May 2004 Entries

Not a big surprise but here's some press coverage.

AOL to release new version of Netscape
America Online said Thursday that it plans to release a new version of its Netscape Web browser this summer, though the effort does not appear to signal a return to major browser development work for the company. An AOL representative said that the new software will be based on Mozilla 1.7 code developed by Netscape's open-source offshoot. She described it as a relatively minor upgrade that will include a few security patches, but leave the interface mostly unchanged. "This is not a huge step forward," she said.

AOL to Release Netscape 7.2 Based on Mozilla 1.7
ZDNet's Evan Hansen reports that AOL will release Netscape Navigator 7.2 based on Mozilla 1.7 code this summer. The update comes a year after version 7.1 and after Microsoft stopped standalone development in Internet Explorer. eWEEK's Matt Hicks offers analysis of the new Netscape release, citing studies that say while Microsoft has a 93.9% browser market share and 87% of business users use IE, 25% still use Netscape and 11% use Opera -- the math works because people use multiple browsers. Hicks asks the question 'Is the Netscape Browser Being Reborn or Just Stabilized?' Hicks interviews several people in the know including a former Netscape engineer, an industry analyst, and Opera Software CEO Jon von Tetzchner."

Written off for dead about a year ago, the forefather of Web browsers, Netscape Navigator, is being resuscitated in the coming months with an updated version. But whether it will mark a revival of the browser, or simply some life support, remains to be seen. America Online Inc., which owns Netscape Communications Corp., is preparing a summer release of Netscape Navigator 7.2, an AOL spokeswoman confirmed with eWEEK.com.
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I removed the following blogs from Blogupdates since they don't really blog about Mozilla:

- Marc Rust
- James "Kovu" Russell
- Zach Lipton
- Chris Gonyea
- Stuart "Pavlov" Parmenter

The following blogs has been removed since it's too long since their blogs has been updated:
- John Keiser
- Scott Granneman
- Christopher Aillon

Sorry guys.

In the future I also only accept RSS feeds that includes Mozilla related blog entries. Fx like mine.

Went to see Troy yesterday. I knew that the movie wasn't gonna be great. But I was disappointed to see that the movie was soo bad. It was boring and way to long. Orlando Bloom was acting really really bad. Brad Pitt wasn't any better. He just wasn't convincing as a leader. It seemed like he was trying to look like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Eric Bana as Hector was good, though.

One of the "best" momets in the movie was when Paris handed over the sword of Troy to a totally random person in the crowd with the words "take good care of it, it's the sword of Troy"! What was that all about?

One star that's it. Worst movie of the year so far!

There's been some interesting checkins into Mozilla the last couple of days. I'll list some of them here:

several libraries need to be linked with -R $ORIGIN
As part of the NSS 3.9 integration with Solaris 10, we need to add the above linker flags . This is so that the Solaris maintainers are happy; and helps NSS applications (linked with -R NSS_explicit_location) can correctly locate all .so's without LD_LIBRARY_PATH having to be set.

Roaming - 4.x-HTTP-compatible
In this case, the minimal work to get some roaming support, with some Netscape Communicator 4.x compatibility, running will be done. FYI, this should appear in 1.8 alpha2, but not in 1.7 final.

How to get Roaming working see this link

America Online has begun testing enhancements to its Internet service, including a beefed-up version of its AOL Communicator e-mail software that plays multimedia files. The product, called "Fanfare," is essentially an updated version of Communicator with new features such as media playback, a calendar and spyware protection. Fanfare is similar to Communicator but with more options on the navigation screen. For instance, a user can pull down a panel with Radio@AOL and its video player next to e-mail messages and instant-messaging "buddy" lists. While Fanfare pulls more features from the AOL proprietary client onto Communicator, the company said the enhancements do not signify any changes in priorities for AOL. "We're adapting to how customers are using our services," AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley said Friday. "This is not instead of (the AOL proprietary client). This is another benefit for the AOL for Broadband subscriber." Like Communicator, Fanfare will come bundled with AOL's "classic" online service for broadband users. AOL for Broadband costs $14.95 a month and represents the company's attempt to sell its service to the growing number subscribers leaving AOL for high-speed Internet providers.
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Launchy version 2.5.0 has been released.

The two major things in this release is the support for adding your own applications and an options dialog.

What's new:
- Fixing Outlook Express support
- Netscape Composer support added
- Syn Text Editor support added
- WordPad support added
- Options dialog - Mozilla Firefox only
- Add skin support in install.js
- Added launchy.xml loading support
- Much much much more!

Launchy is an Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird extension and will enable you to open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Outlook, BSPlayer, Windows Media Player and others. Launchy will auto detect all applications. For at full list of supported applications please read the Launchy page. See Screenshots.

And yes! Launchy works in nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox!

Noticed this checkin comment in todays bonsai:
Don't reset the notification timer on every parse start/stop. This speeds up flurries of little document.write calls a good bit.

From the bug's comment:
This should keep behavior on "normal" pages about the same, but keep us from thrashing the timers. It makes us about 50% faster on those testcases on Linux (so about 1.5-2 times slower than Opera).

See the bug

Again this is what makes Mozilla such a great project and a worldclass browser. You see improvements all the times. It simple just keeps getting better, smaller and faster. Hopefully the world will realize this soon. But we have to tell them!

The XUL Grand Coding Challenge 2004 is over and here are some of the samples. To take part in and complete the XUL Grand Coding Challenge you needed to create two samples plus an optional bonus free-style sample with your XUL / XUI / XAML / XML-UI toolkit/player/parser/etc. of choice.

This sample was completed in Longhorn v4051 and setup as a project in Visual Studio "Whidbey" (PDC Release). More samples here XAML Counter Sample

Read more at xamlblogs.

In Omar Shahine's WebLog:
Thunderbird 0.6 is out. The best news is that they added support for IMAP IDLE. Sweet. I mentioned it on my blog a few months ago and the bug was voted high enough to get fixed. Thunderbird is my favorite mail client for non exchange mail as well as my favorite usenet reader. They also added a real windows installer this time. I only wish it had the three-column view like Outlook 2003. That view just rocks my world.

I've started using Eclipse. I wanted to see if it's better than just using UltraEdit and a command line cvs tool. Here are some resources for Eclipse users.

JSEditor Eclipse Plug-In
JSEditor is a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE that provides basic JavaScript editing functions such as syntax hi-lighting and content outlining.

WDTE - Web Development Tools for Eclipse
WDTE is a collaborative effort to merge some of the separate open-source projects developing Eclipse plugins related to web development into a single project.

CSS Editor for Eclipse
This project aims to contribute sophisticated CSS authoring functionality to the Eclipse Platform. It implements an editor that provides enhanced support for editing CSS source files

Otherwise I could start looking at Syn Text Editor which looks really nice.

Let me know if you got some cool Eclipse plugins or links.

I'm still trying to add Eclipse support to Launchy but I dont think that Eclipse supports opening documents from the command line.

I get many weird mails but this one is one of the best:
hi. ive visited your site because i am interested in getting some gecko's. i would be very grateful if you could send me any information you think i would need about getting a gecko and purchasing a tank and other equipment for the gecko. thank you for your time.

So I send him this

This document describes how to create extensions for Firefox 0.9 and newer, and Thunderbird 0.7 and newer.

The next generation of extensions for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird is going to take a whole different approach than the current ones. Currently the extensions developers, like myself, have to provide an install script to install an extension. This will now change.

When you write extensions for Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7 the build-in extension manager will take care of the installation. This is great news! I hope this will also get rid of the dreaded -239 error which I sometimes get when installing extensions.

Extensions are now made unique by using a GUID. It used to be just a name. It will also be possible to specify that a extension only works for a specific version of an application, fx Mozilla Firefox 0.9.5 or later.

All in all this will make the installation and management of extensions much more easier and consistent. There will be a central place where you manage your extensions (the extensions manager). From here you can also check for updates and disable extensions.

A nice new feature is to be able to start Mozilla Firefox without any extensions firefox.exe -no-extension

You can read much more about how to develop the next generation of extensions here or follow this thread.

I can promise the both Launchy and Linky will soon be available as Mozilla Firefox 0.9 extensions.

By the way: You can see the the theoretical DB table layout for the update.mozilla.org system.

Launchy version 2.4.0 has been released.

The two major things in this release is the support of File Explorers for file:// links and Source Code editors. View source in your favorite editor.

What's new:
- Slim Browser support added
- Netscape Mail support
- FileZilla support added
- Absolute FTP support added
- Download Accelerator support added
- WackGet support added
- Offline Explorer Pro support added
- Windows Explorer support added
- Notepad support added
- UltraEdit support added
- Netscape Composer support added
- OpenOffice.org support added
- Much much much more!

Launchy is an Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird extension (Windows only) and will enable you to open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Outlook, BSPlayer, Windows Media Player and others. Launchy will auto detect all applications. For at full list of supported applications please read the Launchy page. See Screenshots.

And yes! Launchy works in nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox!