June 2005 Entries

Daniel writes that Nvu 1.0 has been released!

Nvu is a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu is based on Gecko , the layout engine inside Mozilla ; it's a super-fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers. Its remarkable support of XML, CSS and JavaScript offers the best authoring platform on the market. Its architecture based on XUL makes it the most extensible editing tool ever.

Big thanks to Daniel Glazman from Disruptive Innovations for bringing us Nvu!

According to this browser statistic from Adtech, Denmark is behind the other European countries when it comes to adopting the Mozilla Firefox users. Only 5.88% of the internet users of Denmark use Mozilla Firefox. This is very disappointing! Other studies show some of the same. In Danish

So if you live in Denmark, why don't you promote Mozilla Firefox even more at your work, school, home, parents, friends, etc.

No money for e-mail software? You've got three free - and effective - choices: Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or Eudora. If you have Windows, you already have Outlook Express. Don't want it? Well, for no cost or obligation to send money later, you have the option to download Thunderbird from the Mozilla Foundation or a free version of Eudora from Qualcomm. Which of these three you end up using will depend on what you want from an e-mail client.

Conclusion
Outlook Express offers the bare necessities, but if you want to move beyond that, you're going to want to choose either Thunderbird or Eudora. Thunderbird's strongest point is its expandability through user-supplied extensions that you can download. It's also the only application that includes a spam filter, and will be attractive to open-source advocates. However, if you're looking for a strong, full-featured program, don't mind a reasonable learning curve, and can live with the ads, then the Sponsored mode of Eudora is your choice.
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Support for Mac OS X 10.1.x has been dropped. Current CVS code (including the forthcoming Firefox 1.1) will not run correctly if at all on 10.1.x for any Mozilla.org products. See bug 298430 for details. Don't spam that bug with complaints please - its done. This is a great move as far as I'm concerned.
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OOo Writer scores most of its victories in features that make the creation and maintenance of highly formatted or long documents easier. This pattern is not accidental. According to Elizabeth Mathias of Sun Microsystems, the documentation of OpenOffice.org has a long history of being written in Writer itself. As a result, the program's developers had the incentive to include the tools they needed. This legacy continues to give Writer advantages over competitors like Word. That is not to say that Writer is a perfect program. Its interface is wildly inconsistent. Some features, notably cross-references, can most kindly be described as lacking. And in version 2.0, the attempt to imitate Microsoft Word hides several useful features. Yet, despite these shortcomings, OOo Writer is not only as fully developed as Microsoft Word, but often superior in terms of features and stability.
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Hvordan laver jeg min egen extension i Mozilla Firefox? Hvis du har stillet dig selv det spørgsmål, så har du nu, ganske gratis, muligheden for at få svaret.

På tirsdag den 21. juni 2005 kl. 19.00 holder jeg et foredrag omkring udvidelsessystemet i Mozilla Firefox. Jeg vil gennemgå opsætning af udviklingsmiljø, hvordan man bruger overlays, indstillinger i dine extensions, test samt kigge på nogle af de typiske problemer.

Program og anden information om mødet kan findes på http://wiki.sslug.dk/Firefox-udvidelse

Det gratis foredrag afholdes på:
Symbion
Fruebjergvej 3
2100 København Ø
Lokale M4

Slides fra foredraget samt mit extension toolkit kan downloades her

The Debian development community is currently hotly debating whether the Mozilla Foundation's strict trademarks policy violates Debian's social contract. However, in a twist, it appears Mozilla has not received approval for the Firefox trademarks yet, and the Firefox name may already be taken in the UK and Germany. The foundation has not applied for the Thunderbird trademark anywhere yet.
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My extension Launchy is mentioned in this article.

The Launchy extension is a veritable Swiss Army knife when it comes to integrating Firefox with other programs. It provides you with a new context menu for pages, links, and images, giving you the ability to open these items in any of dozens of recognized external programs. On Windows, these programs are all discovered automatically, but you can customize the list and even add your own on any operating system. Launchy is an ideal way to handle all kinds of integration points that are otherwise unavailable in Firefox. For instance, if you want to edit the current Web page, you can use the Launchy context menu to send the page source to Mozilla Composer or NVu. If you're on a page with an extremely large image, you can send it to Photoshop for better viewing or editing with a single click.

If you're moving over to Firefox from Mozilla, you've surely noticed how Firefox is built to be a sleeker, faster browsing engine. It accomplishes this in part by shedding all of its counterparts from the Mozilla Suite, including an email/news client, composer, and chat client. But that doesn't mean this functionality is no longer available. With a few extensions -- or with no work at all -- you can make Firefox integrate with your email client as though it were still part of a suite. You don't have to stop there, either; at least one valuable extension gives you the power to connect Firefox with virtually any program on your system.
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dealnews.com, Inc., a leader in web-based shopping, announced that it is now optimizing its site to better address its growing Mozilla/Firefox client base. While dealnews' site traffic doubled in the past year, its percentage of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser users has increased fourfold and now represents one-third of its total traffic. Firefox, which is produced by the Mozilla Foundation, is a free web browser that has been widely praised for its stability and innovative tabbed browsing feature. John Allen, Dealnews' Director of Marketing, said, "By nature, our site tends to attract a more technically sophisticated audience. Over the past year, we have seen unprecedented acceptance of the Firefox browser among our readers. While overall our site traffic has increased 100 percent in the past 12 months, Microsoft Internet Explorer traffic has only grown 50 percent. Firefox traffic has increased 400 percent. Fully 35 percent of our traffic in May was from Firefox or a Mozilla-compatible client. We feel this is significant trend and have taken steps to ensure our site is fully optimized for use with this web browser."
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David Bienvenu has done it again. This time with a supernice checkin that many people have requested. New filter actions: Auto reply, forward, bounce

You can now using a message filter forward your email to another account and use a auto reply. The auto reply feature is implemented using message templates. So first you create a message template. Then you create a message filter and use the template as reply template. Way cool.

I use server side filters but some people might not have access to server side filters and now Mozilla Thunderbird support very strong client side filters.

Screenshot of new filter action:

Some really nice fixed for extensions developers has just been checked into Mozilla Firefox 1.1:

Ability to restrict to compatible operating systems
If your extension only works on Windows you can now have this in your install.rdf file:
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_gcc2</em:targetPlatform>
<em:targetPlatform>Linux_gcc3</em:targetPlatform>
<em:targetPlatform>WINNT_msvc</em:targetPlatform>
<em:targetPlatform>OS2</em:targetPlatform>

Allow extensions to ship searchplugins
Search plugins are currently located in the searchplugins directory which is a sub directory of the Mozilla Firefox program folder. So if you wanted to add a search plugin you had to add it there. So if you removed Mozilla Firefox and reinstalled all your user installed search plugins would be lost. But now extensions can contain search plugins. They should be placed in <extensionguid>/searchplugins.

No way of installing platform specific XPCOM components (dll/so) based on user OS.
You can now specify in your install.rdf file which files should be installed on which OS'es. Nice for people who are distributing XPCOM components as parts of their extensions.

I kind of thought this is a bit cool/funny:

Instead of visiting some dry, boring Web site to download your favorite open source software, why not put some spice in your life and get it from Playboy? mirrors.playboy.com is even an official mirror site for Firefox and Thunderbird, says Playboy Unix administrator Tim Yocum. He wanted to give something back to the community from which his company has drawn so deeply.
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I don't really use this but a lot of people have asked for this feature so here it is. Mozilla Firefox, in nightly builds and eventually in Mozilla Firefox 1.1, will support drag-and-drop reordering of tabs. The patch just landed today so the we, the users of nightly builds, will be seeing this feature tomorrow or the day after.

Another really cool and important checkin is the landing of the groundwork for the new Software Update Service. The new Software Update Service will support binary patching and I think it's based on bsdiff and bspatch. This will allow Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird to be updated with security patches without having to download an entire new version. It will be possible to apply patches. Great work from Ben Goodger, Benjamin Smedberg and Darin Fisher. Screenshot here

Mozilla Suite, to some also known as Mozilla 1.x or Mozilla Application Suite, is gonna be renamed to SeaMonkey. The work to rebrand the installer is almost done. Note that it's spelled SeaMonkey and not Seamonkey. And it's not Mozilla SeaMonkey. It's just SeaMonkey.

"Mozilla Mail" is gonna be named "SeaMonkey Mail" and even the executable is gonna be renamed from mozilla.exe to seamonkey.exe.

It doesn't come as a big surprise. The Bugzilla re-organization a couple of months back created just such a name. But incorrectly spelled it Seamonkey. Oh no, are we gonna see another product misspelling chaos. Just like we're seeing with Firefox by some spelled FireFox? Just look at this page. We have both "Sea Monkey" and "Seamonkey"

The Mozilla Foundation has earlier announced that there won't be any more official releases of the Mozilla Application Suite now named SeaMonkey, but they will provide infrastructure for community members who wish to continue development. SeaMonkey survival will need a new team that cares about that product and that will take over the lead for its development. Read more about SeaMonkey.

And for those of you who ask "what is a seamonkey?" Well here's one.

Update: Please read this update

A blog entry at Brendan Eich's blog details the new Mozilla roadmap. There's some interesting things coming especially in terms for the graphics engine in Mozilla.
Read the blog post and understand where Mozilla is taking you in the near future

As some of you know Mozilla Firefox 1.1 is gonna have support for the <canvas> tag. The canvas element represents a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly. If you're running a nightly build of Mozilla Firefox or the Deer Park Alpha 1 you should check out this cool demo.