March 2005 Entries

My two extensions Linky and Launchy are both listed in the Best Mozilla, Firefox & Thunderbird Extensions posting at MR Tech Forums

Linky: Linky will increase your power to handle links. It will let you open or download all or selected links, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows. You will just need to right click any link or web address, select the Linky menu item and choose the desired action.

Launchy: Launchy is a Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape and Nvu extension that will enable you to open current page, links, mailto, images and view source with external applications. Both browsers, media players, FTP clients, download managers and editors are supported. That's applications like Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Outlook, BSPlayer, Windows Media Player, GetRight and others.

Is the summer gonna be hot/cold/wet/etc? I have no clue, but there's gonna be a lot of great open source software released.
- Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0
- Mozilla Firefox 2.0
- GCC 4.0
- MySQL 5.0
- Fedora Core 4

Source: Weird Al's blog

Now Google's faster than ever on Firefox and Mozilla browsers. When you do a search on these browsers, we instruct them to download your top search result in advance, so if you click on it, you'll get to that page even more quickly. You can learn more about this cool feature here. If you're a webmaster, we have FAQs for you too. Or you can just download Firefox and check it out for yourself.
Read the posting

A API for configuring proxies has now been checked in.

I'd like to provide an interface so that an extension or embedder can easily override the proxy configuration without affecting user visible preferences. When nsProtocolProxyService::ExamineForProxy determines, using its existing logic, that it should go direct, it would query this new interface to check if another proxy should be used. The new interface, or proxy provider, would return a PAC string. We may want to support multiple proxy providers, using some sort of ordering. Perhaps we'd query them all and concatenate the result, allowing proxy failover logic to come into play. Or perhaps we'd stop when the first proxy provider returned a non-direct result. I'm not sure which of those I prefer, but I am concerned about performance.
Read the bug report

I've been making a large number of changes to Firefox's Extension Manager over the past week or so, basically rewriting the way Extensions are installed. These changes when complete will offer a lot of improvements for Extension developers.

- You will be able to install extensions by simply dropping their XPIs into containment relationship Install Locations (e.g. drop foo.xpi into profile\extensions and have it be installed automatically on next start) - this should be a boon for quick setup.
- You will be able to install and uninstall Extensions by simply adding and removing their GUID folders from the Install Locations - if you add/remove an entry, the Extension system will notice the discrepancy on the next start and configure/remove the item.
- You will be able to "point" to extensions which you are hosting elsewhere using a cross platform text format which is basically a text file with a GUID name in the extensions directory with a path to the directory where the Extension actually lives (e.g. elsewhere on a NFS home dir)

Read the posting

This page contains details of the procedure for automatically resolving UNCONFIRMED bugs which have remained in that state for a long period of time. We believe that such bugs are those least likely to result in a useful fix. Therefore, given that we don't have the resources to triage every bug report we get, this is a good way of focussing our resources. Statistical support for this view is available, as is discussion of an earlier draft of the procedure.
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More information

This tutorial explains how to create a toolbar extension for the Firefox web browser. Please do not think that because this tutorial is lengthy, creating an extension is a difficult task (it's not). The size of this tutorial is due to the fact that I explain every step in detail. In addition, a great deal of material is covered. My intended audience are those who have never written an extension for Firefox. Hopefully you will find this to be a useful resource. Although it took me a while to write, I have enjoyed every bit of the process.
Read the tutorial

Vulnerabilities are affecting new alternative browser distributions. During the last six months of 2004, 21 vulnerabilities affecting Mozilla browsers were disclosed, compared to 13 vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft Internet Explorer. Six vulnerabilities were reported in Opera.
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The news in Danish
Firefox mere gennemhullet end Internet Explorer. Sikkerhedsfirmaet Symantec oplyser nu, at man har fundet flere sårbarheder i Firefox end i Internet Explorer i den sidste halvdel af 2004.

Don't go ripping out Microsoft's Internet Explorer just yet. IE certainly has proven vulnerable to attack in the past, and the constant patching to add the latest security updates can be a nuisance. The CERT coordination center last year even warned people to stop using Internet Explorer. And the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox has been getting a lot of buzz lately--to the tune of 25 million downloads in fewer than 100 days on the market. But our testing of both browsers shows that choosing one is not an easy decision--particularly in an enterprise environment. IE's vulnerability to attack might in part be because it's rich in features and thereby presents a larger "attack surface." On the other hand, Firefox's perceived edge in security comes with a price: fewer features and a possible inability to access some Windows-based Web applications. So before you make a decision about ditching IE, weigh the trade-offs. One compromise to consider is using IE internally and Firefox for pure Web browsing.
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And a little more Firefox news coverage:
Market share for the open-source Mozilla Firefox climbed above 6% in February, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer share dropped below 90%. Firefox continues to steal market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications, a maker of Web-monitoring software. According to the company's February figures, use of Firefox rose to 6.17% from 5.59% in January. Firefox's gain comes at the expense of Internet Explorer, which dropped to 89.04% market share, from 90.31% in December. Net Applications reports that other browsers maintained their user base.
Read more

Why this excellent video is located at download.com at not at mozilla.org is beyond me but this is what we, the Mozilla community, need. Great for new users of Firefox and even greater for "why should I switch" users.

Watch the video

More Firefox video here
Great video about why Firefox was given the Editors Choice award. Watch it even thought it's sponsored by MSN.

The new inline spell check which is available in the nightly builds of Mozilla Thunderbird is really nice but it seems to miss some important features.

Multi language support
I write some of my emails in Danish and some of them in English. But the spell checker seems only to be able to spell check in one language. It should be able to check the words using both the Danish and English dictionary. Relevant bugs 69687 and 234143

Support for dictionaries in profile
When I install a dictionary it installs the files into my Thunderbird directory and not into my profile directory. That's not very good.

Support for OpenOffice.org dictionaries files
I have already installed the dictionaries I need in OpenOffice.org. And since Thunderbird uses the same files as the OpenOffice.org ones I find it very weird that it's not possible to Mozilla Thunderbird to use those files. The location of the OpenOffice.org dictionaries could, on Windows, be detected via the Windows registry. According to this page the only difference between the dictionary files used in Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org is and "_" is replaced by "-". Why did the Thunderbird developers use "-" instead of "_" ?

Dictionary installation
The dictionary installation in OpenOffice.org is really nice. You just use a macro and it's click click click and you're done. In Mozilla Thunderbird you have to save an XPI file to you local drive and use the Extension Manager to install the package and when you do it doesn't even get listed in the Extension Manager because it doesn't contain a install.rdf script but only a install.js script.

The newsgroups at news.mozilla.org which holds important developer information and discussions have been seriously spammed. All of the newsgroups I have subscribed to, each had around 50 unread messages. All of those are spam. None of the spam messages contains any URLs. And strangely enough all of them has been cross posted to the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup.

I'm so close to not reading the newsgroups before a seriously anti spam solution have been implemented. And it's not the first time the newsgroups have been hit by a spam attack.

In 2003 we announced our intention to shift development focus from the integrated Mozilla Application Suite (commonly referred to as "Seamonkey") to a new generation of applications -- the Mozilla Firefox browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and news client. That shift in focus occurred almost immediately, as the Mozilla Foundation was formed and we hired the lead developers for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. At that time we also stated our intention to maintain a long-lived, stable 1.7.x version of Seamonkey. We noted that a number of commercial distributors ship Seamonkey and will need the means to maintain it for their customers. There is also a user and developer base that is fond of Seamonkey and would like to maintain it. We have continued with this maintenance plan as well, with a 1.7.6 release scheduled for the next few weeks.
Read the Mozilla Application Suite - Transition Plan

Attended the LinuxForum 2005 in Copenhagen this weekend. It's the 8'th time the LinuxForum is being held. The focus is Open Source and it's the biggest open source conference in Scandinavia.

I went there on friday and saw a lot of really good technical speeches. The main reason why I went was of course to hear Tristan Nitot. Tristan Nitot is the co-founder and President of Mozilla Europe, an international affiliate of Mozilla Foundation. Tristan spoke about Gutenberg and the guerrilleros

I also had the chance to meet and talk to Tristan.

Another cool talk was Jon Maddog Hall who spoke about The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. He had some really nice one liners.

Brendan Eich writes:

Join us in fixing a bunch of DOM-ish bugs and designing a better Gecko content frontside. We started small, just to get together and compare notes. But we're open to help from all proven hackers, testers, and bug trackers. See http://wiki.mozilla.org/wiki?title=Gecko:Content_Team_Minutes, linked from http://wiki.mozilla.org/wiki/Gecko:Home_Page#Developer_Resources. We have a weekly phone conference at 1pm Pacific on Thursdays, ping me if you want to be included. I put a placeholder reference to the minutes in http://wiki.mozilla.org/wiki/Gecko:Task_List too.

Bug 202468, which is about "Simpler, more consolidated UI for SMTP server settings" just got fixed.
The current Outgoing Server Settings are awful to me. Only one SMTP Server is direct available, for more you've to click on Advanced (this button alone is badly named, should be More or Further ones). And then another click to add/edit the server.

See a screenshot

Yet another small update with some of the utilities I use on my Windows system:

BSPlayer - Download - Info
SecureCRT - Beta version with tabs- Download - Info
UltraEdit - Now with HTML toolbar and code folding - Download - Info
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack - Download - Info
Total Commander - Now with thumbnails - Download - Info
jv16 PowerTools 2005 - Now with AI in registry cleaner - Download - Info
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta candidate - Download - Info

Bare lige for at overbevise jer, læserne, om at der altså er en verden udenfor, kommer her en lille kultur update. Vi har været inde og se Guitaristerne på Mungo Park. Og det var fandme godt. Så er det sagt.
Visesangeren og tolvtonekunstneren John Hansen er død. Miljøet i og omkring ham er i chok, og fire dedikerede fans beslutter sig for at afholde en mindekoncert foran Johns legendariske hus på Gyvelvej nr. 3. Den store sangskat, som John Hansen efterlader, afspejler en kunstner og et liv fyldt af modsætninger, vrøvl og skuffelser. Det kan godt være svært at organisere en sådan koncert - så svært, at man næsten glemmer, hvem man mindes. Guitaristerne, Grete, Kim, Gregers og Hesselhud, gør deres bedste; spørgsmålet er bare, om det er godt nok?
Du har mulighed for at hente lidt musik fra stykket Hvor er min lighter? og Har fået nok

Har også fået set Købmanden i Venedig (The Merchant of Venice)
Bassanio er forelsket i Porthia, men mangler penge til et ordentlig kurmageri. Derfor går han og vennen Antonio til den jødiske lånehaj Shylock, der hader kristne. Aftalen bliver at pengene skal betales tilbage inden tre måneder. Kan de to venner ikke det skal de give Shylock et pund af deres eget kød. Alt går godt indtil Antionio kommer i pengenød.
Ganske ok film, men der var altså noget ting ved filmen der irreterer mig. Hvorfor skal den være så lang? De kunne nemt have kogt den en halv time ned. No problem. Desuden var der enkelte ting i selve historien jeg ikke helt forstod. Jeg har ikke læst original teksten, who has?, men hvorfor pokker skulle han bl.a. udsættes for denne her ring test?

Internet Explorer 7.0 won't run just on Windows XP Service Pack 2, according to a new posting on Microsoft's "IE Blog." It also will work on follow-ons to SP2, which include Windows XP Professional x64 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, both of which are due out in the next couple of months. Still no word on whether the updated version of Microsoft's browser will run on older versions of Windows, too (specifically Windows 2000). Microsoft better get the lead out, though; IE's market share dipped below 90 percent for the first time, according to February data from WebSideStory.
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