January 28, 2003
EU Mozilla Developers Meeting
The next EU Mozilla Developers Meeting is scheduled for February 8, 2003 in the beautiful city of Brussels, Belgium. The still in progress schedule is detailed here and the list of speakers on the Talks page.
Phoenix Development Behind Schedule
In a post on the Phoenix forums, Asa notes that Phoenix is not dead and that 0.6 is now scheduled for February sometime.
He goes on to say,
Things definitely have been slow and even as we get it moving forward again, don't expect to see the pace of feature development return to what it was for the first few milestones. We're approaching feature complete and then it's going to be spit and polish leading up to a 1.0. After 1.0 maybe things will take off again into the frantic and massive changes pace that we had for 0.1-0.4 but we have always planned to slow it down on features after about 0.5.
January 20, 2003
Bye Chimera, thanks for trying
As posted on Slashdot (ugh!), Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer of Chimera is thinking about stopping development on Chimera, now that Apple has released Safari.
I'm torn about what to do with Chimera. It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform.
Is Chimera's usefulness at an end? That's hard to say. Personally, I've stopped using it, which is saying a lot since I REALLY miss tabbed browsing.
What does this mean for Mozilla as a whole? Not a lot. Many people have claimed that Apples introduction of Safari is bad news for Mozilla, but really, don't Mac's only account for about 3% of browser market share? The real battle is still on Windows, where it is still very much an IE vs. Mozilla battle.
January 18, 2003
Experimental version of Phoenix for Mac OS X
Kevin Gerich, the creator of the Pinstripe theme has also created an experimental version of Phoenix for Mac OS X.
January 17, 2003
Geek Horoscopes
From BBspot - Geek Horoscopes:
Capricorn
Dec 22 - Jan 19
You have a dream. A dream that one day all browsers will be created equal. Until then you'll keep using Mozilla.
Minimal Theme: Breeze
Current favourite theme: Breeze.
Very minimal with very few colours. It's available for Mozilla, Phoenix and Netscape.
January 15, 2003
More Safari coverage
In an article posted and then later removed article by Dave Hyatt (former Mozilla developer, then Safari developer) was archived via Live Journal. His posting gave some very detailed insight into why Safari chose to go with KHTML instead of Gecko. (note: this article was removed because he wanted to write a better version)
The article in a nutshell,
KHTML - Easier to embed, we'll add full standards support later
Gecko - Harder to embed, but it already has full standards support
It's tough to argue with the choice, but since both projects are open source, you have to believe that this will help both projects in the long run.
---
Now, as a Mac OSX user myself, I have been using Safari quite a bit. For the most part my experience has been positive. It's a damn fast browser for both starting up and loading pages. As you would expect from KHTML, some web pages do not render properly, but I'm sure that will be fixed over time.
There are some really cool features that Safari has that have me saying "about time!". One example is the spell-checking that is done as you type in FORM fields. So, if I were actually posting this on my iBook instead of my Windows machine, it would show me my many spelling mistakes, ala Word. (btw. This is a outstanding feature request in Mozilla that I would love to see implemented.)
Bookmark management is very good, and very logical. I still weep every time I need to manage something with IE's so-called favorites management system.
The progress bar is displayed behind the URL in the address bar. I found that really annoying at first, but once I got use to it, I found it pretty handy.
As for some of my favorite Mozilla features though, I certainly hope that Safari will soon implement tabbed browsing of course (despite the claims to the contrary of all the so-called usability experts/grocery baggers who blog about how evil it is) and type-ahead find (which I use quite a bit).
January 13, 2003
IE Phantom Pain
Sometimes I have to use IE at work. Whenever I do, I find myself constantly using Mozilla shortcuts and features. I'm always middle-clicking on links. In Mozilla this opens the link in a new tab. In IE, this opens the Logitech Scroll Wheel. Or I start typing, attempting to use typeaheadfind, which of course does nothing in IE. Being a web developer, View Source is the other big one. I'm constantly hitting CTRL-U or highlighting some text and looking for "View Selection Source" in the IE context menu. After an unsuccessful attempt, I have to stop myself and copy/paste the URL back into a new tab in Phoenix.
Do you ever find yourself using Mozilla shortcuts in IE? Which ones?
January 10, 2003
New Default Phoenix Theme: Qute
The latest nightly builds of Phoenix are now using a new default theme: Qute. Here's a screenshot. It's a good theme, but I still have an affinity for the Phoenix Classic theme. I never understood why some people disliked it so much.
Qute will make it's formal debut, along with a new name for Phoenix in 0.6, which is still tentatively scheduled for this January according to the roadmap.
January 08, 2003
Bulk "Download Images"
Linky is an add-on for Phoenix and Mozilla that adds an item in the context menu that lets you open all text or all image links on a page in new tabs or windows.
Ben Goodger's Tab Downloader is an add-on for Phoenix and Mozilla that allows you to automatically save the content of all tabs that follow the current tab to a local directory.
So say you were visiting a site that had lots of "images" that you wished to bulk download to view later, you could use Linky and Tab Downloader together to do it easily with only a few clicks.
Apple's Safari. Why not Gecko?
From the KDE mailing list
In short:
The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code.
The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance....
Needless to say, we here at blogzilla are disappointed they Apple chose to use a different rendering engine than Gecko, but they apparently have their reasons.
January 07, 2003
Apple Introduces Web Browser: Not Based on Gecko
Apple introduced a webbrowser called Safari at MacWorld today. The surprising thing is that it's not based on the Gecko engine, but instead uses the KHTML toolkit that is used in KDE Konqueror. The Gecko-based iBrowser rumours seemed believable when Apple hired David Hyatt last year.
According to the press release, it's the fastest browser available for the Mac. Steve Jobs is even quoted as saying “...we predict that many will feel it is the best browser ever created. We are bringing innovation back into this category with the first all new browser created in many years.”
I think tabbed browsing has been the best innovation in "the web browser category" in years, but I don't see tabbed browsing listed in Safari's feature-set.
Safari is available as a public beta today.
January 06, 2003
Copy/Paste Long URLs
Sometimes when you get e-mails with long URLs in them from Outlook people, they show up broken like so:
http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/101_things_that_the_mozilla_browser
_can_do_that_ie_cannot.html
This is because Outlook wraps URLs longer than 72 characters, whereas Mozilla Mail does not :) To visit the above link, you'd have to manually rebuild the full url using copy/paste several times. If you copy/pasted both lines into the address bar, everything after the first line break would be stripped, so you'd have to go back and copy/paste each line of the url.
By adding this line,
user_pref("editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines", 3);
to your user.js file for Mozilla or Phoenix, all line breaks will be stripped out when you paste into the address bar.
Now if you tried copy/pasting the above URL, line breaks and all, the full URL appears with the line breaks stripped out. No more rebuilding long URLs.
***
On another note, sorry for the long absence. This site is not dead and will return to regular scheduled posts.