What Is Firefox
Brian King provides a brief look at Firefox's origins and evolution, and then dives into its support for web standards like CSS and XML, its debugging and extension capabilities, and some cool new features in the upcoming 1.5 release. If you're considering a switch to Firefox, this article may help make the decision for you.
Mozilla as a Development Platform: An Interview with Axel Hecht Axel Hecht is a member of Mozilla Europe's board of directors, and a major contributor to the Mozilla project. At O'Reilly's European Open Source Convention (October 17-20), Dr. Hecht will be talking about Mozilla as a development platform. O'Reilly Network interviewed Dr. Hecht to find out if the long-held dream of Mozilla as a development platform was about to come true. [O'Reilly Network]
A Firefox Glossary Brian King, with some help from Nigel McFarlane, covers everything from about:config to "zool" in this fun, fact-filled Firefox glossary. It's by no means exhaustive, but you'll find references to specific chapters or hacks throughout the glossary to Nigel's book, Firefox Hacks. When you're ready to dig deeper, check out his book. [O'Reilly Network]
Important Notice for Mozilla DevCenter Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Hacking Firefox This excerpt from Firefox Hacks shows you how to use overlays (essentially hunks of UI data) to make something you want to appear in the Firefox default application, perhaps to carry out a particular function of your extension. For example, you might want to add a menu item to the Tools menu to launch your extension. Overlays allow existing Firefox GUIs to be enhanced. [O'Reilly Network]
Mozile: What You See is What You Edit
Most modern browsers don't allow you to hit "edit" and manipulate content as easily as you view it, WYSIWYG-style. Mozile, which stands for Mozilla Inline Editor, is a new Mozilla plug-in for in-browser editing. This article by Conor Dowling provides an overview of Mozile and what in-browser editing means.
[ Mozilla DevCenter]
The Future of Mozilla Application Development Recently, mozilla.org announced a major update to its development roadmap. Some of the changes in the new document represent a fundamental shift in the direction and goals of the Mozilla community. In this article, David Boswell and Brian King analyze the new roadmap, and demonstrate how to convert an existing XPFE-based application into an application that uses the new XUL toolkit. David and Brian are the authors of O'Reilly's Creating Applications with Mozilla. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Remote Application Development with Mozilla, Part 2 In their first article, Brian King, coauthor of Creating Applications with Mozilla, and Myk Melez looked at the benefits of remote application development using Mozilla technologies such as XUL and web services support. In this article, they present a case study of one such application, the Mozilla Amazon Browser, a tool for searching Amazon's catalogs. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Remote Application Development with Mozilla This article explores the uses for remote XUL (loaded from a Web server), contrasts its capabilities with those of local XUL (installed on a user's computer), explains how to deploy remote XUL, and gives examples of existing applications. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Mozdev.org Made Easy Now that mozilla.org is about to release Mozilla 1.2 and Netscape has come out with the latest version of their own Mozilla-based browser, Netscape 7, this is a great time to see what other people are building with Mozilla's cross-platform development framework. Here's a little history about, and a roadmap to, mozdev.org. [Mozilla DevCenter]
XML Transformations with CSS and DOM Mozilla permits XML to be rendered in the browser with CSS and manipulated with DOM. If you're already familiar with CSS and DOM, you're more than halfway to achieving XML transformations in Mozilla. This article demonstrates how to render XML in the browser with a minimum of CSS and JavaScript. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Roll Your Own Browser Here's a look at using the Mozilla toolkit to customize, or even create your own browser. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Let One Hundred Browsers Bloom In this article, David Boswell, coauthor of Creating Applications with Mozilla surveys some of the more interesting, and useful, Mozilla-based browsers available now. [Mozilla DevCenter]
Using the Mozilla SOAP API With the release of Mozilla 1.0, the world now has a browser that supports SOAP natively. This article shows you how Web applications running in Mozilla can now make SOAP calls directly from the client without requiring a browser refresh or additional calls to the server. [Web Development DevCenter]
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Bryan Clark: Raindrop & Jetpack The other day I did a quick hack using Raindrop & Jetpack to get new mail notifications from Raindrop. In total it took me less than an hour. It’s no Joe Shaw hack, so I don’t expect to get in the paper for this but I figured I’d share anyway. This Jetpack checks Raindrop to see if there are new messages and bubbles them up as notifications if there are. Here’s the source code: var messages = ;
function checkMail() {
var api="http://localhost:5984/raindrop/_api/inflow/conversations/home?limit=10";
jQuery.getJSON(api,
function(data, textStatus){
jQuery.each(data, function(i,item){
if (item.unread) {
if (!messages[item.id] || messages[item.id] != item.messages.length) {
var n={title: item.subject,
body : item.messages[0].schemas["rd.msg.body"]["body_preview"],
icon : 'http://localhost:5984/raindrop/inflow/i/logo.png'};
jetpack.notifications.show(n);
}
messages[item.id] = item.messages.length;
}
});
});
}
setInterval(checkMail, 10000);
To try this out you’ll need Raindrop installed and running and Jetpack installed in Firefox. Go to about:jetpack and copy the above code into the Develop tab, then click the try out this code link just below the Bespin editor. If you don’t want to do all that you can just watch the video below (no sound, so you might want to play some music) <object height="304px" width="650px"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7733464&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="304px" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7733464&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="650px"></embed></object> View on Vimeo. [Source: Planet Mozilla] Mary Colvig: Ready for your close up? Are you a Firefox fan? Or even better, a Personas fan? If so, we’d like you to star in a video we’re creating to showcase Personas. Here are the details:
Come as yourself – no fancy costumes needed – and meet other Firefox fans. We’ll treat you to lunch and make it worth your while! And, we promise none of these antics…  Jump up and Dance by Gary Pauck (Firefox Flicks)
Taras Glek: Dehydra Testsuite Passes on GCC 4.5 I spent couple of days fixing the remaining test-suite failures on GCC 4.5 trunk for Dehydra. Since the last time I looked into this, GCC went from crashing all over the place to only crashing if I did something bad. It was nice to discover that as a result of switching to 4.5 Dehydra users will get saner .isExplicit behavior and more precise location info. Treehydra will take more work due to me misunderstanding GTY annotations. By the way, I am really grateful for all of the people who contributed GCC 4.5 fixes so far. You guys have been a big help in getting Dehydra testsuite to 100% on 4.5. Looks like I will meet my goals to finish De+Treehydra by the end of the year in time for GCC 4.5 release and my “Introducing Dehydra to the Developer World”-type talk at LinuxConf.au.nz 2010. Startup Dietrich Ayala: Firefox Startup Performance Weekly Summary Current numbers are available on the Performance Snapshot page. Summary, relative to Firefox 3.5:
This week’s activity:
Projects in a holding pattern:
As usual, more details and links are available on the project wiki, and we’re available to answer questions in #startup on irc.mozilla.org.       Caitlin Looney: Product Shots of Firefox on N900 CNET UK recently reviewed Firefox running on the Nokia N900 (see Firefox Mobile on Nokia N900 hands-on photos: Fire in your trousers). I liked their product shots of Firefox in action (who wouldn’t?) and wanted to share some of those shots with you all today.
Hope you enjoyed the photos…I know I did. I’ll continue to post the latest and greatest screenshots on my Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/missylooney/
      Sid Stamm: update on HTTPS security Version 2.0 of my Force-TLS add-on for Firefox was released by the AMO editors on Tuesday, and in incorporates a few important changes: It supports the Strict-Transport-Security header introduced by PayPal, and also has an improved UI that lets you add/remove sites from the forced list. For more information see my Force-TLS web site.  Giorgio Maone: IE’s XSS Filter Creates XSS Vulnerabilities Internet Explorer 8’s famous XSS filter can be exploited to perform successful XSS attacks against web sites which would be otherwise safe. In other words, XSS “protection” is helping XSS attackers, oh the irony. Well, this is not exactly news among security researchers, but those aware of the details (including Microsoft of course, Eduardo “Sirdarckcat” Vela and myself) have kept a low profile so far. Check, for instance, slide #17 in my OWASP presentation, given two weeks ago. However, after Microsoft left it unfixed for many months, someone apparently decided to whisper this dirty little secret in Dan Goodin (The Register)’s ear. To Microsoft’s credit, this problem has no quick fix: in fact, it’s way worse than a simple implementation bug. Its root is a flawed design choice: when a potential XSS attack is detected, IE 8 modifies the response (the content of the target page) in order to neuter the malicious code. This is, incidentally, the only significant departure from NoScript’s approach, which modifies the request (the data sent by the client) instead, and is therefore immune. Anyway, here’s the juice: IE 8’s response-changing mechanism can be easily exploited to turn a normally innocuous fragment of the victim page into a XSS injection. The attacker just needs a certain degree of control on the content of the web site to be injected: social networks, forums, wikis and even Google Apps are good prey. To be fair, Google Apps are not vulnerable anymore, since Google’s properties wisely choose to deploy the So, web site owners’ dilemma is, opt out or not opt out? Robert Strong: App update status – week of 11/20 It has been a good couple of weeks. There are several bugs I am relieved that are now fixed for Firefox 3.6… especially that we now check if Firefox is in use prior to updating and prevent launching Firefox during an update. Also, checking for updates for users that aren’t able to apply updates. Beltzner did his usual beltzner thing by catching what I see as a major usability flaw in that the original patch notified users repeatedly for the same release until Firefox was upgraded which I was able to fix. I’m still kicking myself for not catching that myself. Progress:
Future targets (short work week so no way this will all get done):
I’m taking Wednesday off so next week is a two day work week for me since Thursday and Friday are holidays. [Source: Planet Mozilla]Armen Zambrano Gasparnian: hy-AM (Armenian) moving forward Robert Sargsyan has been localizing Firefox into Armenian for a really long time through Narro.
Big thanks to Serge!  This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.  Armen Zambrano Gasparnian: libconic package needed for Maemo builds has been deployed Thanks to puppet we were once again able to fix this easily. su - cltbld -c '/scratchbox/moz_scratchbox -p apt-get --yes --force-yes install libconic0-dev' What I did to fix this was:
If you want to read more details check out "Bug 529462 - Add libconic package to Maemo build slaves" This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.  Gervase Markham: Commit Access Policy Draft Currently, Mozilla has a large number of code trees in various source code management systems, many of which have differing requirements for access. This is confusing and difficult for both developers and administrators. This document is the first draft of a vision for what a unified commit access policy might look like. Having a clear commit access policy makes the lives of developers and administrators alike easier. ... This new unified Commit Policy is likely to need careful review and improvement; I've been working on this for a while now but I'm still sure I haven't got it right first time. Comments welcome in mozilla.governance. [Source: Planet Mozilla]Dear ISPs, By far the largest set of support requests that we end up seeing for Thunderbird have to do with being unable to receive or send mail. By far the largest single cause of these failures is some unilateral change by the ISP which cause previously working configurations to stop working. In other words, people come to us for help solving problems we can’t solve. It makes us feel bad, it makes you look uncaring, and it certainly doesn’t help your customers (except for those cases when we go beyond the call of duty and help them as neighbors would, guiding them through the diagnostic & fix). In our next revisions of Thunderbird, we’ll probably work on making our error dialogs better, so that we transmit whatever wisdom we can to your users to give them a fighting chance. But we can do better for your customers, if you get involved. Let’s figure out how to work together to provide better experiences for your customers and our users. I’m quite sure that we can come up with solutions which would save you costs compared to having your customers tie up your tech support lines only to be rebuffed by your staff who often don’t understand how email systems work. It might also help you avoid commoditization… Here are some ideas to start the conversation going:
Together, we can figure out how to get your customers setup with a Thunderbird that works for them, for us, and for you. Looking forward to a productive conversation, – David Ascher Mark Surman: What’s up w/ MozFdn – November Update Here is a brief status update that I shared with the Mozilla Foundation board last week. This report is based on team goals outlined here. In addition to Drumbeat, the last two months have focused communications and community support as well as launching a new education initiative. Highlights include:
November and December will continue to focus on early Drumbeat roll out and web development, as well new fundraising push built around the Namoroka park, which is the Firefox 3.6 namesake. Program2009 team goal: develop a small handful of programs that go beyond software as a way to promote Mozilla’s mission (e.g. education).
Communications2009 team goal: dramatically increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission and public benefit nature amongst the broader public.
Community2009 team goal: improve the Foundation’s ability to support, strengthen and grow the Mozilla community.
Organizational Development2009 team goal: consolidate and strengthen the Foundation team, and develop a long term vision that clarifies the Foundation’s role within Mozilla.
      Daniel Glazman: Opera widgets without Opera... #3 YAY !!! Still a lot to do but it starts looking ok !
Deb Richardson: Last chance! Planet Mozilla Survey I’m going to be closing the Planet Mozilla Survey this afternoon, so if you haven’t had a chance to respond to it yet, please do so ASAP! You can find the survey here: Thanks! [Source: Planet Mozilla] |
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