March 27, 2008
New Add-ons Site Is Awsome
The new add-ons site is awesome, especially for us extension developers.
The Statistics Dashboard especially is a welcome addition. Being able to see the active daily users count is a great way to boost ones ego :)
The basic download/activity data is available as a feed right now, but I wonder if having the more detailed data (operating systems, applications, etc) available would be of any use? Right now one can download the CSV files. Of course privacy becomes an issue as well.
Posted by doron at 8:56 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
March 8, 2008
Trusting 3rd Party Programs
Interesting little story about 3rd party password stealing.
What was interesting to me was that my own Gmail Notifier was accused of stealing passwords early on. It turned out the person actually downloaded the extension from another site and not my own (back when there was no addons.mozilla.org) and had his account "hacked".
Luckily, we have addons.mozilla.org now for a central location to get extensions. Hopefully the extension reviewers are doing a good job filtering out evil extensions :)
Of course, it is easier for us as most extensions are pure xml/js and that makes auditing much easier.
Posted by doron at 6:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
March 4, 2008
IE8 Sees The Light
Basically, if you have a standards-compliant page (doctype and all), it will use the new IE8 engine with all their changes. Before, it was going to be the IE7 mode. Of course, if your page has no doctype (Quirks mode), you still get the IE6 engine rendering mode.
Microsoft has made a bold choice, now it is up to us web developers to handle this correctly.
Posted by doron at 7:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 17, 2008
How To Stop Firefox From Crashing When Watching ABC.com Full Episodes
Trying to watch an episode of Lost at abc.com and Firefox crashes on you? If you have Firebug installed, be sure to disable it for abc.com - that fixed it for me.
This tidbit actually came from the website of the company that created the plugin (Move Networks).
Posted by doron at 2:28 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
February 14, 2008
.exe TLD Coming Soon?
It looks like they are simply handing any major issues (is foo.pdf a file or a url) off to the browser vendors rather than address them themselves. Hopefully they will consult browser vendors before they make any big changes, as it may affect extension sniffing (and perhaps security as well) browsers do today.
I call dibs on ihate.pdf!
Posted by doron at 12:01 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (2)
January 31, 2008
Quick Note to Extension Developers About browser.xul ID Changes
Edit: The changes that caused this were removed (see mfinkle's blog).
I filed bug 415099 today because certain ids where changed in browser.xul that broke my extension overnight.
So if you overlay browser.xul, you should make sure it works with today's build.
Sadly, the id change seems to be actually needed to fix a bug, so extension authors will need to work around this. Read on for a way to work around it.
Continue reading "Quick Note to Extension Developers About browser.xul ID Changes"
Posted by doron at 9:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
January 22, 2008
What's Up, Doctype?
I remember the fun problems IBM ran into with doctypes (See the MDC article) - IBM created it's own doctype and put it on tons of webpages out there. Of course, IE/Netscape 4 didn't care about it and went ahead rendering in their quirky old-school way. Then Mozilla came along, and suddenly the pages no longer rendered "correctly", as the doctype (correctly) trigged standards mode. Long story short, Gecko special-cased that doctype to trigger quirks mode. Which is ugly.
Internet Explorer 7 learned a similar lesson - most web authors have no clue what doctypes really do. So IE7 broke pages that worked fine in IE6 because those pages had a doctype that IE6 ignored and paid for trying to be more compliant. But not compliant enough, because IE8 is going to break even more!
Personally, I thought IE's marketshare and the early betas of IE7 would have given people plenty of time to test and fix. But I forgot that most authors are lazy and wait for issues to arise before reacting, even though the web was full of discussion prior to IE7's release.
So now IE8 is going to introduce a new way (using meta tags) to force a page into IE8 strict mode. So now IE8 will render content in 3 different ways (IE6/IE7/IE8 mode). This means that when everyone finally gets off IE6 to a new, standards compliant IE, they will still be viewing pages using the IE6 mode.
JavaScript Toolkits will have to now figure out how to distinguish this new mode from IE7 mode and act accordingly.
And since IE8 still does IE6 mode, most web applications will probably not bother updating their code to work with IE8's changes and continue to use the IE6 mode even when no one actually runs IE6. Why should someone spend money to update the app to use the new IE changes when they can run the old code just fine. And use Silverlight for more advanced things, of course.
The question is, how long will this cycle continue? Web standards are supposed to avoid this exact issue, damn it.
Posted by doron at 8:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
January 3, 2008
XUL vs SilverLight
So Microsoft may start using Silverlight on its website, probably because no one else is. So on top of having to deal with Flash (stealing focus, dhtml zindex issues on Linux) we will soon have to deal with new issues now.
So, when do we get a XUL version of Mozilla.com?
And if Silverlight ever gets used as much as Flash (which I doubt, just look at Flex), someone can write SilverlightBlock!
As a side note, I recently moved back to Silicon Valley (still at IBM), and in the first two weeks witnessed an earthquake, a bomb threat at a Lightrail station closing down a street in downtown San Jose and a Otter catching and eating live crab. Must be the Bay Area!
Posted by doron at 2:06 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)
October 3, 2007
The world is Grey/Gray
I've always been confused about the correct English spelling of that color between white and black. But it turns out, browsers are sometimes confused as well.
Firefox supports both gray and grey, as well as lightgrey and lightgray.
Internet Explorer only supports gray. And to confuse me even more, it only supports lightgrey. And if you try to set lightgray using js, you get an exception (Invalid Property Value). Which took a bit to figure out today as part of a bug.
If only the world were black and white.
Posted by doron at 7:37 AM | Comments (2)
June 19, 2007
How May I Direct Your Call
Every so often, I get support requests for Mozilla in my email. It is one of the side effects of working on open source - people can easily find a name and an email address on the web. However, sometimes they are just plain bizarre. Such as this one, which I first thought was spam, but which actually seems to be a real request:
Continue reading "How May I Direct Your Call"
Posted by doron at 7:59 AM | Comments (3)