November 2005 Entries

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 has been released. The award-winning Web browser is better than ever. Browse the Web with confidence - Firefox protects you from viruses, spyware and pop-ups. Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use and privacy. It's easy to import your favorites and settings and get started. Download Firefox now and get the most out of the Web
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 på dansk: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux i386

Identity is part of Firefox 2.0 plan as described by Dan Farber of ZDNet in Firefox accelerating development cycle.

To advance that agenda, the Mozilla team, with more than 40 full-time employees, is going to be more aggressive in delivering new Firefox functionality than it has been in the past. Beard told me Mozilla will move to a more rapid product delivery model, in keeping with the pace the herd of Web 2.0 companies, as well as Microsoft's newfound faster "twitch" cycles. Rapid response to any critical issues. Security and stability updates every six to eight weeks. Major releases every six to nine months - Firefox 1.5 at the end of November, version 2.0 by mid-2006 and 3.0 in early 2007. Release of the Gecko rendering and layout engine every 12 to 15 months

Read more at ZDNet and at identity20

Browser developers including Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera are seeking to create a standard method of providing surfers with more information about the trustworthiness of a website. Several developers met in Toronto last week to discuss ways to collaborate, although the talks are still at an early stage. The initiative aims to use the information provided in digital security certificates to help users identify phishing websites, which try to fool individuals into giving up sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers.
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Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers
Today I want to tell you about both our established plan to highlight secure sites in IE7 but also to tell you about some early thinking in the industry about creating stronger standards for identity on the internet. IE7 will join other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Konqueror in making the experience for secure (HTTPS) sites more visible by moving the lock icon into the address bar. We think the address bar is also important for users to see in pop-up windows. A missing address bar creates a chance for a fraudster to forge an address of their own. To help thwart that, IE7 will show the address bar on all internet windows to help users see where they are. IE7 will also help users avoid fraudulent sites if users choose to use the Phishing Filter to check a site for known phishing activity.
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From the browser developers:
- Mozilla - CAs, certificates, and the SSL/TLS UI
- Opera - A Truce in the Browser Wars: Toronto Ideas Create Common Ground
- Konqueror - Web Browser Developers Work Together on Security

I går var jo en historisk dag. Historisk på flere måder. Det var jo i går at der blev afholdt release komsammen for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 på Øbaren i København.

For det første er det vel første gang at der er blevet afholdt en release komsammen for noget som endnu ikke er udkommet. Jeg var ellers blevet lovet af højt-på-strå folk fra Mozilla.org at Mozilla Firefox 1.5 ville komme før Thanksgiving, som i år er i dag, nemlig den 24. november 2005. Men vi må altså vente et par dage endnu før Mozilla Firefox 1.5 bliver frigivet.

For det andet så er(bliver) Mozilla Firefox 1.5 historisk. Mozilla Firefox 1.5 bliver hurtigere, sikrere, bedre og mindre. I 1.5 er der bla automatisk opdatering af programmet, hurtigere frem og tilbage funktionalitet, meget bedre udvidelsesmodul håndtering, bedre sikring mod popups, helt nyt indstillinger vindue, osv osv. Læs mere om alle de mange forbedringer her.

Komsammen havde fået samlet en stor mængde af de danske kendisser. Blandt de fremmødte prominente gæster var bla Mr Kim Blim himself, Thomas Kenne aka Mr Medion, Andreas Hansen aka Mr CMS, Thomas Andersen aka Mr Captcha, Anders Hal aka Mr TV, Jakob Gertz aka Mr Danish Poker Solution, Ulrik Hindø aka Mr Brazil, Mr Morten.dk, Jan aka Mr Øl, Jesper Stocholm.

Three new super cool features has just landed. But remember it's not gonna be included in Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird 1.5.

- Allow external source viewer/editor
A lot of people have been requsting this. Finally it has landed.

- Improve the alert notification for new mail
Now the subject and message text is shown in the new message alert. Check the screenshot

- Add a way to generate UUIDs
Would be nice if xpcom provided a way to programmatically generate UUIDs

Lucky Mozilla Firefox on Windows users....
Microsoft Genuine Windows Validation process now works in Firefox and other Mozilla browsers. Firefox users can manually install the Windows Genuine Advantage validation Firefox plug-in available on Microsoft's website to complete the Windows validation process.

It's done via a plugin that you download. Read more

By most measures, Firefox has had a pretty good year. The upstart browser celebrated its first birthday this week, less than a month after marking its 100 millionth download. Devoted followers have trumpeted its 8.65 percent market share, mostly at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The response from the Windows empire has been largely a collective yawn. That could change quickly, however, given that Google seems to be sidling up to Firefox, a relationship that could bring back some bad memories for Microsoft veterans.
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Once again a couple of nice checkins happened this week. Here I'll mentioned the ones that I find the most interesting:

I like cleanup bugs. The Mozilla code has a lot of areas that needs cleaning up, so I really like developers who take the time to cleanup the code instead of just adding new code.

• Reduce content creation redundancy in nsHTMLContentSink


• XPTI_GetInterfaceInfoManager is a bad signature, and we should just use do_GetService anyway

Faster, faster, faster. Besides cleaning code I also like developers that check in code that simple put: makes Mozilla go faster.
Provide table-driven QI mechanism
This proves a significant codesize win on all platforms. The performance tests I was able to do are a little bit more ambiguous: Linux was a definite win (close to 8% speedup on a contrived looping testcase)

New unseen features are also very nice. This once will make a lot of users really happy. Folder Pane Popup over folders with unseen messages. A screenshot of the feature can be seen here.

Last but not least, making Mozilla more flexible is good. Add a reusable autocomplete result type that doesn't depend on Mork

This post sets out a proposed product and platform strategy developed over the last few weeks by Mozilla project staff and drivers that aims to enable innovative web experiences for consumers, accelerate the time-to-market for user-facing innovation, and improve the security and stability of our products.
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Ben Goodger and the guys at Google have been doing some usability work on how people are using tabs. And the conclusion is that people are having some problems with them. Therefore Ben plans to make some changes to the way tabs works in Firefox amounts others "Put close buttons on the tabs", "Implement a simple heuristic for z-index handling", "consolidate the preferences for links sent from external applications".
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I wonder why Google are so interested in doing usability studies for tab browsing in Mozilla Firefox?

Basically, my plan is to create a set of generic toolkit files to act as wrappers for commonly used functions, in order to facilitate simpler and more future-proof app and extension code.
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This is want I've been requesting for a long long time. Instead of extensions developers create their own functions to load and save prefs, create URLs etc these basic functions will be included in the tookit. The toolkit is a base which both Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird share.

There are some libraries that already provide function like this. Most known is the JSLib. But since JSLib is an extension it's not very practical. JSLib cant be include inside an extension due to namespace clash. I personally gave up on JSLib in my Launchy extension.

So as a Mozilla extension developer I'm looking forward to having these utility functions available.

Following on from the Foundation/Corporation split and in preparation for the Firefox 1.5 release, we'd like to significantly reorganize our web content over the next few weeks. The big picture is that we want to move to separate sites for the end user (mozilla.com), Foundation (mozillafoundation.org) and developer (mozilla.org) audiences. Much of this plan is a continuation of what we've been doing to better organize our web site presence and to focus our content for specific users. Addons, SpreadFirefox, and Devmo are good examples of where we've made progress in the last year in better targeting our various audiences. mozilla.com and mozillafoundation.org are next in line.
Read more about the proposed changes