July 2005 Entries

It looks like Mozilla Firefox is gonna get yet another high profile extension. This time it's Skype. While we have no official announcement Nvu developer Daniel Glazman kind of announced the Skyfox extension in his blog today. Who wants a basic Skype integration into Firefox? was all that Daniel Glazman had to say.

Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It's free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers.

Mozilla foundation has decided to increase the version number of the next major release to 1.5 from 1.1, reflecting the sheer number of bug fixes and features that have been worked into the next version of the browser.

We are planning for a Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.5 (September 2005), 2.0 (unscheduled) and 3.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs.

Read more
Mozilla Firefox roadmap

Microsoft has detailed its forthcoming privacy Latest News about privacy and security Latest News about Security plans, which include enhancements to Internet Explorer 7 and the addition of digital rights management software into applications at the document level. Despite earlier plans not to do a browser update until Longhorn's release in 2006, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates confirmed that code for IE 7 will be available this summer in beta and in full by Christmas. The browser will incorporate antivirus technology from recently acquired Sybari, and enhanced anti-phishing software. "Anti-phishing will definitely be built in to IE 7," said Brendon Lynch, senior privacy strategist at Microsoft.
Read more

My last blog about UMO was not very positive.

But now it seems that UMO is getting somewhere. Scott Kveton writes:
I wanted to pass along the information that Rafael Ebron is going to be heading up the development of UMO (a.k.a. addons.mozilla.org) effective immediately. Rafael brings with him experience from the Netscape SmartUpdate project as well as being a full-time Mozilla Foundation staff member. He is going to be an excellent leader of this project.
Read blog entry

I never really understood why Mozilla Foundation stopped making zip versions of releases. Using the installer changes my Windows registry and I don't want that! Can I use the installer without it touching my Windows registry at all?

I use the releases to test my extensions with and now I need a zip version of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4 in both en-US and da-DK. Can anybody directory me to a place where I can download these releases? I'm talking about Windows versions only.

I've blogged about Harry Potter before and now it's time again. I just finished the fifth book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I have to say they are getting better and better. I'm not saying it's the best book I've read. Far from that, but considering who's the audience of the book, it's a good book.

<danish>
Jeg har også fået læst Nordkraft som er en roman er i 3 dele. I romanens første del, "Junkiehunde", møder vi pusherfrau Maria, kæreste til en af Vestbyens dealere. I anden del, "Broen", præsenteres vi for Allan, som er vendt tilbage til Aalborg efter en tur på søen og kæmper for endelig at slippe ud af miljøet. Den sidste del, "Begravelsen", er historien, der samler trådene, da den sammensatte gruppe af personer mødes til en begravelse.
Jeg vil sige at da jeg havde læst del to, havde jeg ligesom fået nok af dette miljø. Så efter sådan en sag, er det jo altid godt at suse gennem en Harry Potter bog.
</danish>

According to Gerv's blog:
Mozilla Foundation products now only display IDNs in a whitelist of TLDs, which have policies stating what characters are permitted, and procedures for making sure that no homographic domains are registered to two different entities.
More information in the bug report and in this document.

This is great great news! Perhaps I can add a Launchy overlay to the bookmarks after the rewrite. Today it seems impossible due to the mess of the bookmark code.

Sometime in the next few months, I plan to completely redo bookmarks in Firefox. The current bookmark code is an antique, and not a well-cared-for one. The first order of business is to come up with a list of things that we'd like to be able to do with bookmarks, and then to create a data API that can support all these things in a fairly generic fashion. Gone is RDF; it serves no purpose other than template generation (and code obfuscation) in the current code, and the template generation will be handled nicely in the future with Neil's new-world templating.

It seems like the new bookmark code will be using the super cool Unified Storage (mozStorage) which is a database like storage feature that is going to be used in Gecko 1.9 aka Mozilla 2.0.
There's also been talk about moving both the cache and the cookie data into mozStorage.

Read the blog entry
From the wiki: Bookmarks Data API and Bookmarks Use Cases

I had big hopes for the next generation of Mozilla Update but apparently I have to wait a long time for it to happen. I've almost given up updating umo with my own extensions because of the bad GUI. Alan Starr blogs about UMO 2.0
Read his blog entry