August 28, 2002

Disabling Marquee

Hogarth has put up a page that details how to disable the <marquee> tag.

If <marquee> matters to .05% of the Mozilla base, then disabling it matters to .005% of the Mozilla base.

Posted by pinder at 12:16 PM | Comments (2)

August 26, 2002

Mozilla 1.1 Released

For those of you who don't download and install a nightly build, Mozilla 1.1 has been released. This is a very good build, with lots of new features and bug fixes.

Posted by pinder at 10:33 PM | Comments (11)

August 23, 2002

IE Skin

This should make the usability experts happy: Mozilla IE Skin.

I felt dirty using it, so I went back to Orbit.

Posted by pinder at 04:27 PM | Comments (15)

Mmm...pie menus

Everyone seems to be talking about pie menus today. Mozillazine has a nice big post about it. Even Slashdot has an article about it, so now it's time for Blogzilla to jump on the pie menu bandwagon.

I installed pie menus from mozdev and after using it for the morning, I'd have to say that it's something I can really get used to.

What are pie menus? Well, they're a replacement to the regular pop-up context menus that everyone is familiar with. (for a nice explanatory graphic, see this link: TestPieMenu

Instead of right-clicking on a window and being given a list of all available options, after installing pie-menus when you right-click you see a circle listing the main options available.

Moving the mouse in one of the four directions available changes the pie-menu to display the sub-menus available for that option.

It seems like a really nice way to organize the menus in a logical manner without overloading the user with too many options at one.

On the other hand, I can see how it might be more difficult to find the option that you are looking for since it buries options under hierarchies that are not visible until you select them.

Anyhow, judge for yourself. At the very least it's something worth checking out.

ps. One annoying issue I just noticed as I was putting this article together is that if you right click on a link, there is no copy option!

Posted by jeffp at 10:58 AM | Comments (5)

August 21, 2002

August Nightly Builds

Since the busy people at MozillaZine are not updating the Build Comments page at the moment, I thought I'd mention a few of the latest updates in the nightlies for the month of August:

Bug 30088: Type Ahead Find looks to be complete and has become a part of the default build. However to turn it on, add

user_pref ("accessibility.typeaheadfind", true);"

to your user prefs.

Bug 96736: The Amazon.com "Top 1000 Reviewer" floating image bug has been fixed.

Bug 48436: "Document: Done" in the statusbar has been changed to just "Done". Because you know, that's how Microsoft does it, so it must be right.

Bug 150232: Mozilla now submits the form on clicking the Enter key when <input type="image"> is used. Another nice fix for an annoying bug.

Bug 98092: When you right-click on an image and select properties, it now shows you the file size. A nice feature for web developers. Hat tip to Blogzilla reader Jeremey.

— And finally, my most hated bug: "Chrome buttons remain highlighted after dropdown item selected" has been fixed. And with that, a mighty cheer went up from the users of Mozilla.

***

If you're wondering where I found the above info, it all comes from this CVS Query, which lists the CVS Checkins for the month of August 2002.

Bonsai is the query interface to the Mozilla CVS source repository. To use Bonsai to look for the latest updates to the nightlies, go to the query form and select "MozillaTinderboxAll" from the Module Listbox. Scroll down and select a date range and click "Run Query". If you selected "In the last day" for a date, then you should see then see a screen like this, which lists all the checkins for the current day.

If you're using a nightly build, an easier way is to just select "CVS Checkins Today" from the QA menu. You can also bookmark the Mozilla Checkins in the last day listed in the links to the side.

I usually just skim through the descriptions for something that catches my eye. There's a lot of developer related jargon and code in there, so have fun!.

Posted by pinder at 12:49 AM | Comments (7)

August 17, 2002

Centralized Bookmarks

Scott writes:

I think Mozilla would be perfect if I could make it save my preference to the web instead of my desktop, whether by ftp or other mechanism. Simplest version would be having my bookmarks accesable from any machine with mozilla once I log in.

It would be nice having your bookmarks at work synced with your bookmarks at home. It would be nice having this feature built into Mozilla, but probably highly unlikely it will ever happen. However, Will Sargent's Bookie project might be what you're looking for:

Bookie is an application which keeps all your bookmarks on a central server so that you can access bookmarks from anywhere on the web.

I haven't tried it myself yet, but it looks promising.

Posted by pinder at 05:05 PM | Comments (14)

August 16, 2002

Finally, MailNews gets the same attention as browser

With all of the work being done to improve the browser end of Mozilla, finally it appears that MailNews is getting the same attention.

The Minotaur project designed to "produce a stand alone mail application, built from the mozilla code base."

For additional detail on this project check out bug 90293

Woohoo!

For some interesting stats on both the Phoenix and Minotaur projects, Blake Ross has posted some interesting benchmarks from these two projects in comparison to the Mozilla code base:

On a PII-350 with 128MB of PC-100 and a 7200RPM ultra-2 LVD disk, Phoenix starts in 3 seconds (compared with 5 seconds for Mozilla). Minotaur starts in 6 seconds (compared with 13 seconds for Mozilla).

Now, if I can only find a build of Minotaur to play with...

Posted by jeffp at 11:17 AM | Comments (3)

August 14, 2002

Why should I use Netscape 7.0 again?

As compelling as Radio @ Netscape, integrated AIM, Net 2 Phone and thousands of useless icons on my desktop are, I can't imagine any reason to use Netscape 7.0 if they are not going to include the pop-up ad blocking feature.

From: Dodging pop-ups with Mozilla

Posted by jeffp at 05:22 PM | Comments (3)

August 11, 2002

Phoenix Build

Asa has posted a build of Phoenix on his site. It even uses the Orbit theme as default. But View | Customize Toolbar... is what you want to play with. Very cool.

Posted by pinder at 11:51 PM | Comments (7)

August 06, 2002

Some major Mozilla UI changes

Lot's of changes are under way for the Mozilla browser

- Dave Hyatt is working on customizable toolbars. You can see a screenshot here.

update: a couple more screenshots of toolbar customization are available here and here

- The "Skyline" project, which is a version of Mozilla is being worked on internally at Netscape, "is a short-term project to build a working prototype of a new web client that provides for the daily needs of novice-intermediate users, is fun to use, and really shines in a broadband environment"

- Project "Phoenix", "...a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon, K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform" (via mpt's site)

- The mozilla/browser project, mentioned a while ago on this site has resurfaced on mozdev. There are some screenshots, but the installable XPI is not working, yet.

Posted by jeffp at 09:33 AM | Comments (5)