know, one of my common email addresses used to be adot@ -- my first initial and first three letters of my last name, and notblog was just a cheeky attempt to describe my blog as something other than a blog.) I liked the branding but didn't like answering all the emails.

Asa, what about the Mozilla Visual Identity Team. Is that still an active team? If so, what are they currently working on?

Yes, it's still an active team. They've helped us with the 1.5 beta branding and they'll be involved with the 1.5 final branding.

Are you and mozilla planning anything, like with linux? *wink wink- nudge nudge*

Aas, we're definitely not going to make a linux distribution. My linux rant was my own.

1) What do you make? 2) What is your favorite tool/toy? 3) Who are your technology heros? ;)

Haha. Were you there too?

I'll take this opportunity to make a desperate roll call: PLEASE do a complete reversion about your information policy concerning profile stuff and start a information offense about profiles and profilemanager. To see so many helpful people in all forums, who are fighting this pitiful battle with users which doesn�t have any clue about profiles and all problems resulting from that, is not fun anymore. If users start to learn to handle profiles as ordinary as folders or files I think more than 50% (60,70?) of all problems will disappear from forums. And: do not take down the GUI for profilemanager.PLEASE!!

I think we should be fixing bugs, not fixing workarounds.

Asa it seems Firefox and cats and mars isn't really blogged anymore, why?

I've been really busy with work lately. Seems to get that way when we get near our big releases :-) I'll be back with more good cats and mars commentary soon :)

Do you ever miss the coffee banque?

TaHa, I don't think I miss it. I certainly remember it, and a lot of the great people there and all over Auburn. Are you someone I know?

I have a not-so-hypothetical question. Suppose 15 people lose all their personal files as a result of a bug. The bug is well documented and easy to fix, and 15 people each give it one vote. Now suppose 150 people suffer a minor inconvenience. The bug can't be replicated, and it receives 150 votes. Which bug do you fix? (A: the inconvenience -- true story.) Sorry, I know this is supposed to be a question, not an ambush, but I have to wonder sometimes how bugs are prioritized, or if they are at all. Surely it's not by vote total, is it? I know you have put a lot of effort into bookmarks loss, but should Mozilla be taking more interest in data loss?

Bugs are not prioritized by vote total. We certainly do care about dataloss and are doing what we can to prevent it from happening.

What's the definitive stance on Mozilla's commitment to Win9x platforms? In your blog, you previously indicated that Firefox would gain market share thanks to IE7 being available for XP SP2 and upwards. While that's true for Firefox 1.0.x and Firefox 1.5.x, the Mozilla Wiki indicates that this is not the case for Firefox 2.0.x. "Uniscribe not a problem since we're going to drop Win9x support for FF2." Source: http://wiki.mozilla.org/FutureGfxWhiteboard Any comments on this? I personally understand if this is the case, but some people are concerned about this and it would be nice to have clarification.

Ben, I'm not sure we have a definitive stance on commitments to any platforms. If we do, can you point me to the documentation? The developer Wiki is a place of discussion, not policy documentation. Firefox 2.0 is still a ways off and I'm not sure what platforms we'll be supporting there. If you've followed our Mac development at all, you'll see that when a platform becomes too painful to support in relation to the number of users we have on that platform, it doesn't last. We still have a significant number of win98 users, but I don't know what that number will be when we're getting closer to 2.0.

Will there be a Firefox packaged as msi for easy deployment? That _the_ thing i'm missing regarding Firefox right now. I know there are msi builds floating around done by third parties. But more often than not no German builds are available.

It turns out that everyone wants something different from an MSI package. I suspect that we're not going to be able to satisfy these requests for 1.5.

Hello you beautiful people, When you click on the link in IE or Firefox or Opera you never know where will it open, in new window or in current and this is very annoying. In Firefox and Opera this is even more annoying since we have tabs, so when you middle click on javascript link you will end up with empty tab, so every time before middle click you need to check is it link javascript link. This can be very puzzling for not so much experienced Firefox or Internet user and it is very annoying for rest of us since browser should do what we tell it and we shouldn�t guess what browser is going to do and adjust our action to it. My proposal is, make left click to always open links, even javascript links, in current tab, middle click in new tab, and shift + left click in new window. Of course make this optional and configurable. I think that this kind of option will perfectly match Firefox slogan "Take back the web". Sorry for my bad English, I hope that my idea is clear enough. What do you think about it?

We're making this better for Firefox 1.5.

3 quick questions related to the download counter 1) When Fx 1.5 is released, will you zero the counter? 2) Any plans to start a counter for Tb? 3) Any plans to release Fx 1.5 to coincide with 100 million downloads? It looks like the 2 will occur fairly close anyway...

1) not sure. 2) we already have a feed for this if you want to build your own counter but we're not doing one at SFX. 3) I think that depends on when we're ready to ship and when we hit 100 M downloads. It does look like they're going to happen pretty close.

Mr. Asa, I am an avid user of linux. I installed each and every flavor of linux for the past 2 years and want to introduce linux to others(especially home users). But they all want a plug and play OS not a plug and try OS. I want a Easy to install, light weight, easy to upgrade and with good usability(people who are desinging usability features better read the apple Human Interface Guide lines). Asa, Can i expect something like a GNU/Mozilla linux based on XUL runner?

Kishan, I seriously doubt it. We've got our hands full with a browser and an email client.

Opera supports CSS 2.1, XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.01, WML 2.0, ECMAScript, DOM 2 and SVG 1.1 tiny. Which does Firefox support?

Firefox supports enough to display more of the web more accurately than Opera and to provide forward looking developers with one of the most capable content platforms on the planet :-)

What kind of weight do you give to bugs that are shown be top sources of questions in the support forums? Do you have some sort of reporting for the top support issues? Would you consider adding a keyword that "support forum leaders" could set to indicate it's a bug that affects a lot of people?

I would love for the forum leaders to let us know which bugs are top sources of user problems. Email me and let's talk. Right now I just try to read as much of the forums as possible and nominate bugs as blockers when they look like they're causing users a lot of pain. I'd be thrilled to have that be pushed to us so I can spend less time trying to pull it out of the forums.

Following up on Jason's question, I'd like to ask if there is any mechanism by which forum leaders can reach you. I imagine you get an unmanageable volume of mail. Do you have eyes down on the ground?

Email me. I may be slow in responding but I try to get to all of my mail. Any information from you all that helps us make better apps is a high priority for me and I'll certainly get to it before lots of other mail I get (like the dozen or so "when are you going to answer your ask asa questions" emails I get each week.)

What about focussing the effort of development and especially code review to the footprint issues ??? To reduce codesize (and datasize), one can try to focus the Mozilla/Gecko/Firefox development and especially the patch review process to those bugs that involve codesize and datasize reduction, instead of introducing new features again and again... For example, bug 214672: Further optimization and correctness improvements of libjar: streamlining nsJarInputStream, is awaiting a long time allready on a patch review. This patch saves about 5K code for the app, 4K for the installer, and about 400K of allocated memory... Other codesize optimisations are: bug 196295: Move GIF2.cpp into nsGIFDecode bug 58310: consolidate duplicate implementations PRTimeToSeconds() and SecondsFromPR bug 301594: Remove unneeded row allocation and such from 'BlackenFrame' in imgContainerGif bug 192790: make imgContainerGIF::BuildCompositeMask useless bug 230675: nsICacheVisitor.idl can reduced drastically resulting in about 20K codesize savings... bug 289571: Optimization for nsRecycleAllocator bug 271386: nsHttpResponseHead: Some functions can be made private... and of course: bug 92580: [META] footprint issues (tracking) bug 143046: Need to Keep GIFs at original 8 bit or optimized.

Alfred, there have been and still are efforts to reduce footprint as we drive Firefox into smaller and smaller devices. See the minimo project for where much of this is happening.

Are there any chances that the blank window popping up when starting a download will be gone by 1.5?

Got a bug # for me?

Hi Asa, do you know of any extensions that change how Firefox reacts to being called with parameters? Today many applications on Windows open the default browser on Windows with something like this: $system_variable_path_to_default_browser_exe http://www.site.com/?data=your_private_data_here This avoids being blocked by the firewall and can get quite ennerving or even allow the application to send confidential data out there. I was not able to find an extension, that simply disables the possibility to open an URL by calling the firefox.exe with a parameter. Is this not doable with an extension or was there simply no one that wanted to realise that idea?

I think it's doable with an extension though I don't think I've seen one that does that. You should check out both https://addons.mozilla.org/ and http://extensionsmirror.nl/.

Wow. That certainly was a long list of questions. I think that next time I'm going to limit it to one question per person. Maybe I can do them a bit more frequently too, so that they don't get as long. Please, if you have follow-up questions, hold off until I open the next installment of Ask Asa. Feel free to discuss these questions and answers here, but I probably won't be getting heavily involved. I hope you all enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed answering.

We've been working on moving the Mozilla office from where it's been the last two years on Villa Street in Mountain View to a larger space across 101. Chris Beard has posted some photos showing the construction and buildout of the new space. Our first day over there will be Monday and I'll try to take a few more photos to share.

In just 10 months and 10 days, Firefox has achieved the 90 million download mark. Wow!

We've got a security update for Firefox 1.0.x users. Please download and install the new version ASAP. This version includes several security and stability fixes including:

• Fix for a potential buffer overflow vulnerability when loading a hostname with all soft-hyphens. (The IDN bug that we offered a workaround for a few days ago.)
• Fix to prevent URLs passed from external programs from being parsed by the shell. (A Linux only bug that was made public today.)
• Fix to prevent a crash when loading a Proxy Auto-Config (PAC) script that uses an "eval" statement. (Fixing a PAC crasher that was introduced in 1.0.5/6.)
• Fix to restore InstallTrigger.getVersion() for Extension authors.

There are a lot of Opera fans that think I don't like Opera (or worse, that I want to see them fail.) That's just not the case.

I hope that Opera continues to improve and to become more acceptable to regular people. I hope they can move beyond the niche space they occupy today and take some serious market share away from Internet Explorer. Toward that goal, I've offered what I consider to be constructive criticism and have been pleasantly surprised that nearly all of my concerns have been resolved and my suggestions adopted. From the radical simplification of the user interface to the change from adware to freeware, Opera is making the best moves possible, as I see it, in winning over a broader audience. I think this is good.

Today I read, that the CEO of Opera wants Opera to become #2. "Our goal is to become the number two browser," he said, as part of the press roll-out around this new "free" message they're pushing.

I've always been partial to the #1 spot and have always believed that's where we're headed with Firefox. I wish Opera all the success in the world at achieving their goal and will be happy to see them achieve that #2 browser spot -- right behind Firefox :-)

A Norwegian maker of Internet browsing software hopes to imitate the success of the Firefox browser by using the same business tactic: giving the software away.

As many of you know, I live in a state of email overload. If I'm keeping up, it's only because I'm sleeping less than I should. Last week I left my email provider of the last 4 years, looking for something more performant and in doing so I lost a few of the flags and other markers I use to track the emails I intend to reply to but don't at the moment have time to. So, if I owe you an email reply and it's been more than a week or two, please let me know with a new email or a post here.

And, yes, I know I still owe all of you answers to my last Ask Asa installment. I'll see what I can do to get that done this week.

Well, Microsoft's FUD engine is coughing and sputtering as it cranks back up. Today Microsoft is telling a gullible media that they've got a search strategy that's better than Firefox's because, "unlike with Firefox, Microsoft is using a standard that develops itself independent of the browser, and can thus let users add many search engines to IE without Microsoft having to code them all into the browser."

WTF? Seriously. How is Firefox's standard not open and how does it require a Firefox update to add any of nearly 4,000 search plugins available today for Firefox. This is a clearly a case of Microsoft pushing lies and FUD to the to the press and the press happily publishing it as fact.

It's a shame that the press is so comfortable publishing without first fact checking. Nathan Weinberg should be embarrassed at having been made a Microsoft tool like that.

Scott's posted a post-slashdotting update over at his blog. More good stuff. I have to excerpt part of it here but you should definitely head over there and read the rest of whta he's got to say, as well as the comments there.

On ui design. The mistake we�re all making, myself included, is focusing on designing for ourselves. Designing for ourselves isn�t a sin, but if the game you want to win is market share, you have to work very hard to make sure your needs and wants jive with people who�s needs are less sophisticated than ours (Which is most of the planet�s web browsing poulation). Lots of folks said �my mom can do X� or �my friends can do Y� as justifications of how their experience matches everyone elses, but I think we�d all agree how fragile and anecdotal those claims are. Your mom might be a rocket scientist, and your friend might have watched you do whatever it is before they tried to do it themselves. I�m not saying I�m right, you�re wrong, or that your pants are on fire. Instead I�m saying that design arguments, ui design arguments in particular, can and should stand on firmer ground. There should be an essay somewhere called �how to have a meaningful UI design argument� (finger on nose).

One of the biggest challenges we've faced over the last few years in designing and building Firefox was to make a browser, not that we as developers would personally love to use, but that "regular people" would love to use. In the very early days, that decision seemed to mean that we'd sacrifice a lot of the power and heavy user audience who would cringe (and more) every time we trimmed or removed a feature or a preference.

Our big compromise, and one that's not only helped us hold on to our power users but grow that audience, was the extension model. It has allowed us to design and build a browser that meets the needs of the largest possible audience and still satisfy our more advanced audiences.

A wonderful side-effect of this is that we now have the largest and most innovating feature development and testing community in the world. The extension architecture first enabled the community to restore old Mozilla features and preferences, but I think more importantly, this Firefox platform provides the community with the opportunity to react very quickly to a changing web and to design powerful and innovative new features that couldn't have been imagined when Firefox was being initially designed -- we see this with extensions that help users deal with new kinds of content (think of adblock and greasemonkey,) and hook up to new and exciting web services (think about all the del.icio.us extensions, Gmail addons, and scores of other website integration extensions,) and much more.

If you'd like to listen to my Linux desktop preso from OSCON, you can find it at IT Conversations. You can follow along with my slides here.

c|net Top 10 products of the last 10 years:

Sure, Mozilla has been around for many years, but Firefox 1.0 brought the open-source browser into the mainstream. Some never thought Mozilla could make it as anything more than a geek badge of pride. The light, secure, and efficient Firefox is legitimately challenging Internet Explorer's stranglehold on Web browsing.

I've been playing with Yahoo's new outpost-based webmail application in today's Firefox 1.5 branch nightly build and so far things are looking really, really good. It's snappy. It feels like a desktop app. The tab implementation is pretty slick, and so is the new folder implementation I think I'm ready to move back to Yahoo! for my webmail. This is really nice stuff. Congratulations to all the people working on this.

Last week I switched to Firefox: and I�ve been happy.

Scott points out some of the shortcomings of IE that led him to move to Firefox and goes on to point out some usability issues with Firefox. I wanted to take a second to address some of Scott's concerns about Firefox.

His first criticism is of the Find toolbar's location, at the bottom of the app rather than the top. We tried both configurations and the bottom was the solution that didn't cause the content area to shift down a couple of lines. This seemed much less jarring. We haven't done any serious usability testing on this but we've been following the feedback quite closely and Scott's not alone in this concern.

Scott's second concern is about the download dialog. I think he's asking for the amazing Download Statusbar extensions. For people that do a lot of downloading, this is certainly a nice UI. I use it occasionally. Scott, extensions kick ass ;-)

His next criticism is the new tab not inheriting session history from the previous tab (how IE does for new windows.) Again, this is one of those decisions that we spent a lot of time thinking about and we think we've settled on a reasonable default behavior. Perhaps some formal usability studies would enlighten us but I think that tabs are fundamentally different from new windows and just copying the new window behavior seems wrong too. Fortunately, and once again, extensions come to the rescue. Either Clone Window or Duplicate Tab should give Scott the behavior he's looking for.

Scott's forth issue, that modal dialogs which should be tab modal are app modal, is a bug. It's probably 123913 and we should fix that. It's a pain in the butt.

Scott's final complaint is that Firefox has a Go menu. Indeed. Not only do we have a go menu, but rather than displaying session history like the back and forward button, our Go menu shows global history. He suggests we put it out to pasture. I wouldn't have a problem with that :)

I'm really pleased that other than those issues, Scott, who worked on IE versions 1-5, is finding Firefox to be a better fit than IE. It's even better that he's offering some good feedback. Without high quality feedback, we wouldn't have the Firefox we do today.

Scott, if you're reading this, I highly recommend you give Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 a test drive. It's my daily browser and I find it to be not only faster and more stable than Firefox 1.0.6, but also considerably more polished. Oh, and as for your question on the gatekeepers for UI, that was Blake, Ben, Dave, and me :-)

Today I stumbled across this article by Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist and author of The Life of the Cosmos, and it just grabbed me. If you think like me, you'll enjoy this short piece written for a catalogue for an exhibit of sculpture by Elizabeth Turk.

We've got some really exciting things coming up at Spread Firefox. If you haven't seen it yet, head over to SFX and join in the discussion about Firefox and the new TV series, Supernatural.

We've got a lot of buzz lately, almost all of it a result of grass roots marketing -- existing users reaching out to potential new users -- and I think it's only gonna grow as we start to make better connections with more Firefox users in more positions to spread the word. Exciting times!

The Firefox Beta 1 release is looking pretty good so far. We've identified a couple of new crash bugs through talkback, and the data coming in on broken websites is awesome. Today I'll be diving in to start triage of the bugs nominated to block the next Firefox beta. If any major new problems surfaced in your use/testing of Beta 1, please make sure those bugs have been nominated for Beta 2 by setting the "blocking1.8b5?" flag. Thanks.

A few people commenting here at my weblog have taken to hurling quite offensive personal insults (most of which are directed at people other than me.) I'll will remove those comments and ban commenters who cannot keep things civil.

I've got not problems with healthy debate, and in general don't even mind absorbing personal insults aimed at me, but if the language gets out of hand or people start using my blog to insult other members of the Mozilla community, their access to the comment interface at this weblog won't last.

Also, off-topic comments are subject to removal. I've got lots of posts here and I read most of the comments, even on the older posts. If you can't find the correct post to comment on here at my blog, I suggest you get a blog of your own and use that.

That being said, I think that comments here are overwhelmingly constructive and add a lot of value, and I want to thank all of the people who, by contributing in the comments, have helped make this blog so exciting over the last few years.

Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 is out. Go get it!

Highlights include:

• Automated Software Update.
  
• Spell check as you type.
• Built in phishing detector to help protect users against email scams.
• Podcasting and other RSS Improvements.
• Deleting attachments from messages.
• Integration with server side spam filtering.
• Reply and forward actions for message filters.
• Kerberos Authentication.
• Auto save as draft for mail composition.
• Improvements to product usability including redesigned options UI, search and filter UI, and SMTP server management.
• Many security enhancements

You heard it here first.

10 months and over 5,000 bugs squashed -- Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is available for download.

win32 | linux | mac

(We haven't released 1.5 Beta 1 yet. Please don't jump the gun and blog or post reviews saying we have until we actually have. Thanks.)

We've taken what we believe are the final changes into Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 and expect to have a release sometime tomorrow.

If you'd like to help us test these candidates, you can find the builds here: windows, macintosh, and linux.

Using the builds for regular surfing and reporting your feedback here is great. If you're interested in more focused testing, some of the areas that you might hammer on are topsite testing, update testing, and putting any ecommerce or webmail accounts you have through their paces.

You'll probably notice that some of your extensions are not (yet) compatible with this release but I expect over the next few days, most of the popular extensions will be updated. Many already have and are already working. This is actually a key area we could use your help testing -- the extension update checking, disabling, and re-enabling, so please don't shy away from helping us get this all worked out in time for the Beta and then in time for the final release. Thanks.

You'll also notice that the super sexy Firefox branding has returned -- that should be reason enough to help us test ;-)

If the feedback doesn't turn up anything horrible in the next half day or so, we'll be in a great position to ship this beta. I'll have more updates on the beta release tomorrow.

If you're an extension author and you want your extension to be available to 1.5 beta 1 users, you'll need to test your extension against today's candidate builds and if it's functioning, then rev the extension version. If it's not functioning, now would be a great time to repair it. You can find more info on this over at the Mozilla Developer news blog

We've got a post up at the Mozilla Quality blog asking for Mozilla Testers to tell us a bit about themselves. If you're a Mozilla (Firefox, or Thunderbird) tester, please head over to the Quality blog and see how.

We hope to have all the changes for 1.5 beta 1 landed by this eveing so that tomorrow morning's builds will be our first candidates for the beta. We'll spend the day testing the builds and if all goes well we'll have a release by Thursday. If we find problems, we'll try to take low-risk fixes, and spin up a new round of builds so that we can hold to the Thursday release plan.

As soon as we've got Firefox 1.5 beta 1 out the door, we'll start accepting changes for the second beta which is due the first week of October.

Over the last few months I've been at several geek conferences -- Gnomedex, OSCON, FooCamp -- and a couple others. One of the questions I got a lot of was "what kind of new features can we expect in the upcoming Firefox releases?" My answer was something like "I'd be pleased as punch if we could remove a couple features for the upcoming Firefox release. A feature is a flaming hoop we make our users jump through and if we're doing our jobs -- writing software that actually works for people -- we'd be removing those hoops, not adding more."

Blake Ross, Firefox co-creator and my co-conspirator over at the original "spread" site, Spread Firefox dot com, has been writing a Firefox for Dummies book. I expect that his experience doing that will produce some interesting commentary on the state of usability and discoverability of Firefox's 1.5 feature set.

Firefox is a huge improvement over IE and Mozilla browsers that came before it, in terms of usability and security, but it's still got a long ways to go before it's as good as it can be. Firefox makes people dread going online a lot less, but removing dread is just the beginning.

I can't wait to start work on Firefox 2.0

Looking through our list of Firefox 1.5 beta blockers this morning it appears that all of them have fixes and are in some stage of review or approval so I think we're solidly on track for a release next week.