Asa Dotzler - Firefox and more

firefox and thunderbird garage

Our very own Marcia Knous and Chris Hofmann have a new book coming out called Firefox and Thunderbird Garage.

I've been watching this book come together for several months now and it is, without a doubt, the book to get if you want to become a Firefox and Thunderbird power user. You'll find great explanations of all of the most important features and valuable instruction on the different ways you can use those features. You'll learn just how flexible and powerful these tools can be and, best of all, you'll enjoy the exploration because Marcia's made it a fun read.

As an added benefit, you can have confidence that what you're reading is coming not just from people who use the software, but people who have spent years developing and testing the software. You won't find any other books out there written by people who are more intimately involved with both Firefox and Thunderbird than Marcia and Chris so grab a copy and take your Firefox and Thunderbird experience to the next level.

say goodbye (again) to pop-ups!

update: before you comment here, we already know what this breaks. This was a test and we'll be having another test soon that backs off a little bit. Thanks for your help testing. No need for further debate here about whether or not it's OK to break requested pop-ups. It's not. We need to do a better job at identifying requested popups. Our goal is to break as little as possible while preventing unrequested pop-ups. We're workin' on it.

A lot of people have been reporting a new breed of pop-ups on the web. This increasing menace is rooted in the pop-up capabilities of plug-ins like flash and Java. If you're seeing pop-ups and pop-unders, you're probably visiting sites that have flash or other plug-ins and those plug-ins are being exploited by advertisers to abuse you with annoying pop-ups and pop-unders.

Firefox has the capability to disable these pop-ups but it wasn't enabled by default in Firefox 1.0 because we had concerns about websites that rely on plug-in triggered pop-ups for legitimate functionality.

Give that these pop-ups and pop-unders have really started to spread on the web, we're testing a quick patch that enables the Firefox pref to block them. I blogged about this earlier this month and included manual steps to disable these nasty pop-ups and pop-unders. In addition to this fix, the good news is that for sites where you need these pop-ups, you can just whitelist them like you do other "wanted" pop-ups. This looks (at this stage) like a reasonable trade off.

If you're interested in helping us test this patch, we've packaged it up as a signed extension you can install (and disable or uninstall if you don't like it.) It's available for testing from our ftp site. You'll need to add the site to your whitelist for software installation and then agree to the extension install to get it - or, you can simply right click and save as then open locally in Firefox.

I'd appreciate any feedback on how this affects the sites you visit, how well it controls the pop-up and pop-under problem, and whether or not you find any sites that don't work correctly after installing the extension. Feedback is welcome both here and in email to asa@mozilla.org.

I'm also interested in specific cases of these plug-in triggered pop-ups and pop-unders that we don't block (without the patch) that IE does block on XP SP2. If you know of sites using plug-in triggered pop-ups that IE blocks, please let me know here or at the above email address. Thanks!

Download: Pop-ups Must Die! extension.

update: OK, thanks for the feedback. We're working on addressing the problems and hope to have another test soon. If this was too much for you, just disable or uninstall from your Extension Manager. Thanks for all your testing and feedback!

early adopters and "web pros"

I've been watching our growth as closely as I can since well before the launch of Firefox 1.0 and so this doesn't come as any surprise to me but it's nice to see some of the stats pulled together like in this Information Week article.

Not too long ago, I aggregated all of the top 100 blog sites with public statistics and came up with 30% share for Gecko-based browsers. We've been taking serious ground with blog readers and web pros. Now it's time to figure out how to reach out to the next larger group of users.

google can't drive 55

Google just got a lot faster for Firefox. See here. Thanks to Yacoubean for the tip.

cool product of the day

This looks very cool. It's called LivePad and it's billed as "A realtime web-based collaborative editor." Check out the demo.

From the site:

Its user interface is written as XUL, a fundamental XML language for defining user interfaces in Mozilla applications. The client-side processing is done with JavaScript while the server-side processing is done with PHP. The data storage is handle with SQLite, an zero-configuration ACID-compliant SQL database engine.

This is very cool stuff, Ming Hong!

cat blogging

It's been a while since I posted about our cat, Ptolemy. Having just received another one of those "no one cares about your Mars stuff, we're just reading for the Firefox news" emails, I thought now would be the perfect time.

Ptolemy turned 6 last month. She's an indoor cat but gets to have supervised walks in the yard with her harness and leash. Deanna snapped this shot (at the right) tonight just as it was getting dark outside.

She's a pretty large siamese (about 11 pounds,) built like the more traditional apple heads with a rounder face and more sturdy build than today's competition breed.

Yes, we know that Ptolemy is traditionally a masculine name. She's named after Claudius Ptolemy who painted the geocentric theory in its finest light about 1,865 years ago. Our Ptolemy is pretty darned sure the universe revolves around her, hence the name.

The photo on the bottom left is from about five years ago when we lived in Austin, TX. Ptol made the flight here with us in a soft carrier on my lap :-)

what do you all think of yahoo 360?

After about 30 minutes playing around I don't have anything definite to say about Yahoo 360, but they do have some of the nice cliche pastel boxes with rounded corners. I'm happy with my MT blog so I won't be moving there any time soon. I also noticed some bug with trunk Firefox in their rich text area thing.

It's decent looking but there's nothing shockingly cool about it.

mozilla developer interview #3

Ask and ye shall receive. Mike Shaver, of the Lightning project has agreed to answer interview questions here at adot's notblog* and so I'm opening the floor to questions. If you've asked Lightning or Calendar questions at Ask Asa and my response wasn't sufficient, now's the time to try again.

Interestingly, Simon Paquet had the same idea at about the same time, so we'll be doing deuling interviews ;-) Actually, we won't. We'll be doing a combined interview and the answers to both sets of questions will be posted at both blogs.

Mike Shaver is a founding member of mozilla.org, the Lightning project leader, and a maker of fine omelettes. I'll open the floor here for questions and hopefully get those all wrapped up and delivered to Mike later this week (so be quick with your questions.)

columns

Now this is a nifty Gecko feature. Maybe I'll start using columns here. What do you all think?

Oh, and Mike Connor, who recently visited us at the MoFo headquarters, has a good Firefox blog post. If you're interested in Firefox dev, you should keep an eye on his blog.

like a phoenix

Like a phoenix from the flames, a great idea rises again.

Some time back over at SpreadFirefox.com, we started an effort to make a college poster to help spread Firefox. The results of this effort was a great poster that showed a rear view close-up of a person wearing bluejeans with a Firefox-wrapped condom in the hip pocket. The slogan was "Always use protection." Everyone involved loved it and we were days from taking it to print.

The project was spiked because of concerns that it would offend some people. One of the participants in that poster effort has revived the idea and while it's not a poster, this variation makes a very nice desktop image. Go check it out at mandolux.

Thanks to Chris for the heads up.

weather station

I've been meaning for months to set up this great wireless weather station from La Crosse Tehchnology (a birthday present from Deanna and my mom.) and today I finally got outside, climbed up on the roof (to mount the wind sensor) and set it all up.

My timing was perfect because just as I wrapped it up, the rain started coming down -- which meant that I could test the rain sensor without getting out the hose :-) So far it's working wonderfully. As soon as I get an adaptor or a differnt cable (the PC connector is telephone to RS-232 serial cable, and none of my machines have serial connectors) I'll start pushing my weather to the web, and maybe even join these guys. Now isn't that fun :)

great new extension

I don't use a lot of extensions, mostly because Firefox "just works" for me out of the box. There are a few nice ones that I use on occasion, like BugMeNot (though I can usually uninstall that after a few weeks of building up my password manager store) and LinkVisitor which I use to keep track of the articles I've read and not read at big aggregation sites like Google News or TheRegister.

Last week I started using Nightcap, a new extension that loads download status at the bottom of the browser window and I think I'll probably keep that one. Today I've discovered a new extension that I'm sure will be a keeper -- at least until we get similar functionality built in to Firefox. It's called Resizeable Textarea and it "just works".

If you use web mail, or blog with a web-based tool, or participate in forums, you can go hack up a user-stylesheet to resize most text areas you use regularly, but you'll still find yourself using other text areas and wish you had a simple way to resize. I used to use Jesse's bookmarklets for this, but this new extension is so much cleaner and more precise. I give this one two thumbs up. Good work, Raik!

free audio books?

I'm looking for collections of books that I can dump onto my iPod and listen to in the car. I'm cheap, so I'm looking for free books. I've poked around but can't seem to find any high-quality recordings for free. Anyone have any suggestions?

spirit got a bath

If any of you are following the Mars Rovers, you'll probably have already seen the great news from the Spirit rover team that the solar panels got a good cleaning about two weeks ago. (For those of you who don't know, the lifespan of the rovers is probably going to be determined by the amount of dust that accumulates on the rovers' solar panels. The dust accumulates and blocks the panels' capability to generate electricity and recharge the rovers' batteries. Without that energy, the rovers die.)

About two weeks ago, just as Spirit snapped some amazing photos of dust devils the team noticed a big jump in the power output of the solar panels. It turns out that some very helpful dust lifting winds, probably the same winds that created the dust devils, cleaned up the solar panels.

This week, the team released some before and after photos of Spirit's Pancam calibration target which clearly shows how much of a cleaning the rover got. This is great news because it improves the power situation and will help Spirit make a great climb up to "Husband Hill" summit and probably extend the rover livespan significantly.

update If you're wondering why they didn't just build a windshield wiper onto the solar panels, read helvick's explanation in the comments. I should have added a note about that with the original post. Thanks, helvick.

mozilla developer interview #2 - scott macgregor

About two months ago, I brought you all the first in my new series of Mozilla developer interviews. It was a quick Q & A with Brian Ryner. The response to that was very favorable and I decided to try to turn it into a regular event. Feedback here suggested Scott MacGregor as someone that you all were very interested in so I opened up a post to gather questions. Scott was happy to participate and here are his answers.

First, a question from me (Asa). "How and when did you get involved with mail development and are there other applications that you've worked on or would be interested in working on."

mscott: I started working on the Netscape 4 e-mail client after I graduated from MIT in the summer of 1997. After Netscape went open source, I began working with folks like David Bienvenu, Seth Spitzer and Alec Flett to create the Mozilla Mail Client (part of the Mozilla Application Suite). In February of 2003 I started the Thunderbird project in my spare time and shifted my Mozilla focus to that. David Bienvenu and I now work on Thunderbird full time as employees of the Mozilla Foundation.

patrick asks "In the TB-section of mozilla wiki it states something like 'menus need severe decruftification' and something similar about the rest of the UI of TB. While i am a 100-times-a-day-user of TB and am very pleased with it i just wanted to ask who put that sentence there and what it means for the future?"

mscott: I haven't read those Wiki comments yet so I can't say what someone meant by that. We're always looking to improve the over all usability of Thunderbird and are always open to suggestions. In fact one of the new 1.1 features is a redesigned Options UI which I think is a huge improvement over the existing interface and something I'm very excited about. Other recent usability improvements include: managing SMTP servers, and an improved RSS feed subscription interface.

Olly asks, "Will we see some sort of Exchange/eMAPI compatibility"

mscott: We currently support Microsoft's public Simple MAPI protocol for interacting with Windows Applications such as Word, Excel, etc. I don't forsee us adding proprietary Exchange code to the Mozilla codebase any time soon for Exchange compatibility. I would point out that Exchange has the ability to act as an IMAP server, you just need your system administrator to enable IMAP support.

miguel asks, "Why is Thunderbird so sexy?"

mscott: It must be the Thunderbird mascot.

Ian Pottinger wonders, "Have you given thought to starting your own blog? I am sure there are many more like me who would enjoy reading more about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into every Thunderbird release."

mscott: One day I'd like to set up a web blog. Right now I already spend so much time writing code and communicating with folks on the Mozillazine Thunderbid forums that I don't think I'd use it very much and it would quickly fall into a state of disrepair.

Donny asks, "There has been a several discussions going on in the forums regarding labeling emails, to be more exact doing this more or less the way Gmail does. Are there any short/long-term plans to change the current labeling way (or remove 5 labels limitation)?"

mscott: We don't have any plans at the moment to alter this behavior. For folks looking for a more powerful solution, I'd suggest using saved search folders to attain the same goal.

Dere asks, "Will it be possible to use 'group by sort' and the 'virtual folders' together?"

mscott: We'd like to make this work eventually.

Henrik wonders, "Do you plan to extend the "manage identities" feature, so that an SMTP server can be associated with an identity?"

mscott: This is one of the new Thunderbird 1.1 features and exists already in the current 1.1 nightly test builds. Enjoy!

and my wrap up question is "What does the emergence of reasonably capable web email tools like gmail mean to you?"

mscott: I think you'll always have folks that receive a certain volume of e-mail in a given day which works fine for web based email. And using Firefox with a provider like gmail is going to be great for that. I also think you'll have a subset of users who deal in much larger volumes of e-mail or are in an enterprise based setting which requires the power of a thick e-mail client. And then you'll have a set of users that can benefit from both! I actually use Thunderbird with my gmail account so I can get the benefits of a good web mail service while leveraging Thunderbird's features. For instance, I've found that Thunderbird's junk mail filters make an excellent complement to the gmail spam blocker in catching things that get passed it. Between the two of them, I get great coverage.

Thanks, Scott, for taking the time to participate here.

A big thanks to all of you who asked questions and certainly to Scott MacGregor for taking a break from all that Thunderbird work to respond with some great answers.

Who do you all want to hear from next. I can't make promises, but let me know and I'll try to make another one of these Mozilla developer interviews happen.

answers from asa #15

Question from Peter Kasting
Asa, after Mike Connors' recent Slashdotted comments about Firefox code reviews (and the various reactions and related stories around the web), we've seen a post from Ben Goodger and a followup from Mike Connors, but I've seen no explicit discussion of how Mike's particular comments will be addressed. Ben's post seemed to discuss future plans for Firefox (especially projects being worked on by the "inner circle") and delegation of work, while Mike sought to assure people that there were still more people than himself working on Firefox, but neither one seemed to explicitly mention how more code reviews were going to get done. From my (outsider's) perspective, it looks like a scarcity of people with both comprehensive knowledge of the codebase and the time (and monetary compensation) to review the code, leading to a perception among other "outsiders" that submitting patches is somewhat useless as no one will be able to get them reviewed. Is this particular piece of the Firefox picture of concern to the Mozilla Foundation? Are there plans to hire any additional staff for this kind of a focus, or in some way enable more code reviews to happen, so that contributions from people outside the 6 core Firefox hackers can get in more quickly? Is there anything we outsiders can do to help build the "community of hackers" Mike suggested Firefox may not have developed yet?

Peter, we have always had and probably will always have a scarcity of patch reviewers. One could rephrase to say that we've got more patch contributions than we can handle. Better tracking tools in Bugzilla would help the situation some, but it boils down to an abundance of patches, mostly non-critical and a small set of developers capable of understanding first, whether or not we even want the change, and then, assuming we do, that the code is correct. There are currently about 135 bugs with patches awaiting review. Over half of those are very minor or are feature requests. The "Core" product, which contains Gecko and other infrastructure for Firefox currently has about 310 bugs with pendant requests. Given the size of the two teams, the two products seem to me to have about the same shortage. As far as building the community of hackers, we're on the way. We have all of these people submitting patches and needing review from the senior developers so I'd wager that there's a pretty good group there to cultivate and grow.

Question from James Napolitano
Why are dogs *so* much better pets than cats? (Wow, if that isn't flamebait, I don't know what is) Just kidding :). My actual question is this: a while ago there was a big commotion about cooperation between the GNOME and Mozilla projects. The possibility was even raised of merging the two. We haven't heard anything about this since, so I ask, has anything happened along this front? Oh, and what's up with all that dark energy? I mean, what is it and what causes it? I demand exact answers, in your own words!

I'm picking the first question to answer ;-) Dogs are so much better than cats because they like to roll in garbage, lick their privates right before they try to lick your mouth, and generally poop and pee whatever they are. Cat's are obviously inferior because they bathe themselves regularly, rarely come home smelling of the neighbor's garbage, make number 1 and 2 in a litter box and bury it well, and show affection in much more appropriate ways than a french kiss. ;-) On the Gnome question, we continue to work with those folks at an engineering level. On the dark energy question, my exact answer is "nobody knows" but I suspect we will have much better answers in the next decade. We may very well find that it's not necessary to add dark energy to the equation at all.

Question from zzigtu bukti
My question is: why is your name so funny, where does it come form, and what does it mean? Thank you.

what irony. :D

Question from killermanjarro
What products and techniques do you use to groom your goatee? I have found it almost impossible to tend to a goatee without it taking up too much time.

I have a flowbee and one pound bucket of lard ;-)

Question from xiao
When will we see new features for everyday folk in Firefox? Security fixes, rendering improvements and news Preferences dialogs are great but don't really get people excited like Tabbed Browsing or Find as you Type. Saying 'extensions' is all well and good to people who are capable of installing them, but most people aren't. Also, extensions will never integrate or perform as well as base code. So my question: What, if any, are the NEW killer features for Firefox, and will you please please PLEASE put them in 1.1 instead of 1.5? If not, how do you hope to keep competing with IE7?

Xiao, we've been hard at work on new features since the release of 1.0. The releases we've had since then have been specifically concerned with security so no new features are going to happen in those. I'd also disagree with your statement that no extension can integrate or perform as well as base code. That's simply not true. As far as competing with IE 7, I don't think that requires a lot of new features. If we continue to make the browser easier to deploy and use and more stable and secure, IE can't win :) Actually, we will have new features in 1.1 and 1.5 (and 2.0) that will make browsing easier and more safe and secure. We have to worry about our app, not what Microsoft is up to.

Question from Jure Repinc
I'm also interested into GNOME + Mozilla cooperation. But as I mostly use KDE for my desktop I would like to ask: What is the progress of native Firefox/Thunderbird interface for KDE?

Jure, I don't know the state of KDE's effort to port Firefox and Thunderbird to their toolkit. That would be a question better asked of the KDE folks.

Question from phil
Who is the artist that created the firefox logo?

It was a collaborative process that you can read about here.

Question from Bram
How should convince someone to switch to Firefox when the always-available Internet Explorer is updated to a version that is as secure as required by most users? (Or the people who already tell me: "But the one I have works fine for me! Why should switch to something that might occasionally display a page different than intended?")

Bram, you should dispute the validity of that statement. You can read about how IE was insecure for 98% of last year. See this and this. If you're talking to people who don't see a point in upgrading and the security story doesn't carry enough water, try selling them on features like tabbed browsing and type-ahead find.

Question from Chris G.
What extensions do you use with Firefox and/or Thunderbird? Why? Also, do you have a screenshot of your copy of Firefox in action? Just curious how one of the Mozilla guys has customized his Firefox :)

I rarely use extensions but I do have a few installed. The first one I install is always BugMeNot because I'm an avid reader of tech news and so many sites require logins these days. I used to make up bogus logins but BugMeNot saves me that time. I also have LinkVisitor which helps me keep better track of where I left off in a buglist or a news site. Finally, I just started using Myk's new Nightcap extension for moving the download manager into a slim toolbar at the bottom of your browser windows. My customizations are really quite few and are more about content than chrome. Here's a screenshot.

Question from Tablet
I noticed new flags in bugzilla for blocking Firefox 1.0.2 and blocking Firefox 1.0.3. Is it because there is going to be Firefox 1.0.2 release soon? If so, why? Thanks

Well, I'm a bit late to getting to this so you probably already know that we've shipped Firefox 1.0.2, a security update. If and when we ship a Firefox 1.0.3 it will also be a security update.

Question from Foxtrot
When can we expect to see some progress on update.mozilla.org... Roadmaps? Policies? After a long silence, there were some blog entries a month (?) or so ago that shed some light on what the problems had been (eg, security audit) and that progress was now being made. But since then it seems to be running in stealth mode. For those of us who write extensions, it would be nice to know when (if?) the Developer Control Panel will return, and how the perpetual weeks-long backlog of submitted extensions will be addressed. I think there was also mention of working with other extension sites (like extensionsmirror.nl) that have become popular due to UMO's shortcomings -- any news on that front? Also... Now that Opportunity has reached Vostok crater, it looks to be boring and filled in (just ring-shaped flat circle of white rocks). What's your prediction for when we'll finally see some interesting terrain again? :-)

I'm really not in the loop on the state of Extension update services from UMO. I do know that they're in the process of hardware and software upgrades and security audits. There are also going to be new features that help everyone conform to the new extension hosting policy. I'll try to look into it more when I'm not so snowed over with other work. You could probably get more by asking those involved. As far as the Mars rovers go, I think we've seen most of what we're going to see as far as new terrain goes. I'm still hopeful, but we've seen so much more variety than I ever expected, that I'll be content even if the pretty pictures continue to look a lot like what we had over the past year.

Question from That Guy
I halfheartedly asked about this at the end of your last Ask Asa: What will be the future uses of XTF? Will you use it to for example integrate the code-heavy SVG standard which isn't suitable for the "less than 5MB" download you want Firefox2 to be? Also, what's your opinion on how to best learn coding and becoming involved in Firefox development? Thanks for your time. :-)

Guy, I know next to nothing about XTF. Sorry. As far as learning coding and becoming involved, I always recommend that you start out in testing, reporting bugs, and triaging existing bugs. This will give you a good feel for the people involved as well as the process that patches go through in order to become part of Firefox. Watching discussions in the developer newsgroups and on IRC is also very useful. In then end, it boils down to finding a bug you'd like to fix and then figuring out how to fix it.

Question from Programmerman
The Firefox nighly Linux builds currently show "gcc version 3.3.2" in about:buildconfig. Are there plans to move to GCC 3.4.x or 4.0? The latest GCC status report says 3.4.4 is due May 1 and 4.0 is due April 15. I'm a tweaking addict and I build my own optimized versions from CVS. I think the users should have builds with the latest fixes and code optimizations added to newer GCC versions. Also, is Pango support still planned for font rendering?

Programmerman, I'm simplifying the answer to your first question a little bit but basically we use that so that we can build binaries that are compatible with the widest variety of systems. As far as Pango goes, it's already there and being included in the Fedora Firefox updates. Mozilla Denudation's distribution doesn't have it yet but as soon as a couple more reviews are completed, we'll have that as an option for our builds.

Question from Likhat
I agree with xiao. Why isn't there more migration from the uber-popular and not-too-tech-only extensions to the main codebase, where new features should rightly belong?

Likhat, one of the things that makes Firefox so easy to use for so many people is that it doesn't try to do everything. We just shipped our first version a few months ago and are in the middle of working on our first non-security update (Firefox 1.1). I think it's a little too soon to suggest that we should have integrated extensions into the main codebase already. If and when we do integrate any extensions, it will be with significant evaluation not done lightly. We all have our pet feature requests, including myself, but if everyone got the feature they wanted, we'd be right back where we were with the Mozilla suite.

Question from Lino Mastrodomenico
The Web Forms 2.0 specification from the WHAT working group is almost ready. AFAIK Firefox/Gecko/NGT already supports some small parts of it; when we can expect (almost) full support? <p class="flamebait">Cats are much better than dogs, obviously.</p> ;-)

I've been so busy at the application layer that I haven't been tracking Gecko as closely. I probably couldn't give you a date for full support even if I was watching it closely. I can poke around and maybe have a better answer for next time.

Question from Tomm Eriksen
How much of the code in Firefox is just used in Firefox, and not part of some other Mozilla component (for instance Gecko). I rough estimate (in percent) would do nicely :)

I'm estimating here, but I'll bet that the Firefox application layer is no more than 5% of the total lines of code (Firefox + Gecko). Extremely powerful XUL apps are quite tiny compared to the Gecko platform on top of which they live.

Question from jimich
Hello Asa ... some little questions about some future fonctionality of FF and TB * Will FF will get a profile manager? ok, i know it is there, but it is not easy for standard user to get it --> exemple: a link in the start menu (windows) will be cool, as for thunderbird * Is TB will have a different settings mode for enable javascript/loading image? In fact, i disable javascript for all mails ... but it cause that my RSS feeds cannot use the javascript ... and thus, some of thus cannot work. It will be cool if the JS/image can be changed in a per folder setting mode * Is TB'block image will be extended. Now, you can enable extern images in your mails from messages coming from adress in your adress book ... but some mailing lists change their email adress with each newsletters (the domain stay, the adresse stay also, but added with some numbers to identify the newsletter) --> for exemple newsletter.00.001.012.64@newsletter.domain.com A new setting to enable adress like newsletter.*@newsletter.domain.com will be cool ... or a other filter like "subject contain ..."

Hello, jimich. Firefox will not get a profile manager and Thunderbird will probably get more fine-grained settings considering the needs of its RSS functionality.

Question from Bram
Which argument do you find most convincing to choose Firefox instead of Opera? And excuse me for my laziness, but I really don't know how much people get paid by the Mozilla Foundation. Thanks in advance, I still enjoy reading your blog.

Bram, I find the out of the box usability argument to be the single best way to convince people to use Firefox instead of Opera. Firefox is simply way easier for way more people to use without messing around a lot. Full time employees of the Mozilla Foundation get paid competitive wages (at least I do) for this industry and location.

Question from forest
Asa - What is the status of the stand alone XRE (XUL Runtime). It would be great to have a prebuilt XRE for all the platforms that mozilla supports to make building cross-platform stand alone XUL applications easier. I have used XULRunner for proto-typing and testing out XUL, but this approach is not a viable option for a real application. Thanks for your time.

XULRunner is rocketing forward with heroic efforts from Darin, Bsmedberg and probably others. XULRunner will become the most viable option for delivering real standalone XUL applications (as long as you consider applications like Firefox and Thunderbird to be "real applications".) You can read more about the plan over at the Mozilla wiki.

Question from qwerty
Asa, can you give us an update on the status of automated testing throughout all Mozilla products? I would like to know about both automated functional and security tests. In particular, have you extended the mangleme 'fuzzy' testing tool to non-HTML stuff? Is there anything in the way of autotests casual developers can cook up or help with which you busy MoFo's don't have time for?

Hi qwerty. Questions dear to my heart :-) We're still overloaded with current testing and release obligations but we're making some progress on automation. Tracy's working on a system for JS-based functional testing, Sarah's evaluating a couple of commercial tools for automation, Robert O'Callahan has squashed the last bug that was making layout automation painful, so things are progressing. We already use a couple of security automated testing tools, some home-baked and some commercial. If you're interested in contributing to automation, please email me at asa@mozilla.org and I'll try to get you hooked in to what's going on now.

Question from perko
I am the entirety of my school's new cycling team, and am looking for a modecum of sponsorship from companies that I feel good about, mostly just to buy the custom jersey with my school's logo on it. Would the Mozilla Foundation be interested in guying space for a two color Firefox logo for something in the $10 to $100 range? I have been a Firefox user since 0.9 and have converted a number of my friends at school over to the browser. I've also switched over to Linux (Suse) and want to represent OSS in doing what I love and what I'm good at. Thanks so much, Perko

Hey, Perko. I'm not the right person to answer that but you could email Rafael Ebron (rebron at meer dot net) and see if he can help you out.

Question from channeler
I'm "asking Asa" if he realizes that there is an entire nebula somewhat vying for the honor of representing FurFox in advertising and as an excellent wallpaper-- see the beautiful Fox Fur nebula at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050314.html

Channeler, yeah, I like it. Did you see my work on the "Firefox Nebula"?

If you'd like follow-up on one of the answers here, feel free to ask for it in the comments and I'll do what I can. If it's a new question, please hold off until the next installment of Ask Asa. Thanks.

zip builds

In case you haven't already read about it over at Chase's blog, I'm posting the news here as well.

We're no longer shipping windows zipped builds because they were too problematic. Our update mechanism serves installer builds and serves tens of millions of people. Many zipped build users (several million of them already exist, by my rough estimates) got hosed by the 1.0.1 update which installed Firefox over their zipped install and left them with a completely broken browser.

Discontinuing the zipped builds (which were created for testing, not for end users) will prevent that kind of problem from spreading to millions more users. It will also simplify our test matrix for the app and for the update system, something that desperately needs to happen if we're going to move forward in improving both.

There are a lot of people who prefer the zipped builds. I've tried to address a few of those below:

"I don't have permission on this system to use installers" - there are a couple of workarounds here. First, you could just get the zipped nightly build that corresponds to the final release (look at the build ID in the final release, and get the same nightly build from the same branch and you're set). There is nothing magical about the release build. It is the exact same nightly build bits that we QA'd with a new file name and location on FTP. The second answer is to make a "zipped" build of your own. Just install the installer and don't run it, then zip up the Firefox directory and carry that around.

"I like the zip because it doesn't touch my registry like the installer." - wrong, the app itself does a fine job of molesting the registry. You don't have to use the installer to leave Firefox registry footprints.

"I keep the release zip builds around for regression testing." great! so do I. In the future I'll be keeping the final nightly build or making a zip myself from the installer.

"Zipped builds is preferred on Linux." indeed it is right now. We should work to remedy that by making official RPMs. In the mean time, we're still shipping the linux tarballs.

"I'm using the zip build to install it for lots of other people at my work/school/home." Well, then you're setting those people up for a pretty awful situation unless you're also disabling the app update feature. If you're disabling the app update feature for them, then you're supporting their installation and upgrade process and you're probably capable of making your own zipped build.

There are scores of additional reasons that people want the zipped builds, but right now there are too many differences between the zipped and installer builds and we cannot afford to let millions more get zipped builds that may break them when they try to get a security update.

Also, perhaps some of you who care so deeply about the zipped builds could fix them so that their filelists match the installer builds' and stayed in sync. That would go a long way to improving their prospects for a return.

firefox 1.0.2 is out

Firefox 1.0.2 is a proactive update to fix a bug that makes users vulnerable to a buffer overflow in GIF image processing. We don't know of any exploits in the wild that take advantage of this bug, but the Mozilla Foundation, and all of the mozilla.org projects, take security very seriously, so we're happy to be able to provide rapid turnaround on issues like this.

We've worked hard to build a reputation for delivering secure products. That reputation wasn't earned by some billion dollar PR effort with catchy phrases, it was earned because we've attracted great talent from all over the world and they are continuously examining our open source code, and testing our releases and developer builds, helping to find and fix software flaws before they become security exploits.

This is one of the areas that proprietary software has a difficult time competing with open source and the discovery and fixing of this GIF buffer overflow is a perfect example. Because security experts have direct access to the code as it's being developed, and have a direct line into our development and testing process, these kinds of issues usually get reported directly to us.

So grab the new Firefox 1.0.2 bits :-)

fedora core 4 test 1

After a day on Fedora Core 4, test 1, I've had my fill. I performed a "complete" install from the DVD on my Lifebook and that all went quite well. Complete seems to take about 7 GB of space :-)

Things seemed to be going OK at first, then I notices that my fans were screaming and when I checked top I saw that the CPU was pegged by gdm and syslog. A reboot didn't cure this ill so, with Johnny's help, I turned it off and dropped back to a console boot and manually starting X.

Once I got up again, my fans started screaming again and checking top, I saw some other process chewing up CPU. I forgot what it was, something about linking (and I wasn't compiling or anything like that). Not interested in tracking that down, I just bailed :-)

I'm hoping that these issues were unique to my install or laptop but I'm happy falling back to FC3 and I'll be patiently awaiting FC4 test 2.

last chance for the bugzilla sweepstake

There's one hour left to get your entry in for the Bugzilla 300,000 Bug Sweepstake.

I guessed 2005-06-22 16:32:01 but I'll probably be off by about a month. We'll see.

thunderbird 1.0.2 available for download

We've just pushed the Thunderbird 1.0.2 update to FTP (it may take an hour or more to hit all the mirrors, though.) This update is the first security release for the wildly successful Thunderbird 1.0 - which has already seen about 5 million downloads.

The Thunderbird 1.0.2 release resolves several important security issues since 1.0 and all Thunderbird users are encouraged to ugrade. You can find more about the security issues over at the Known Vulnerabilities page.

Thunderbird 1.0.2 can be downloaded at:

Windows
Linux
Mac

In case you're wondering whether or not you missed a release, the answer is no. We shipped Thunderbird 1.0 in early December and had planned our first security update to coincide with the Firefox 1.0.1 security update. Before we could get Thunderbird 1.0.1 finalized, a new issue surfaced that required we ship another round of releases (Firefox, Thunderbird, and 1.7.x) so we shelved the Thunderbird 1.0.1 release and started to tackle the issue we needed fixed for a 1.0.2.

mozilla 1.7.6 available for download

Mozilla 1.7.6, the latest security and stability update to the Mozilla 1.7 product, is now available. You can find the release notes here and my quick and dirty changelog here.

This release resolves several important security issues to bring the Mozilla 1.7 product up to par with Firefox 1.0.1 as well as a couple of additional security fixes which will be released with Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.2. (An update to the Known Vulnerabilities for Mozilla 1.x should be appearing here soon.)

You can download Mozilla 1.7.6 from here:

Windows
Linux
Mac

I'm sure some of you all are scratching your heads and thinking, "Another Mozilla 1.x release. I thought that MoFo wasn't doing the Suite any longer." Well, you're half right. We're not doing new versions, but we are maintaining Mozilla on the Mozilla 1.7 branch so you can expect to see regular security updates beyond 1.7.6.

toolbar tutorial

If you've been thinking about building a Firefox toolbar but didn't know where to start, this article is for you.

Oh, and while you're there, check out the very nice Googlebar Lite. This toolbar is to the Googlebar what Firefox is to Seamonkey :-)

three hundred thousand reports sweepstake

One of the occasionally overlooked areas where Mozilla has redefined open source software development is in the bredth and depth of our open source community of quality assurance and testing volunteers.

We're about to achieve another milestone in Bugzilla and Gerv's again holding a sweepstakes for all of you Mozilla folks out there with Bugzilla accounts. Head over to his blog and get your name in the hat with a guess for when we'll hit the 300,000 bug reports mark in Bugzilla.

mozilla 1.7.6 candidates available

We're swiftly approaching the release of Mozilla 1.7.6. You can find the candidate builds at:

Windows
Linux
Mac

fox and bird 1.0.2 release candidates

OK, we have bits that we hope are final. If you've got a few minutes to help us test these out, we'd really appreciate any feedback.

You can find the Firefox candidate builds here:
Windows
Linux
Mac

You can find the Thunderbird candidate builds here:
Windows
Linux
Mac

Areas that could use specific attention are:

• Drag and drop, both within the browser and to and from other applications.
  
• Iframes in XUL windows (if you've got extensions, we changed the default size so if you were relying on a minimum iframe size, you might need to adjust).
  
• Lock icon state when navigating to named anchors in secure pages.
• Bookmarked pages in the sidebar.

If you see any strangeness in those areas, please let me know. Actually, if you see any strangeness in any areas, please let me know.

firefox and thunderbird 1.0.2

We shipped the security update for Firefox 1.0 three weeks ago with the intention of shipping the Thunderbird and Mozilla Suite upates soon after. Well, just as we were getting ready to push out Thunderbird 1.0.1 and Mozilla 1.7.6 releases we came across a couple more issues that needed fixing in all three of our products.

We've shelved the Thunderbird 1.0.1 bits and are hard at work getting Firefox 1.0.2 and Thunderbird 1.0.2 wrapped up and delivered. As soon as that's done, we'll be pushing out the Mozilla 1.7 update too.

If all goes well, we'll have candidate builds in the next day or two for community testing. I'll let you all know as soon as they're available. (And, yes, we did fix the 2004 copyright notice to say 2005 ;-)

download counter update

We're very close to having the SpreadFirefox.com download counter up and running again. Hopefully this will happen this week or early next and it will be automated so I don't have to make those updates manually. It's been quite a while since the last update so it's going to be interesting to see what we're up to :-)

yahoo support

The good news keeps flooding in. Today it's a nice article titled Yahoo vows to open all services to Firefox. If you were in any doubt as to whether or not Firefox would achieve the kind of mainstream recognition necessary to improve the web, it might be good to start counting the top 100 sites that are evaluating or currently building in support for Firefox. I'll bet that list is getting pretty impressive.

another in the "ask" series

Ask Jeeves has a Firefox toolbar.

And so, in the spirit of adding useful functionality for Firefox users, we are excited to announce the release of our first toolbar for Firefox. You can download it here. It features convenient access to Ask Jeeves world-class search technology, and one-click access to a range of search tools, including the MyJeeves personal search service. Other new features added to our Firefox toolbar include:

- Save any webpage you access
- Save useful locations, e.g work or home
- Snip content from web pages and save it
- Search your personal web from anywhere via the toolbar

Stay tuned for more features, coming soon.

ask mitchell

If you have questions for Mitchell Baker, you can ask over at slashdot.

chase's cross compiling adventure

Chase Phillips, the MoFo Build Engineer, has posted to his blog looking for information on Cross-compiling Mac executables from Intel x86. If you've got anything to contribute to that discussion, head on over and and post comments or trackback him with your thoughts.

my seamonkey past and future

It seems like a lot of relative new-comers to Mozilla (and a couple of old-timers) believe that my only goal in life is to kill Seamonkey, seemingly because either I think it sucks or I think it threatens Thunderbird and Firefox. I thought I'd spend a few overly-defensive minutes and recount some of my history on this project with the hope that folks will see that's just not the case.

In the spring and summer of 1998 I was downloading binaries of the Mozilla Classic code. Back then, you couldn't get any binaries from mozilla.org so I had to hunt them down at a few ftp repositories that hosted semi-regular "pre-compiled binaries." (Anyone else here remember Mike Wynholds's FTP and poking npm.general posts nearly every day to see if he had a new binary?) Soon, Jason Kersey, now of Mozillazine fame, had started a very cool site called mozBin that attempted to maintain links to the latest of these early community builds, including Mike's, so me and the handful of other early "community testers" could get new builds pretty frequently.

I was a huge fan of the (now "classic") next-generation Communicator that was being developed and I spent more hours than I can count downloading binaries with my US Robotics Sportster 28.8 modem onto a Dell P100 with 32 MB of RAM. Not only was downloading a painful task but running the builds, even when I could score non-debug builds, was an exercise in both faith and patience (45 second start-up times :| When mozilla.org started providing binaries toward the end of 1998 and the transition to NGLayout and XPFE was starting to pick up steam, I was downloading at least a half dozen builds a week.

I loved Seamonkey. I loved the idea of XPFE and even the hard to love early Apprunner implementation. I spent hours and hours talking on IRC with developers about XPFE problems and trying to get early Messenger to work so I could wean myself off of 4.x completely. By M3 or M4 I was fully migrated to Apprunner nightly builds for browsing (not a great experience, let me tell you) and by M9 or M10 I was fully migrated to MailNews nightly builds. I don't think that anyone but a couple of Netscape Mail engineers had made that move as early as I did.

You couldn't have found a bigger fan of Seamonkey anywhere. You couldn't find a more staunch defender of XUL and XPFE (except maybe Chris and the one or two others that would take on Bruce at Mozillazine :-) I devoted the entirety of my evenings and weekends the following year working to build an open source community around the Seamonkey project -- Seamonkey had become a true labor of love.

By the time M16 and M17 rolled around, I had been hired and was working full-time for mozilla.org and it was becoming clear that the time had come for the Netscape 6 product and the mozilla.org 1.0 release to part ways. I became one of the original drivers@mozilla.org to help define the requirements for Mozilla 1.0 and to help drive releases on the road to 1.0 and beyond.

Since then, I've spent a significant amount of my time at Mozilla working long weeks and late nights, busting my butt to ship about 70 Seamonkey releases. Yes, 70 release cycles of building buglists, driving those buglists, assembling testing, shipping, collecting feedback and building the next buglist. I have been devoted to shipping high-quality Seamonkey releases for almost 5 years and I couldn't have done that if I didn't believe in Seamonkey, if I didn't love it.

Two and a half years after the release of Mozilla 1.0, most estimates of of marketshare put Mozilla 1.x between 2% and 3%.

I was very involved when Firefox was born (then m/b) and saw the potential for this new application to take the Mozilla project, the standards-based Gecko rendering technologies, and Open Source much further than Seamonkey had been able. I was quick to step in to help with project management and releasing and by the time we got to Phoenix 0.5, it was clear to me that this app was going to deliver Gecko to more desktops, doing more for the Mozilla project and our goals of preserving choice and building an open, standards-based, web than anything we'd done to date. I've spent the last three years working to make that potential into a reality -- while still fully committed to delivering great Seamonkey releases on a regular basis.

Firefox 1.0 shipped about 30 million downloads in the first 4 months it's been available and is achieving market penetration at about 15 times the rate that Seamonkey did over the last two and a half years. While Seamonkey leveled out at around 2-3%, Firefox has already gained about 6% and clearly has a momentum that Seamonkey never had and I don't believe could ever have.

I well understand that there are some long-time contributors and a non-trivial number of Seamonkey users who haven't yet made the migration to Firefox. I plan to do what I can to support them with regular security updates to the 1.7 release for users and assistance to the new team of contributors who want to take Seamonkey forward.

Like probably everyone else working on Mozilla projects, I'm already overloaded but that's never stopped me before from taking on additional work so I'll be doing what I can to work with the new team Seamonkey to help them get off the ground and develop their project and release planning.

I'm here to help all of the Mozilla efforts and that includes Seamonkey just like it includes Minimo, Camino, Bugzilla, and all of the other projects. My primary focus is on the Firefox and Thunderbird applications, but I put in lots of evening and weekend hours doing Mozilla work that isn't directly related to my primary responsibilities. I've talked with several of the folks emerging as early leadership in the Seamonkey project and as long as they want my help, and as long as I feel like it's appreciated, I'm here to give it.

If you still want to curse me in the comments or elsewhere, maybe you should consider whether it benefits Seamonkey to turn away one of it's oldest and most ardent supporters -- and the guy that knows more than probably any one else about how to ship successful Seamonkey releases.

yo yo yo

Wow. The Tom Kuhn Tom Cat would make an excellent upgrade to my Duncan Imperial. That sure is sexy.

I'm also enamored of the HSpin Good & Evil 2 Poison and the Cold Fusion (Playmaxx) now being shipped by Duncan.

ask asa #15

It's time for another installment of Ask Asa. I'm Asa and I'm here to answer your questions -- at least the ones that I think are interesting. Ask away and I'll do what I can to have some answers posted next week.

ping me, prod me, poke me

I make lots of commitments to do lots of different things and I don't always follow through. On top of that, there's another mess of almost implicit commitments like replying to email or returning phone calls that I just don't always get around to. I'm disorganized -- and busy, a bad combination. I suck.

So, if I promised you something, offered some kind of posts or reply here at the weblog, have email from you sitting in my inbox, owe you a phonecall, or some other kind of response, please let me know. Ping me via email, in comments here, in my voicemail (I don't actually answer calls, so don't be discouraged by the voicemail,) or find me at work or home (actually, don't find me at home, as with my phone, I probably won't answer.)

Sometimes it takes several proddings so don't give up if there's something important you need from me. Eventually I'll get better organized. Until then, you all will just have to be a bit more persistant. Thanks for understanding.

mozilla product futures

There has been a lot of swirl in the community lately around the future of the Mozilla 1.x application suite. A big piece of the responsibility for that falls on the shoulders of the Mozilla leadership, including myself. We've done a poor job at communicating our product roadmap. Our focus, too often, has been on technology roadmaps and project management, and not on product management. This has left a big gap that's being filled by both educated guesses and wild speculation. We're hard at work trying to remedy some of that that with a better focused product management effort.

The first announcement in support of better communicating our product plans can be found at the Seamonkey Transition Plan. You should read that, probably, before reading any more of this.

OK. Welcome back. My post probably says mostly the same thing but I hope that it will help answer some questions that are are likely to come specifically from the Mozilla developer and testing community. You can also find good stuff over at Mitchell's blog.

First, Firefox and Thunderbird are the Mozilla Foundation's premier applications. We first published our intentions to make this the case two years ago and after two years of incremental change, we've shipped Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 and fulfilled a major part of that roadmap. Going forward, Firefox and Thunderbird are, as I said, the premier applications -- the applications we will productize, ship, and support. There is little doubt that these applications have achieved more in terms of industry acceptance and user adoption than anything in Mozilla's history. They are where our future lies -- and so our focus.

We do understand that the Mozilla 1.x application suite achieved some amount of acceptance, with users probably numbering in the low millions, and we fully intend to support those users and organizations that have adopted the Mozilla 1.x application by continuing to deliver security updates to the well-received Mozilla 1.7 product. This sustaining process is critical to many organizations which do not deploy major updates regularly and we don't intend to leave them hanging.

Those are the applications that we at the Mozilla Foundation intend to support, but they are not the only applications that are hosted by Mozilla. We also have other projects like Sunbird and MiniMo, which are maintained by our vibrant community of volunteers but not "productized" by the Mozilla Foundation. It seems likely that a community will organize to continue the development of "the Suite" in the same way that a community has stepped up to develop Sunbird, and to continue development on the Mac-only Camino project.

For that to happen, though, supporters will need to organize the resources to do the work that drivers@mozilla.org have previously done to make Suite releases happen. There's more involved here than I'll wager most people think --but I'll do what I can to document as much of that process as possible and hand it over to whatever leadership emerges to continue development of the Suite.

This change, from a Mozilla product, to a community-driven project (with minimal or no involvement from drivers@mozilla.org,) and the fact that the Mozilla Foundation and drivers@mozilla.org plan to continue security-related development and support for the Mozilla 1.7 product necessitates that we have a new name and versioning for the new community-supported project. In addition to offering hosting (CVS, Bugzilla, FTP, etc.) the Mozilla Foundation will assist in the legal work of securing the name for this project but it is important that we clearly communicate to Mozilla 1.7 customers that the Mozilla Foundation support lies in the continued sustaining releases of Mozilla 1.7.x and that any application suite released on future Gecko versions is not a Mozilla Foundation supported upgrade path.

Some have suggested using the name "Seamonkey." That would probably work fine. As far as versioning, this new application should have new versioning and not use the Gecko/platform version to avoid confusion for those organizations who want to benefit from the longer-term investment in Mozilla 1.7. Something like "Seamonkey 1.0" or "Seamonkey 1.0, based on Gecko 1.8" seems like a reasonable convention for naming the community-maintained suite. I'm certainly not saying this is the only solution, just pointing out that it is an issue we'll need to address.

I hope this post helps to explain our plans more clearly and serves to restart this discussion with the a more complete set of participants and information. Let me know what you think.

firefox futures

Ben has an informative post up over at his weblog where he discusses some of the changes that are coming up for the application and the division of labor among the core Firefox hackers.

tip on thunderbird junk filtering

Here is a tip for using Thunderbird's junk-mail filtering. I have no technical explanation for why this works -- and it may not work at all for others, but I've been testing the junk-mail feature since it was born and this has definitely worked for me.

Do not overtrain. This is perhaps the most important tip about using junk-mail controls that I can offer. In the early days, I thought that more training was better and so I'd mark everything as spam, including multiple identical emails. I figured that I'd really get it good by using this aggressive technique -- even keeping a massive and growing spam corpus in a special folder so I could retrain new accounts against it. I was re-flagging as junk any that the filters were catching, doing whatever I could to train it, and train it good!

Well, what I found was that with this massive training I got up to 80-90% spam recognition almost immediately -- in a day or to, but I wasn't ever able to get my junk-mail controls to flag more than about 90% of the junk I was receiving. Even months in with thousands of messages marked as junk, I couldn't break 90%, so I tried a new approach, minimal training.

I started with a clean slate, and only marked a few very distinct emails as junk on the first day, trying to avoid marking duplicates or even similar spams. Each morning I'd look at my inbox and compare with my junk folder to avoid any overlap, marking a few more distinct spams as junk. It took me about a week to get up to where I'd gotten with the massive training approach in just a couple of days -- but! in another week of following the minimal training technique I was up over 90% recognition and in two weeks I was bordering on 95%. I'm about 3 months into this, manually flaggin a mail about once a week, and in the last week, I calculate that my junk-mail controls have nabbed 97% of the spam that's hitting my inbox.

You may not think that it's worth the careful management to make the improvement from 90% to above 95% -- and that may be the case for some users, but for me, that means a long-term time savings that will be quite dramatic.

If you have tips for managing email in Thunderbird, I'd love to hear them. Next week I'll try to do another Thunderbird tip installment where I talk about using virtual folders.

google news customization

Maybe I'm late to the party with this (as I usually am) but I just noticed that Google News lets you customize the display of their news digest. Cool. Portal status, here they come ;-) I also got image previews on my standard search results for the first time today.

thunderbird 1.0.1 testing candidate

We've gotten over the hump on the Firefox 1.0.1 update and turned our attention to shipping the Thunderbird 1.0.1 update. Like with Firefox 1.0.1, this is not a feature release. It's a security and stability release.

Today we've got a set of candidate builds that are either what we hope to ship, or at least very, very close. Please help us test this new version by grabbing bits from here and let me know if you see any problems.

new mouse

I know this is probably uninteresting to most of you but that's never stopped me before :-)

Today my new mouse arrived in the mail. It's a Razer Diamondback, a gamers' mouse. I don't really play video games (except an occasional online flash game if it's addictive enough) but I do spend some time in Illustrator and Photoshop and have been looking for something that's a step above my previous mice in precision (resolution.) I also didn't want to move to a tablet or specialty mouse just for Photoshop, since I really don't spend enough time doing that and I move back and forth between different apps quite a lot.

After purchasing a few mice and trying out about a dozen others, I settled on the Diamondback as the best mix of comfort and precision. With it's long and comfortable buttons which allow me to position my fingers so the scrollwheel is actually under my middle finger's tip and not about half-way down the finger, and on-the-fly precision adjustment (button 4 + scrollwheel,) this mouse makes moving from Firefox to Photoshop a breeze.

I've tried a couple of wireless mice, including the mx1000 laser, and decided that they were a bit too heavy to be comfortable. The the wired mice I'd tried didn't have the comfort or the precision I was looking for with an under $50 pricetag so I'm very happy to finally have this solid mouse under hand.

What mice or other peripherals do you really like?

firefox on phones?

Doug Turner has been doing some great work to get our Gecko rendering engine up and running on Windows CE. As I understand it, the browser that comes with many of these phones is IE 3. Wouldn't you rather have a browser that was built for the 21st century :-)

Here's a snapshot I took of a cell phone running with Google.com loaded up in a Minimo (Gecko for small devices) browser. Great work, Doug!

Windows CE developers are invited to help contribute to the port, particularly in the areas of Windows integration and the user interface. The relevant tracking bug is bug 277211.

You can find a bit more information at my post from December 08, 2004.

battelle on gds

John Battelle's Searchblog has a nice post up on the Google Desktop Search and what, beyond a great search tool, it means for the web and for Windows.

google desktop search with firefox and thunderbird support

It looks like Google's desktop search is out of beta now that it's got Firefox and Thunderbird support. I'll be giving it a try over the next couple of weeks and let you all know how it fairs.

firefox poster

I just ran across this awesome poster over at Spread Firefox. That's exactly how I feel.

upgrading from firefox 1.0 to firefox 1.0.1

Steps for upgrading from Firefox 1.0 to Firefox 1.0.1

Automatic Update (Windows only)

Windows users

1. Before beginning the update, be sure to complete any work you're doing in Firefox 1.0 and close any extra tabs or windows you may have open.
2. If you see a small red icon on the right end of your menubar, click that. If you don't see the icon, then follow these steps:
   1. Go to the Tools menu on the menubar and select the Options... menu item.
   2. In the Options window, select the Advanced icon.
   3. Scroll down to the Software Update section and press the Check Now button.
3. You should see a Critical Updates (1) item and a checkbox with the label Firefox 1.0.1(en-US) Software Update. If you do not see this, skip to the Manual Installation steps below.
4. Press the Install Now button.
5. Wait for the installing updates progress meter to finish
6. Follow the instructions in the Firefox setup wizard.
7. You will get one or possibly two Attention dialogs informing you that you must first close Firefox before proceeding with the install. This is normal. Select OK when prompted.
8. When the install completes, you may wish to uncheck the Use Firefox Start as my Home Page checkbox. If you leave this checked, your home page will be set to the default Firefox Start page.
9. Press the Finish button to complete the install.
10. To launch Firefox, double-click on the Firefox desktop icon or any other shortcuts you may have.
11. To verify that you have successfully updated Firefox to the 1.0.1 version, launch Firefox and select About Mozilla Firefox on the Help menu. Confirm that it says Firefox version 1.0.1.
12. At this point, you may wish to delete the Firefox Setup 1.0.1.exe file from your desktop. Should you have problems at any time during the automatic update, you can use this file to run the manual install. See the Manual Installation steps below.

Note: there are a few issues with automatic update which we hope to have corrected by the next release.

• We do not clean up the Firefox 1.0 listing in Add or Remove Programs. Do not attempt to uninstall the old Firefox 1.0 from Add or Remove Programs. That will uninstall your updated version.
• When update is completed, the installer file is left on the Windows Desktop or default download location. Feel free to delete this after you've completed your install and verified that Firefox 1.0.1 is working.

Manual Update (All Platforms)

Windows users

1. Visit www.mozilla.org and click on the Free Download link and select Save to Disk in the resulting dialog.
2. When the download is complete, exit Firefox 1.0 by selecting the Exit item on the File menu.
3. Go to the Control Panel, double-click on Add or Remove Programs, and uninstall Firefox 1.0. This will not remove your Firefox bookmarks or other settings.
4. Locate the file Firefox Setup 1.0.1.exe which is either on your Windows Desktop or the folder you set as your default downloads location.
5. Double-click on the Firefox Setup 1.0.1.exe icon and follow the instructions in the install wizard.
6. When the install completes, you may wish to uncheck the Use Firefox Start as my Home Page checkbox. If you leave this checked, your home page will be set to the default Firefox Start page.
7. To launch Firefox, double-click on the Firefox desktop icon or any other shortcuts you may have.
8. Verify that you have the new version by selecting About Mozilla Firefox from the Firefox menu. You should see Firefox version 1.0.1.
9. At this point, you may wish to delete the Firefox Setup 1.0.1.exe file from your desktop.

Mac users

1. Visit www.mozilla.org and click on the Free Download link and select Save to Disk in the resulting dialog.
2. When the download is complete, quit Firefox by selecting the Quit Firefox item on the Firefox menu.
3. Double-click on the Firefox 1.0.1.dmg file.
4. When the disk image has been opened and mounted, drag Firefox into your Applications folder.
5. When prompted to overwrite the existing Firefox, press OK.
6. Launch Firefox and verify that you have the new version by selecting About Mozilla Firefox from the Firefox menu. You should see Firefox version 1.0.1.
7. At this point, you may wish to drag the Firefox 1.0.1.dmg file and Firefox disk image to the trash.

Linux users

1. First check with your distribution to see if they are offering the Firefox 1.0.1 update.
2. Ensure that you have sufficient permissions to install to the same location as your Firefox version.
3. To install from Mozilla, visit www.mozilla.org, click on the Free Download link and select Save to Disk in the resulting dialog.
4. Find and extract the firefox-1.0.1.installer.tar.gz file, (probably located on your desktop or your default downloads directory.) This will extract the files to a folder called firefox-installer.
5. Open the firefox-installer folder and double-click on the firefox-installer script to run the installer.
6. Follow the instructions in the Firefox install wizard, selecting your previous Firefox install directory when prompted for the install location.
7. Launch Firefox and verify that you have the new version. Select the About Mozilla Firefox item on the Help menu and confirm that it says Firefox version 1.0.1.
8. When the install is finished, you may wish to delete the firefox-1.0.1.installer.tar.gz file from your desktop or home directory.

Note: Not all localized versions of Firefox 1.0 have updates available yet. You can determine if your version has been updated by visiting the Download Firefox page. You will not be prompted to update to 1.0.1 until an update for your language is available.

update: A number of people have been commenting on how this isn't very "automatic". Well, no, it's not. But, it's also not as complex as I've made it sound. I figured it was better to spell it out in the best possible detail than to leave anything up to chance. I could have just said "click the update icon and follow the instructions" and not opened the system up to the criticism I'm seeing here, but some people were having problems so I figured I'd better give very specific steps. Any process can be broken down into an infinite number of steps if you want to, and I figured more was better for those having difficulty. That being said, we can and will do a lot to improve this for 1.1. This was our first try at this kind of thing and we're learning how to improve. Thanks for all the constructive feedback.

blocking those flash pop-unders with firefox

There's been quite a lot of buzz around the blogs the last couple of weeks with people seeing the return of the pop-ups and pop-unders. It looks to me like the overwhelming majority of these are from plug-ins, mostly flash.

A number of pundits and bloggers have been wondering aloud whether or not we'll be able to keep up with the pop-up spammers now that more of them are focused on us. Well, we shipped 1.0 with the capability to block these pop-ups and pop-unders but we didn't enable it because we were concerned about breaking legitimate uses. If you'd like to turn it on, it's a fairly simple change -- and would be absolutely trivial for us to enable once we determine whether or not lots of websites are depending on the feature.

To block pop-ups from plugins, open your Firefox 1.0 or 1.0.1 browser, type about:config in the address field. Right-click in the resulting config page somewhere and select New -> Interger. Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins in the resulting dialog, hit OK, type 2 in the next dialog and you're all set.

This pref can actually take three values:

• 0: open allowed
• 1: the opened windows are treated as popups, but they're allowed to open (we limit the number of these types of popups)
• 2: the window is a popup, block it

If you turn this on, please let me know how it works for you so we can make the decision about offering it to users who aren't likely to be hacking in about:config.

kveton on distribution

For those of you who don't know him, Scott Kveton is leading the efforts to bring our distribution infrastructure up to the capabilities we need to exist in the world of massively popular software titles :-)

Today, Scott blogs some ideas on incremental updates and improving our distribution model. Give him a read, and if you haven't yet, grab his feed. Good stuff over there.

how firefox works

I just got an email pointing out this nifty article over at HowStuffWorks.com. The article, aptly titled How Firefox Works, covers basic features, extensions, security, and history. A good read for anyone new to Firefox.

Thanks for the pointer, JoeSmack.

mozilla china

As Firefox grows, so does the need for infrastructure and advocacy to help develop, promote, and deploy. Today, Mozilla China came online to spearhead these efforts in China.

On a related note, Mitchell's been in Beijing and has a nice write-up of her time there.

roc's layout tests arriving soon

I've mentioned in several of my previous posts on testing that Robert O'Callahan was working on a layout testing system based on visual comparison pages rendered across different Gecko builds. Well it sounds from this post like it's nearly ready to go. I can't wait to see this in action.

Robert, you rock!

more updates available

We've just QA'd and shipped another round of updates. If you're using any of these localizations, you should be able to get your update now.

ast-ES, cs-CZ, da-DK, en-GB, he-IL, ko-KR, nb-NO, pt-BR, sl-SI, sv-SE, tr-TR, zh-CN, zh-TW

I've posted a revised version of the update instructions so if you'd like to the howto before attempting the update, you can find it here

update: I didn't mean to suggest those were the only localized build updates. That's just the latest batch. The full list looks like this, I believe.

af-ZA, ast-ES, ca-AD, cs-CZ, da-DK, de-DE, el-GR, en-GB, en-US, es-AR, fi-FI, fr-FR, ga-IE, he-IL, hu-HU, it-IT, ko-KR, nb-NO, nl-NL, pl-PL, pt-BR, pt-PT, ro-RO, ru-RU, sl-SI, sv-SE, tr-TR, zh-CN, zh-TW

We'll be adding es-ES to that shortly which leaves ja-JP the only remaining 1.0 localization to not yet have a 1.0.1. The Mozilla Japan folks wanted to spend more time on QA for that build so it's delayed until they give me the go-ahead.

OK, now we've got es-ES for Windows and Linux up so we're just waiting on Mac.

draft update instructions

I've posted a draft of a document on how to update from 1.0 to 1.0.1. I know it's late in coming, but I've been really busy. Because I'm so late with this, I'd like to get it posted as quickly as possible. If you've got suggestions for improving the document (independent of style, which will eventually conform to the look of the Mozilla website) please let me know.

Oh, and yes, it is funny that the automatic update has more steps than the manual update :-) Should I add some more steps to manual or remove some from automatic ;-)

Upgrading from Firefox 1.0 to Firefox 1.0.1

re-enabling update

It looks like we've sorted out enough of the update problems to re-enable the service. We had a number of problem, including localized builds that were incompletely localized so they were pointing to the en-US update, mac and windows clients trying to fetch win32 update bits, and some server-side issues as well. Things look pretty solid now so the service has been re-enabled.

We still don't have all of the localized updates posted, some are still awaiting code changes, others are in the QA process and some are just waiting for us to get a free minute to push them and add them to the update service.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes. I'll have to double-check, but I think the current list of available 1.0.1 updates are ca-AD, de-DE, el-GR, en-US, es-AR, fi-FI, fr-FR, hu-HU, it-IT, nl-NL, pl-PL, ro-RO, and ru-RU.

mis-information

There's a lot of buzz around some statements that Gerv made ot FOSDEM last week, the latest of which is an almost completely wrong post up at Inside Google.

There are a few big misrepresentations here. The first is around the localized releases and the suggestion that we've got some contractual obligation to include the Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and other web services and search engine even where it doesn't make sense. This is totally bogus. Not only are we not contractualy obliged, but the Mozilla policy around search engines and other product settings was made long before any sponsorship deals were on the table. The decisions around the localization policy were not about revenue, they were about consistency across the Firefox brand. While some of those issues were contentious, money had nothing to do with that policy.

Second, Google search has been the default search engine for Mozilla applications for years, not because we had any deal with Google, but because it was the best thing we could do for our users. We're always re-evaluating all of our features and trying to do the best thing by our users. We have and continue to feel that the core set of search and web services we've chosen are simply the best service for most of our users. If one day we decide that is no longer the case, then we'll make a change. The Mozilla Foundation worked very hard to ensure that any sponsorship agreements we've made don't lock us in to something that we might later want to change to improve the experience of using Firefox.

Third, sponsorship money money isn't what's keeping us afloat, although it certainly helps. Hard work by thousands of contributors who have developed a great product that's generated a lot of good will and interest from a large number of sponsoring organizations is what's keeping us afloat.

localized 1.0.1 updates

We're aware that some of the localizations are not installing updates correctly and working to fix the problem. If you're experiencing difficulties with a non en-US 1.0.1 update, please note which language it is and what the symptoms are in the comments here. I'm hopeful that it's a very simple fix but more information is almost always helpful. Thanks.

got dictionary?

Just saw a press release from Merriam-Webster saying they've got a new line of Firefox tools. Anyone tried these yet? Looks like some fairly basic additions, including a couple of re-packaged extensions, but they've got nice docs and screenshots to walk you through the process. I'm surprised at how complete their package of offers is.

trackback discoveries

Through a trackback on the post below, I discovered a couple of pretty interesting articles on Firfox by a fellow named Patrick Jarret. They're linked to from his current post, Even More Firefox, in his weblog, Ronincyberpunk.com.

My favorite two lines are, "I'm predicting the most outrageous and most historic battle in the history of the Browser Wars. This is the stuff legends are made of," and "This is how Firefox has to win the war. It has to be the best. And it’s supporters have to be loud and proud."

I couldn't agree more with both of those statements :-) Head over and give both aritcles a read. There's good stuff there.

on marketshare

It's really surprising how many people missed the real story behind the latest batches of usage statistics made available over the last week. Forbes, via MSNBC, seems to have hit the nail on the head, though, with their article IE drops below 90 percent market share: Firefox keeps chipping away at Microsoft browser.

IE was at 95.5% of the market just before Firefox 1.0 shipped. Now they're under 90% and trying to stop the hemorrhaging with vaporware and promises of a better tomorrow -- and even that falls pretty flat when you take into account the hundreds of millions of pre-XP Windows users that don't even get to look forward to the vaporware.

another try at update

Yesterday, we tried to launch update for Windows users and ran into the problem that we were serving the windows update to Mac and Linux users.

Today, the mighty Chase has fixed everything up so that the Windows users of Firefox 1.0 will receive the update notification and the Windows update package and Mac and Linux users won't (which is the intended behavior since we don't have update ready for those platforms).

If you see any weirdness, please let me know.

adot's notblog in learning

A distributed learning blogosphere for non-technical students at the University of Michigan. Interesting stuff. Check it out.

Are you using blogs as a communication tool between specific people? What would make this work better. What other applications could blogs replace with minor modifications or technology changes?

reporter update

Robert has posted an FAQ on the Reporter tool. If you're interested in website evangelism or improving Gecko bug reports, go check out the Reporter FAQ.