I noticed a little bit ago that the form autocomplete behavior was not working as I expected, but I hadn’t quite figured out why until recently. For whatever reason, I often start typing in a form field, wait for the autocomplete list to appear, press down arrow to pick the appropriate autocomplete selection, and then press right arrow. This works beautifully in the location bar: it positions the cursor at the end of the completed selection and lets you type in the rest of the path or press Enter to go to the location. Unfortunately, when you press right arrow in the form autocomplete, it just closes the autocomplete box and leaves you with nothing other than the characters you originally typed.

I’m happy to report that somebody noticed it, reported it in bug 283777 and fixed it. The fix is coming in the next Firefox 1.0.x update along with other good fixes.

Almost immediately before the release of Firefox 1.0, the tabs were changed so that they were separated from the page by a thin line. (See bug 258884.) I’ve grown used to having them attached to the page as they were in 1.0PR. I guess the reason for the change is that there were complaints that the tabs didn’t work as well with web pages that had dark backgrounds. From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of pages use a light background color. I don’t blame the Firefox team for the last minute tweak—cleanup and polish before a release is great—but at the same time I miss the old style.

To restore the tabs to the way they were prior to the 1.0 release, I tracked down what exactly was changed in the bug fix. If you add the following to the userChrome.css in your profile directory, it will restore the tabs to the 1.0PR style. You may need to create the userChrome.css file.

.tabbrowser-tabs { border-bottom: 0 !important; }

As you’ve probably already heard, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 has been released. Mozilla Firefox is a fantastic browser and the 1.0 release is a major accomplishment. After years of work, and leveraging and improving on the already solid Mozilla layout engine used by Netscape 6 and 7, Mozilla Firefox is ready. Having followed the project from the early days, I’m glad to see how true it has remained to its original vision. It is a small, fast, and usable tool. It has been my default browser of choice for at least a year and it just keeps getting better. A big thank you to the team that produced it and to the tireless community that supports it.

Go get it! Take back the web.

Earlier this year, developers implemented a few Microsoft-inspired JavaScript/DOM extensions in Mozilla. I was pleasantly surprised to see such pragmatic behavior. Perhaps Dave Hyatt’s post about real-world standards inspired them:

We have a phrase we like to use… and that’s “real-world standards compliance.” What that means is that where possible we attempt to be fully compatible with the W3C standards, but we also want to support the real-world standards, i.e., extensions that for better or worse have become de facto standards. If you really do believe we should not have implemented [a particular non-W3C standardized extension], then you are simply out of touch with reality.

Whatever the reason, with the fix for bug 248549 and bug 246964, Mozilla gained support for “undetected document.all usage”.

What does that mean? Well, hopefully it means that more sites just work correctly. Many current sites use detection of document.all as a quick way to check for IE. Code like if (document.all) { // Do IE stuff } will continue to fail after these bug fixes. What is interesting is that there are older websites (and intranet sites) that just assume that the IE-specific document.all collection exists and go ahead and use it. With these bug fixes, in most cases this document.all usage will work and for somewhat simplistic DHTML, this can make the site usable.

I accidentally ran across a site that was fixed by this change. A coworker pointed it out to me and complained that it wasn’t working correctly in Firefox 0.9. (Go here and click the More Search Options link at the bottom of page.) I examined the site and noticed the undetected document.all usage. Since I had Firefox 1.0PR, I demonstrated that it now worked. There’s now another happy Firefox user in the office!

The fix for bug 239977 gave Mozilla support for tlhIngan Hol, the Klingon language. Although I’d vaguely known that some Star Trek fans spoke Klingon, I was somewhat surprised to learn that the warriors’ tongue is a well-developed language.

Klingon was invented by Dr. Marc Okrand, a linguist originally hired to create a language for those bumpy headed aliens in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Instead of just creating a few words and phrases, he developed grammar, vocabulary, and usage rules. Twenty years later, the language is spoken and studied by a diverse group including Trek fans, linguists, philologists, computer scientists, and psychologists. A number of works have been translated into Klingon, including some of Aesop’s Fables, Hamlet and other works by Shakespeare, and the New Testament.

The Klingon Language Institute, a nonprofit corporation, has much more information about the language. To learn more, you might start with its FAQ. I also enjoyed reading about the written Klingon alphabet.

Two Mozilla hackers, Vladimir Vukićević and Stuart “Pavlov” Parmenter, have put together a spec for an animated PNG (aPNG) format. Wait a second, isn’t there already a format for animated PNG called MNG? Yes. Yes, there is.

Background

Up to version 1.4, Mozilla and browsers based on it such as Netscape 6 and 7 supported MNG. MNG support was removed from Mozilla for a number of reasons, many of which were disputed at the time. Among the reasons were a large file size and a lack of a Mozilla maintainer for the code. Work has continued on the code and if it were included in Mozilla again now, it would be significantly smaller than what shipped with Mozilla 1.4. But it seems to not be enough. Back in Aug 2003, Stuart Parmeter dictated what it would take for MNG to be restored. We’re closer, but I wonder whether the requirements were realistic.

What Now?

So where’s that leave us? The problem with the removal of MNG is that there is no other graphics format that can completely replace it. MNG provided all the beauty of PNG — a full range of transparency, true color support, etc. — as well as animation. In addition, the subformat of MNG, JNG, supported embedding JPEG images for better compression of photographic content while also allowing a full range of transparency. Mozilla practically needs something like MNG for internal use in skins and themes. Indeed, when MNG was removed, a number of themes needed to be updated with GIF-replacements that were larger in size and didn’t look as clean due to the limited color palette of GIF.

If all that was needed was something for Mozilla themes, I’d question the need for revising the PNG file format; it’s clear that MNG/JNG would do what we need today. But I believe the Mozilla drivers are looking to create something that is backward compatible and usable on the web now. It seems that the primary advantage to aPNG is that they are trying to design it so that it will at worst show up as a static PNG image in apps that do not support animation. In real terms this means that IE users as well as web development tools such as Dreamweaver would at least see a PNG image. Another benefit of aPNG over MNG is that it should be a minor change to the PNG library and therefore easier to maintain.

It’s exciting to see Mozilla developers working with the original authors of the PNG specification. Thomas Boutell, the instigator and original editor of the PNG spec writes MNG is dead, long live APNG. Calling the Mozilla pair “young turks”, he speaks positively about their efforts to work with the “old-timers” to create a simple animated PNG format. He says “I could not be more pleased with this development.”

Once the format is defined tools need to support it. At the moment I can create a MNG simply by saving my animation in Jasc Paint Shop Pro. How long before I can do the same with aPNG?

Are the browser wars back? With Microsoft Internet Explorer commanding an estimated 95% share of the browsers used on the web, many proclaimed the Browser War over. A recent article in the Guardian suggests that the past month’s one percent dip in Internet Explorer’s market share may mean the browser wars are back:

The tiniest shift, history shows us, can signal the greatest change. News last weekend that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser had lost a single percentage point of market share might not sound all that significant today, but it could well mean the browser wars are back on. One percent is all it takes…

This week, we find that Microsoft’s share has, for the first time, dropped. Ever so slightly, from 95.73% to 94.73%. “It’s the first time we’ve seen a sustained trend downward for them,” says Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory, which produced these results. “We have a trend. It’s been about a month, and every day we have a steady incremental change.”

For years now I’ve been telling you about Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox, two terrific and completely free web browsers from the Mozilla Foundation. It’s good to see that the world is finally catching on that we don’t need to put up with the pop-ups and security holes of IE.

Even more exciting to me are the extensions available for these browsers. Here are two that I’ve found useful:

SpellBound

Lets you spell check web forms, such as text areas and input fields. This has been desired by Mozilla users for years. (See bug 16409 and bug 23421.) With this extension, the wait is over.

Document Outliner

A shiny new extension that uses the headings in properly marked up web pages to show a document outline in the sidebar. It’s clickable much like the outline in Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word. I’ll write about this more as I play with it. In the meantime, all you web developers should join the conversation about HTML heading markup considerations [noticed on Mezzoblue.]

Firefox just keeps getting better and better. Have you switched yet?

Do I understand correctly—Mozilla Firefox will have Select All on the context menu, but not Print?

For all the good that the Firefox developers have done to create a better browser, they employ a somewhat haphazard approach to UI design. Whether a feature is in the core browser or only available as an extension seems to be based on the whim of the developers. Matthew Thomas commented on this in a post to the WHATWG mailing list, “Firefox isn’t noticeably innovative in any respect (mere competence is enough for now), so I don’t think that’s really surprising enough to be annoyed about.”

Firefox is generally usable and elegant and that is a tribute to the developers. Their dictatorial command of the UI has benefited the browser. (In other words, their decisions are usually reasonable.) Firefox is easily a better browser when taken as a whole, especially when you consider security issues. However, UI problems make it not as good as competitors in specific areas.

In response to the request for a Print context menu, a developer suggested using Ctrl+P or File->Print to print the page. There are various contexts, such as windows opened by JavaScript without menu bars sometimes used by commerce sites, where File->Print just isn’t available. Ctrl+P is fine if you happen to remember keyboard shortcuts. The real advantage to a Print item in the context menu is that it is discoverable. It’s not hard to find with a right-click and it doesn’t require remembering the keyboard shortcut.

I want Firefox to be a fantastic browser. It’s moving in the right direction. I’ve been using it every day for quite a while and Mozilla before that. Let’s make it even better.

Update: I should have mentioned that this feature is available as the Print extension created by Jeeradej Thaworntaweewong. Thank you, Jeeradej. My point is that it shouldn’t be relegated to an extension, but should be part of the core product.

Steven J Vaughan-Nichols recommends Mozilla Firefox in an article for eWeek titled “Internet Explorer Is Too Dangerous to Keep Using”. It’s shocking how frequently IE security holes have been found this year and how large they are. He writes:

This past Friday I started installing Firefox, the browser-only side of Mozilla, on every one of my production Windows machines.

Why? Because Internet Explorer, like Outlook, has finally become, to my mind, a permanent security hole that masquerades as a useful application.

Strong words? Have you really thought about this latest exploit? It could hit every Internet Explorer (IE) browser that merely visited any page served by an infected Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server).

No anti-virus program would stop it, no firewall would slow it down and no shipping IE security patch would even notice it. Visit the page, get the infection. It was that simple.

…

And just how bad was this attack? Boys and girls, let me tell you, this was the worst security violation I have ever seen.

…

In the few days that the sites provided the Trojan horses, hundreds of thousands or millions of users could have had their credit-card, stock-brokerage and bank-account numbers and passwords stolen.

Let me repeat myself: Millions of you may have every bit of your browser-driven online financial security information stolen.

…

The bottom line is that for all practical purposes for today, open-source browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, are inherently more secure than Internet Explorer, and I still have half a dozen more workstations to switch over to Firefox. Go ahead, stick with Internet Explorer for everyday use. It’s your funeral.

In addition to better security, Firefox offers a more enjoyable browsing experience. The few times I’ve used IE in the last few months, I’ve been stunned at how may sites have popup windows for advertising. I haven’t seen one in years with Mozilla and Firefox.

Firefox offers Tabbed browsing, which makes it easy to switch between multiple sites and pages. Conveniently, the bottom of the menu for each bookmark folder has the option to “Open in Tabs”. I organized the bookmarks for a number of sites I read each day in a “Daily” folder. Then I just pick Open in Tabs each morning and read through them.

Firefox’s Find as You Type feature lets you just start typing on a page and it will jump to the links with the letters you’ve typed. It’s a quick way to navigate the page. If you type a slash first, it will search all the text on the page.

Go get Firefox. It’s more secure. It’s more enjoyable. And it automatically imports your Internet Explorer favorites and settings so you can switch very easily.

The Mozilla Firefox 0.9 release is out. Read more about it on the Firefox Product page. Read the Release Notes and then go get it.

I was impressed with how it migrated my bookmarks and other data from Mozilla. (It also offered to do it from Internet Explorer.) I just installed it, ran it, and it offered to migrate the data. Very smooth.

I found a few cosmetic polish issues, but this is a very solid release. Definitely something you can use every day. There’s even a nice help system with tips for Internet Explorer users that are converting to Firefox.

Steven Garrity announced that the Mozilla Visual Identity Team has been hard at work and that Mozilla Firefox is getting a new theme. Although it’s surprising that Firefox is changing themes at this point in the release cycle—the 0.9 release is anticipated this week—I’m glad that the developers are not afraid to make bold moves like this.

The new theme is called Winstripe and is based on the Pinstripe theme for Firefox on the Mac. Kevin Gerich and Stephen Horlander are the designers of both themes. Kevin Gerich’s screen shot of the theme thrilled me, and now that I’m using it I find it quite elegant and clean. The goal is to have a similar “feel” across platforms while blending in with platform styles. It’s a terrific plan. Winstripe already looks quite good to me despite Steven Horlander’s claim that it’s a 0.1 release at best.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the previous Firefox theme called Qute. To me it seemed, well, too cute, almost cartoonish. While it was clearly well done with gradients and vibrant colors, I found it a bit overpowering. I mentioned earlier that I also hated the throbber. Apparently one of the reasons for the change of themes was that the designer of Qute wanted restricted licensing. That’s bad, especially in an open source program like Firefox.

Winstripe excites me by its simplicity and clarity. Years ago, Matthew Thomas (mpt) pointed out graphics for a similar theme. I’d wished that somebody would make it into a theme and now we have Winstripe.

Despite my pleasure with Winstripe, I don’t find it perfect just yet: Perhaps it’s just that I’m a long time user of Mozilla and before that Netscape, but I miss the tails on the arrows on the back and forward buttons. I’d also like to see the back and forward buttons have a slightly different color, which would help improve recognition. Using the checkmark-in-blue-circle symbol for both Properties (in the bookmarks manager) and General Options is a bit confusing to me. Although it isn’t used that frequently, Windows has a distinct toolbar symbol for Properties—it looks like a hand over a white page. The new throbber is slick, especially on the tabs, but I’d hoped for one that featured the Firefox logo.

In any case, I think the Firefox team made a great choice in switching themes and I’m looking forward to the refinements as Firefox moves toward a 1.0 release.

Reading the blogs of Mozilla contributors is a great way to keep up with the latest news about Mozilla. (Reading mozillaZine is required.) To save you time, Henrik Gemal has put together a page of Mozilla Related Blogs aka Blogupdates that shows a snippet from the latest few posts from each blog. Even better, each time you visit the page it marks which blogs have been updated since your last visit. Many thanks for the page!

To save a few more seconds, I created a bookmarklet that will open a new window for each blog that has been updated. Go to his Blogupdates page and click the bookmarklet. I wish there was a way to get them to open in new tabs — opening lots of windows can be slow — but that doesn’t seem to be possible from a bookmarklet. (I’ve heard that there’s an extension (multizilla?) that might support this but haven’t checked. Perhaps there’s one that lets you force opening of new windows to use tabs.) The bookmarklet also leverages code and specifics of his site, so it may break if he makes any changes.

Open New Blogs

Enjoy!

I’ve found that a quick way to switch between them on Windows is to use Alt+Tab immediately after they finish opening. If you close each blog window after you read it and then press Alt+Tab, you’ll jump to the next one. This also lets you read them oldest to newest.

Update: Well that didn’t last long. I fixed it to work with the site again after some style changes caused it to break.

I’ve had a chance to play around with the new and shiny Mozilla Firefox release. First, I have to say that the new logo makes a surprising difference. With its bright colors and obvious polish, it makes the browser feel more like a real product. I am surprised that the logo has the fox facing the globe. They had a tremendous opportunity to create a friendly “mascot” for the browser based on the cute red panda and passed it up. Ah, well. I played with the logo to quickly try a front facing variation that looks more like a firefox (that’s it on the right), but I’ll go with the official brand.

Second, the name change is good. I complained about Mozilla Firebird stealing the name of another open source project and I’m glad they’ve done the right thing and changed names. Again. (This makes at least five, but I may have miscounted.) The amusing Firesomething Extension lets you attempt the difficult task of changing the name more frequently than the developers. Actually, based on the trademark registrations, I expect Mozilla Firefox will be around for a long while.

I was stunned to find that I like the new download manager. It just does what I expect it to do and then gets out of the way. Wow. It has a slick appearance and shows the download percentage in the titlebar, which suits me fine. If only I could get rid of the completely unnecessary “biff” that pops up near the taskbar at the end of a download. I think it’s only there to show off. It almost ruins the experience for me.

I continue to be impressed with the Firefox Preferences, er, Options dialog. It’s well designed and elegant. I heartily agree with them moving the Proxies selection to the General panel. Much better than Advanced in Mozilla.

Firefox still has areas that need to be improved. Below are things that I believe will frustrate users switching from Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) yet can be easily fixed. These are also some of the most long-standing and contested bugs in Mozilla. Although I’m including the bug numbers, if you’re wise you won’t go and read them. They’ll just annoy you with the mindblowing lack of common sense.

• Replace File|Exit with File|Close. bug 65121 (or bug 171892)–This used to trip me up in Mozilla relatively frequently, but after repeatedly bashing my head on the keyboard and crying I managed to learn not to use the bottom menu item. Firefox’s IE-like qualities must have lulled me into thinking I could trust menu items again. “Where’d my browser windows go!?” Just fix it already.
• Add Print to the page right-click context menu. bug 24221 (and more optimistically bug 204519 This has been “won’t fixed” since 2000 and has gotten many duplicates. There are specific cases in pop-ups where there is no menu other than the context menu. This would likely be my third most frequently used context menu item after Back and View Source.
• Improve plugin installs. bug 224227 and others. While it’s better than it was before Netscape 6 shipped, plugin installation is still not as easy as in IE. Some of this would be mitigated if “typical” plugins were preinstalled or detected automatically.
• Show the URL of bookmarks in the status bar when mouse hovers over them. bug 23460 IE does this in the favorites and it’s quite useful. I even developed a fix for this bug. Hyatt’s comments in the bug made me think it was fixed in Firebird. If it was, I don’t see the fix in Firefox.
• Support multiline tooltips 45375 Sites often use tooltips for extra information. Firefox crops the text so you may miss the important bits. IE shows it all.
• Add a help system. (bug 165960) Mozilla 1.6 comes with a help system that even includes tips for those switching from Internet Explorer. This is a great idea that needs to be included with Firefox. After reading through the bugs it looks like this is already fixed on the trunk. Looking a little deeper I found the Firebird Help Project at Mozdev.org. Good!

Below is a list of a few things that bother me about Firefox. I use and develop web-applications all day, so I want a powerful and elegant browser. Firefox feels and is incomplete in areas compared to Mozilla. (It is also better in others, such as the form autocomplete dropdowns and customizable toolbars.) Yes, there are extensions that would give me the functionality I want, but Mozilla already has it so I’m not sure I see the point. Still, I’m finding it hard to stay away from Firefox.

• I want the Mozilla history window. Sure it’s nice to have quick access to history in the sidebar in Firefox, but when I really want details Mozilla’s history window is superior. Why can’t we have both like we do with the Bookmarks sidebar and Organize Bookmarks window?
• I can’t change my language preferences. I’m frequently switching my default language in Mozilla to test various language versions of sites. I’m told this is a not uncommon experience in internet cafes. Firefox has no current support for switching languages.
• The backspace key goes back!? I know this is an IE-ism, but this is terrible. I use Find As You Type all the time and frequently revise it with backspace. In Mozilla I can backspace multiple times with no problem. I seem to do the same in form fields. In Firefox I’ve found myself multiple pages back for no apparent reason.
• Bring back MNG and JNG support. It looks like this will soon be back on the Mozilla trunk. It’d be great for Firefox, too. While the current IE market dominance limits the web usefulness of these image formats, they can be used in fantastic ways in themes. And I hope Firefox can steal some marketshare.
• Ok, this is a bit silly, but get a better throbber. I’m sure it’s cool to have your personal logo as a browser’s throbber, but the Q-scythe doesn’t do it for me. Mozilla’s M/Mozilla head throbber has the benefit that it is extremely obvious when it is active. I gotta give some credit to Firefox: at least the throbber is there by default. Can’t we make one based on the new Firefox logo? Perhaps this provides the chance to show the front of the firefox?

Earlier this year I mentioned that I had developed a fix for Mozilla bug 23460. After applying the fix, Mozilla will show bookmark URLs in the statusbar when you hover over bookmarks in the personal toolbar or bookmark menu. Although I wrote the description of the fix for Mozilla developers, interested Mozilla users have asked about what they need to do to patch their Mozilla version. I’ve added instructions to help you.

I know this works with Mozilla 1.4. I’d imagine if you make the edits instead of just snagging the patch files it would apply to any recent version of Mozilla including 1.5 and 1.6, but I haven’t tried it. I also got a report that applying the file uncompressed worked better for one user. Not quite sure why that would be—perhaps it depends on your zip tool—but thought I’d point it out.

Of course, you could also use Mozilla Firebird instead as it apparently already supports this feature.

The new Mozilla.org website is up and while I somewhat appreciate the design change, the usability problems are disappointing—I know they got feedback on this. I never understand why designers mess with the link underline styles and colors to make them inconsistent. The site forces no underlining for links, which wouldn’t be so bad—indeed, it’s my preferred style—but it also has poor choices for link colors. Are links white, blue, brown, or red? Oh, that heading that’s blue and looks just like the links over there isn’t a link. Oh, that heading that’s brown and looks looks just like the links over there isn’t a link. Frustrating! I hate using my magic wand to find which of the text that looks like links really are. Worse, the designer decided that visited links should (almost) match the text color. So now you have to look through all the text for links.

Colors are also a problem on LCD monitors. Some of the text, particularly the brown when not bold, becomes faint so it isn’t read as easily. The visited link color might as well be the same as the text. The choice of the link colors seems to switch randomly as you progress through the site. Watch the colors in the left side navigation bar: sometimes they’re blue, sometimes brown, sometimes they become red when hovered, other times they become blue.

It’s really sad that the site suffers from these problems, because I really like the revised and much more user-centered content. If they’d just used the blue color consistently for links, the site would be a joy to use.

I scratched another itch and created a fix for bug 23460 so that Mozilla will show bookmark URLs in the statusbar when you hover over them in the personal toolbar or bookmark menu. This bug has frustrated me since Netscape 4 broke Netscape 3’s bookmark menu behavior. Even IE5 got this one right. It’s way beyond time that Mozilla did as well.

As mpt requested in the bug, it’s in the statusbar only (although I did leave the personal toolbar tooltips in place). No strange tooltips popping up in a menu to show a redundant URL.

There are a few related bugs that I’d also like to fix: show the URL in the statusbar for the back and forward buttons and menus (bug 88541) and show the URL in the statusbar for items on the Go menu (I don’t think there’s a bug logged for this).

I’ve created a fix for bug 72374 in Mozilla 1.4 that makes bookmarklets have different icons than bookmarks in the menus and on the personal toolbar. To apply the fix you need to add the updated files to the appropriate chrome jars.

A new chapter in the Book of Mozilla has been revealed after yesterday’s events. In Netscape 3.x and 4.x, the about:mozilla URL would give you the following entry:

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10.

In Netscape 6.x/7.x and Mozilla the entry read:

And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble.
from The Book of Mozilla, 3:31 (Red Letter Edition)

Now Stephen Donner says there’s a new entry:

And they watched as the beast cast off its chains, and with a terrible roar burst forth and slew those who had bound it. And for days the rivers ran red with their lifeblood.
- from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

And Neil Deakin suggests another:

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 (Red Letter Edition)

I’ve been working most of today on a couple of Mozilla bug fixes. Although I’ve been keeping an eye on the project, doing bug triage, and writing testcases for years, this was interestingly the first real code I’ve worked on for Mozilla. I even got permission from management at my employer to do coding work. I’ve been using LXR, bugzilla, and the mozilla.org website off and on all day. After a break for supper and to help get the kids in bed, I come back to resume work and am stunned to find that the world changed while I was away.

The revised mozilla.org website looks shiny, but it will take me some time to adjust. I thought I’d mistyped something for a second.

So what changed?

• Mozilla.org announces the formation of the Mozilla Foundation, a new non-profit organization to manage the code and coordinate development. AOL pledges $2 million in cash over the next two years, as well as equipment, domain names, and trademarks to help launch the organization.
• Mitch Kapor is the new chairman of the Mozilla Foundation.
• Netscape employees are laid off.
• Netscape.com rebrands as Netscape Network. The Download Netscape link is buried as “Browser Central”.

I’d been thinking that all the rumors floating around for weeks about Netscape 7.1 being the last Netscape browser ever were just confused by the new Mozilla roadmap where future development was switching to the Mozilla Firebird browser. Apparently they weren’t so inaccurate. I’ll miss Netscape, but I switched to Mozilla quite a while ago. Still, as I mentioned yesterday, Netscape 7.1 is a great browser and makes an excellent final release.

I think today’s developments will be a positive thing for Mozilla and the Web. Mozilla finally gets to determine its own fate. With deep appreciation, I wish the best to all the Netscape developers that have worked on this terrific browser. Thanks for your hard work!

I’ve upgraded my Mozilla 1.3.1 install to the Mozilla 1.4 milestone and I’m pleased with it. Mozilla 1.4 is the best Mozilla yet. Here’s a few of the improvements I noticed: the chevron menu for the personal toolbar that shows up if you have too many items, improved bookmark drag and drop behavior, go to line in view source, and clicking on an error in JavaScript console takes you to error line in view source. There are also changes in the preferences including a terrible UI for configuring the launch options for startup, new windows and new tabs, but at least you can do it.

I find that I still need to do fair amount of tweaking and reconfiguring before I’m ready to use it. I put together a page that shows my typical Mozilla Tweaks.

I’ve also played with Netscape 7.1 which is basically identical to Mozilla 1.4. Compared to 7.02, it is a huge improvement. As a web developer, I’ve very thankful that a custom install of Netscape 7.1 includes a developer pack with the DOM viewer, JavaScript debugger, and Chatzilla. Of course those tools have been available in Mozilla for ages, but it’s good Netscape decided to include them in the branded release. If you need to use Netscape, 7.1 is terrific.

Let me get this straight—Mozilla added support for the usability decreasing Marquee tag because a few sites in China used it, but removes support for MNG, the only animated image format that supports alpha transparency and is currently used by Mozilla themes? Yeah, that makes sense. Reading comments in bug 195280 it appears that the current module owner wants to call it quits. No big deal—someone else has offered to take over. There’s also a complaint that at 166K, MNG support is too big, but that seems grounds for improving it, not removing it. Finally, some said that it wasn’t a W3C standard, so it should be gone. Standard or not, it’s being used and supported by a number of apps. The discussion in the bug got pretty heated. As near as I can determine, the only reason it’s being removed is because they said they were going to and had a patch. I’m just cynical enough to believe that this means the next version of Netscape (based on 1.4) won’t have MNG/JNG support, although currently the removal only applies to the trunk. (Netscape 6 and 7 did.) If you disagree with this removal, go vote for bug 18574, now one of the top 20 most voted for bugs in Mozilla.

Some people have suggested that Mozilla’s SQL support is unlikely to confuse anyone. I would say the same but that doesn’t change the fact that courts often try to prevent potential confusion. Two companies can, and frequently do, share the same trademark if they are competing with different products or are in different markets. I think that Mozilla SQL support might cause confusion with the FireBird SQL database, as I mentioned earlier. The Pilot pen vs. PalmPilot case makes me think the FireBird database people might have grounds for a legal battle. In that case, the makers of the Pilot pen made the claim that because you used a writing stylus to use the PalmPilot device, there was potential market confusion, despite the fact that the PalmPilot was a totally different market and that the stylus did not resemble a Pilot pen. This is why Pilot is no longer a part of the name of the company or products produced by Palm.

I hope that Boris Zbarsky is correct in his understanding of how Mozilla plans to use the FireBird name. If Mozilla uses it simply as an internal component name like “Necko” this is all overstated. However, given that the browser formerly known as Phoenix will be distributed as a standalone product, I doubt he’s right.

I’m sure it is quite expensive to pay for lawyers and trademark searches, but I believe the right thing for Mozilla to do is to pick a new name and forget about using FireBird. Potential legal issues aside—who knows, the lawyers may have already said there’s no concern with this—it just doesn’t feel good to trample on another open source project’s name.

Mozillazine has an announcement that the Phoenix browser has been renamed FireBird. This has provoked furious discussion about the legality and morality of stealing the name of the FireBird SQL open source project. Helen Borrie of the FireBird SQL project harshly responded saying "we of the real Firebird Project ARE incensed about this filthiest of dirty tricks, launched without warning by a crowd which has pretensions to being ‘open’ in the broader sense espoused by the OSI. This is not a ‘free and open’ tactic in any sense except that by which felons believe others’ property is ‘free for the taking’ and ‘a glass door is always open’.… The heart of this dispute is not ‘legal comfort’, however. It’s the doing of this dirty deed in the heartland of open source, where we are all supposed to be above such things. If Open Source is to win, we can well do without brother cynically stealing from brother."

Given that the Mozilla browser has added native SQL support, I believe there could be some confusion that would have legal teeth.

I assume the browser formerly known as Phoenix picked up this SQL support from the Mozilla code as well. If it did, then people may well ask: did the FireBird browser use FireBird database technologies to add support? I know the answer is no, but many will not know that or may be confused.

As much as I like the name FireBird (I liked Phoenix even better) I find it appalling that Mozilla would steal a name from another open source project. Yes, I know that it is typical for open source projects start out by accidentally using the name of another. This is usually easy corrected. I expected better from a well established project like Mozilla.

Just after the fifth birthday of the code release, Mozilla.org draws a new roadmap that charts a bold course for the future. Partially a response to the failures and experience of the past development years, it is also a natural progression and recognition of Mozilla.org projects already leading the way.

Key points:

• All future apps will leverage the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE).
• The browser component will utilize the work on Phoenix.
• Similarly, the standalone Minotaur/Thunderbird project will become the basis for the mail application.
• The full everything-in-one-process Mozilla suite of apps will be replaced using a more modular approach.
• Bless the 1.4 release as the new stable release and discourage the use of 1.0 for future work.
• Fix architectural bugs in the Gecko layout engine to enhance performance, extensibility, and maintenance.
• Give more power and responsibility to module owners and have fewer people with blanket check-in rights.
• Relax super-review requirements for those people, such as the module owners, that demonstrate good judgment and ability.

It remains to be seen how this will play out, but I like the essence of the plan. The Phoenix browser is worlds better than Mozilla in some areas and even Mozilla 1.3 is fabulously better than 1.0. Having a more modular architecture should benefit not only Mozilla apps, but applications and products built by other organizations. Having better defined module ownership and the ability and desire to say no to poor quality code should also improve the project.

Still, I have concerns, primarily about user interface. The roadmap has this to say about UI:

It is almost always better to have a competent owner who rules decisively, than to have no owner and live in a state of indecision (N.B.: a committee of more than one or two is not an effective owner). This point is especially true for top-down application design and policy setting, particularly for user-interface design. For coherent UI within an application, there is no substitute for leadership by an “application czar”. For cross-application consistency where it is needed, we expect such czars to communicate, cooperate, and consolidate things such as common default keybindings.

That’s true, as far as it goes… where Mozilla, and open source projects in general have broken down is in actually having the application czar. (Or more to the point, in having good ones that understand user behavior and can design well—most open source projects effectively have an application czar that is the lead programmer.) Having UI involvement and management just at the module level isn’t enough. UI decisions frequently affect overall architecture, from the network on up to the browser chrome and everything in between. Add to the mix that for good or bad, the best designers are rarely top-notch coders. So how does the application czar get elected and respected in the community?

A related challenge is in determining target audience for the application. I’ve seen many end-user complaints that the mozilla developers just don’t work on the things that are most annoying and need to be fixed. Unsurprisingly to me, Phoenix is a better browser than Mozilla because it set out to be a browser for real people. Will the ficticious “Mozilla isn’t for users” mindset continue? Or will the Phoenix practice win? With many more companies deploying and shipping Mozilla (see RedHat and HP for examples) and with this roadmap it’s time to admit that Mozilla is for users.

But who is the user, specifically? I’ve often thought that using a Persona approach such as described by Alan Cooper and others could provide an answer for open source developers. It’d be worth a try. Until then, design for mpt’s mother.

Back to the big picture, the idea of providing an extension mechanism is quite appealing to geeks, but the average person wouldn’t even know to look for extensions. There’s also the shared-computer / internet café to contend with. How will the question of the default set of capabilities be answered? Whatever was in IE? Whatever the module owner likes?

Regardless of these concerns, I believe this is a step in the right direction. Even if done for reasons other than concern for the user, it will benefit them. I just hope Mozilla.org can take the additional steps to create processes and products that will result in joyous and satisfied users.

Five years ago yesterday, Netscape released the Communicator source code. In the years since then, Mozilla.org community members have hammered on the code to create an extraordinary browser that leads the world in standards support and is a platform for other browsers as well as other products.

By coincidence, the 200,000th bug was logged in the bugzilla bug tracking system on the five year anniversary of the source code release. Although bugzilla tracks many components and tools other than the browser and includes features and duplicates as well as unique and real bugs, the magnitude of that bug number is amazing. Many, many bugs have been found and fixed over those five years, making Mozilla a solid and stable tool. A number of these fixed bugs include security exploits that remain unpatched and troubling in other browsers.

Happy birthday, Mozilla!

I’ve been waiting with much anticipation for the final release of Mozilla 1.3. I expect this will be an excellent Mozilla version and a highly recommended upgrade. There have been a number of terrific changes, including ones that allow web developers to create rich-text edit controls like htmlArea by interactivetools.com. Profile switching is another recently added feature that will be very nice for those that share computers.

In other Mozilla.org news, the Chimera browser for the Mac has been renamed to Camino™ and has a new 0.7 release available. They were forced to change the name due to trademark infringement. Shame that they picked something so bland. Camino is a Spanish word meaning “path” or “road”, so at least it has some loose relationship to a web browser.

Yay! Boris Zbarsky has a blog.

Mike Pinkerton is pondering what to do with Chimera:

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. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn’t any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much.

12 days before, he sounded much more optimistic and pointed to Chimera’s strengths:

So I bet you want to know what I think about Safari? … What does it mean for Chimera? Well, we have the ability to be much more flexible simply because we don’t answer to one man: Mr. Happy.… We’re also a real open-source project, not just one that dumps its changes back at the 11th hour because we’re mandated to. That means we get the help of everyone on the net not just in testing, but in development and feedback that is crucial to the success of the milestone releases.

We’ve come a long way in less than a year. Where do we go now? Now that the cat is out of the proverbial bag, we have a chance to openly evaluate what each browser brings to the table and ensure that we’re going in the right direction. Then probably 1.0 after a couple months of polish, then back on the Mozilla trunk so we can pick up a lot of the cooler features that have gone in, as well as speedups (15% by bryner’s latest numbers, and that’s almost as much as we need to catch Safari).

I think it’d be a shame to lose Chimera, even though I don’t directly benefit from it (well, I am using the Chimera theme for Phoenix at the moment) I’ve heard many good things about it from Mac-using friends. It also seems to be an important option for those that aren’t using the latest and greatest version of OS X as Safari requires. This whole conversation is a bit strange to have about an open source project. It may not matter whether there are other options if Chimera still fits some users’ needs.

David Hyatt discussed in more detail why Apple would chose KHTML over Gecko as the engine for the Safari browser. Unfortunately it has been taken down now. John Gruber apparently saw it, too, and quotes the following snippet over on his Daring Fireball site:

Imagine that your number one priority for a browser is speed. You want a browser that launches almost instantly. You want a browser whose page load peformance can be improved dramatically. This is your number one goal, because you want to address what has been a fundamental problem on your platform (OS X) ever since it was launched: that no browser has accomplished the goal of fast startup and fast page load. Your job is to find an existing open source engine and improve it to the point where it does have fast startup and phenomenal page load times.

Hyatt also pointed to David Baron’s review of the Gecko layout engine for examples of the challenges facing a company seeking a layout engine. Hyatt essentially said that in order to use Gecko to accomplish Safari’s speed goals, Apple would have had to significantly rearchitect some parts, drastically trim or remove several libraries, such as the image and network libraries that were redundant with Mac OS X libraries, and learn Gecko’s unique terminology for everything. With KHTML they did not need to rearchitect because they found it already small and well-designed. But it cost them the unmatched standards support of Gecko. It will be interesting to see how these comparisons motivate improvements in both engines.

Update: jwz saw it too and points to the LiveJournal archive of Hyatt’s post. He says Hyatt says he is working on a more accurate version.

Aaron Swartz alludes to Safari having spell check in HTML form fields. If only Mozilla had implemented it back in 2000 when it was suggested. See Mozilla bug 23421 and bug 16409. This will be a killer feature for anyone that writes text in HTML forms, especially bloggers. Unfortunately, both bugs are still marked helpwanted.

Don Merton (formerly of Mozilla.org and now engineering manager of Safari at Apple) has sent a message to the KDE developers explaining why Apple picked KHTML as the engine for their new Safari browser. He writes:

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….

Update: jwz claims that “translated through a de-weaselizer, this says:”

“Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can’t even comprehend where to begin. Also did we mention big and slow and incomprehensible?”

Don also posted a very lengthy list of changes that Apple made to improve KHTML. He promises that Safari source code should be available soon.

Competition is good. Bring on the browser wars.

Just caught the live feed from MacWorld 2003 where Steve Jobs demonstrated the new Apple web browser called Safari. Impressive. The SnapBack feature looks cool: You go to Google, search for something, go to one of the resulting sites and wander around a while, and then just click the SnapBack button to jump back in history to your original search results page. Seems a reasonable and frequently needed shortcut, although I’m unclear how it affects the back button and it might add some user confusion about which to use. He also demonstrated SnapBack with Amazon and said it worked for any site. I would have been really impressed if it worked for searches on any site, but I suspect it just goes to the root for non-known search engines. I liked the excellent mechanism for reporting bugs.

Jobs said it is based on the KHTML open source project when I expected it would be based on Gecko like Chimera. It really surprised me, especially after they hired David Hyatt. It remains to be seen how well Safari does with standards, but more standards-based browsers is a good thing. I hope it is solid. If Safari is really the fastest browser on the Mac, that’s cool.

I can’t wait to try it out.

Update: I added a link to the Safari information on the Apple website and to a KHTML page.

Robert Wall has released an update to his Bonsai Bugs tool that highlights the interesting and noteworthy bugs as I discussed earlier. I’ve been using an early version of it for a couple weeks and I’m impressed with the bugs that it’s highlighting. Try it out and see what you think.

I made some suggestions to Robert Wall about ways that he could improve his already quite nice Bonsai Bugs tool. As I mentioned earlier, I miss Asa’s informed and concise buildbar comments about what bugs are most interesting in each build.

Seeing Bonsai Bugs got me wondering if there was some way to determine the most interesting bugs without needing a human investigator. If Google’s shown us anything, it’s that you can use the power of the network to show you the most relevant information. What if Bonsai Bugs could somehow mark the bugs that have the most community interest and downplay those that are less important?

I came to the conclusion that there are several ways to evaluate community interest using data already in bugzilla. For example, the following criteria could be added together to devise a reasonable Community Interest Factor so that you could rank the bugs:

• Bugs with many duplicates
• Bugs with many votes
• Bugs with a large list of CCs
• Bugs with a large number of comments
• Bugs with many dependencies (or even with a parent with many dependencies)
• Bugs with certain keywords (for example, bugs fixed that have out of date milestones (Mozilla0.9), crash, dogfood, catfood, or 4xp keywords).
• Joke: Bugs that I vote for or that I am CC’ed on.

Obviously these are somewhat vague and need to be tweaked to pick up those bugs that are most relevant. You could compare with the most frequently reported bugs list or recent duplicates list as well. You could search and see if a bug is a dependency of a “Make X release not suck” bug. I imagine you could even search Google or the newsgroups for each bug number and up the Community Interest Factor if you find additional links.

I’m happy to say that Robert found the idea a good one and we’ve had a stimulating discussion about ways to refine and improve this. You could be incredibly granular and show a great number of levels of community interest, but the result is that nothing really stands out. Five seemed like too many. I suggested to him that with the right threshold only two levels (normal and interesting) might be needed, but three felt about right (normal, interesting, and imporant).

I’m looking forward to the first release of the improved Bonsai Bugs. I imagine that the algorithms will continue to be refined and this will make it more enjoyable for the community to watch the tree grow.

Interesting bug of the day: The fix for bug 172751 has been checked in. This should make Mozilla on Windows platforms other than XP look more like native apps. It fixes a few cosmetic glitches on XP as well. This will be most obvious with the Classic theme.

A few days ago Blogzilla mentioned the jTFlashManager tool that lets you enable or disable flash on the fly. Investigating how the tool works shows that it just renames the plug-in file. I’ve been renaming the plug-in to disable it for a long time, but never tried doing this while the browser was running. For some reason I thought it read the plug-ins at startup.

The tool requires a Java VM to be installed and I thought that was overkill for renaming a file. I was a bit rusty, but wrote a DOS batch file that works beautifully as a shortcut from my Windows desktop. Save the toggleflash.bat file and then run it passing the path of your Phoenix, Mozilla, or Netscape plugin directory. If you’re not currently viewing a page using the flash or shockwave plug-ins, it will toggle them on or off.

Here’s the file:

@echo off
if “%1″=="” goto usage
if exist %1.\npswf32.dll goto disable
if exist %1.\npswf32.dll.off goto enable
echo Couldn’t find a flash plugin.
echo.
goto usage

:disable
ren %1.\npswf32.dll npswf32.dll.off
if exist %1.\np32dsw.dll ren %1.\np32dsw.dll np32dsw.dll.off
echo Flash Disabled.
goto done

:enable
ren %1.\npswf32.dll.off npswf32.dll
if exist %1.\np32dsw.dll.off ren %1.\np32dsw.dll.off np32dsw.dll
echo Flash Enabled.
goto done

:usage
echo You must specify the path to your browser’s plugins directory.
echo Put the path in double quotes if it includes spaces.
echo For example, toggleflash.bat "c:\Program Files\Mozilla\bin\plugins"

:done

I was somewhat disappointed when Asa stopped updating the Build Bar over at MozillaZine. I enjoyed reading his summaries of the important bugs that had been fixed each day. This was especially helpful to me in testing nightly builds of Mozilla. Now with Mozilla 1.0 (and 1.1, and almost 1.2) shipped and the product generally quite stable, I’m not as concerned, but still miss the up to date news.

There are now a number of resources that help keep you equally or better informed about Mozilla development. The MozillaZine Mozilla Builds Forum and Phoenix Builds Forum provide a wealth of information.

Unfortunately, I most miss the short and to-the-point summaries that Asa provided, as well as his overall sense of the state of the project. One easy but verbose way to track Mozilla (and siblings) development is by watching CVS check-ins via Bonsai, which I’m sure it one of the tools Asa used. A day’s results from Bonsai provides more information than you’d probably want to wade through: it shows every file that was changed. Thankfully, several sites now condense the list of daily check-ins and cross-reference them with the relevant bugs. Bonsai Watch provided by MozillaNews gives the detailed bug information. I personally prefer the brief results provided by BonsaiBugs and BonsaiBugs for Phoenix from backprop.net.

Finally, there’s the weekly status update from Mozilla.org, the previously mentioned news sites, MozillaZine.org and MozillaNews.org, and an ever increasing number of developers’ blogs.

Blogzilla characterizes the discussion in Mozilla bug 97284 as a war of Standards vs “But IE Does It”. They misunderstood the thinking behind my comments in that bug and missed what I believe is another point of view. Here’s a hint that I don’t believe in doing things just because IE does it.

The fact is that IE currently has far better support for editable content than Mozilla. I’d really like to see Mozilla have similar capabilities. In cases such as this where Mozilla is playing catch-up to IE and implementing similar, identical, or better capabilities, it often makes sense to use the same syntax as IE. Mozilla has done this in the past (see innerHTML, offsetHeight, offsetWidth). InnerHTML is a particularly interesting example. You could get the same information through the DOM, but it was convoluted, poorly understood, and developers were already familiar with the convenience of innerHTML.

The argument is often made that Mozilla should only implement the “magic” standards defined by outside standards organizations. I see little difference between a standard that is defined by the W3C and one defined by a company, such as Netscape or Microsoft. Implementing a Microsoft-defined standard could be more beneficial than a W3 standard because more sites would be impacted. In the end, I don’t care too much how the standard became a standard as long as we can agree on it and our browsers support it.

As a historical note, the early versions of HTML suffered from a problem typical of standards organizations: they were slow to be defined. This led to innovation and browser-specific extensions and the browser war. The initial versions of IE implemented the Netscape extensions as part of standard behavior. If I’m remembering correctly, HTML 3 was a mishmash where the W3 agreed to simply release a “standard” that matched the extensions in use at the time. They realized that if they waited too long they’d be irrelevant.

Standards organizations can define standards that look good on paper, but are difficult or impossible to implement. Companies that have implementation experience and take that expertise to the standards groups are quite valuable. This means that the companies need to be experimenting and implementing before the standard is defined. The -moz CSS extensions provide some of this and reasonably protect against attributes that are expected to be standardized but which are not fully defined (zoom is an example here).

In the case of editable content, which has been available since IE5.5, Mozilla has some options:

• Wait for the standard (and I fully expect there will be one—see the first comment of the bug) but be penalized by waiting.
• Implement a Mozilla-specific format and place additional burdens on web developers to convert their pages.
• Implement the IE-defined contentEditable attribute and be immediately able to use a number of existing web pages (For a preview see Xopus or Bitflux or other TTW WYSIWYG editors).

Rereading the bug’s comments, I see less flame war, and many people being pragmatic about this. Note that a Netscape developer logged the bug and agreed with the suggestion to use the IE syntax way back in comment 10, long before my comment 150. I like that. The more similar the browsers are, the better for everyone. Isn’t that the point of standards?

Update: Scott Andrew LePera makes similar comments about the Microsoft-defined contentEditable standard. He says “Kudos to the Mozilla engineers for making the right choice: mirror the IE implementation and prevent further fragmentation of the technologies. If and when the W3 catches up, the decision will already have been made. Them’s the breaks.”

According to the updated Phoenix FAQ, Blake Ross will soon be working on a standalone mail client called Thunderbird. Mozillazine says Thunderbird is simply Minotaur renamed. They are targetting a Thunderbird 0.1 release around the same time as Phoenix 0.5. There’s currently no scheduled release date for Phoenix 0.5, but based on comments that 0.4 will leverage the Mozilla trunk freeze for 1.2 scheduled for a release November 8, we can guess that we’ll see something in November. Blake posted more details about his plans.

I notice that the Phoenix 0.3 release is going to slip a week to around October 14 due to the 1.2beta.

Since Netscape 1 and probably before that you’ve been able to get the source of a page from the View menu. This has been true in IE for its many versions as well. For whatever reason, in the latest nightly (I expect it will be the 0.3 release) the Phoenix developers moved it to the Tools menu. In the same version, they moved Preferences from the Edit menu to the Tools menu, which is an obvious imitation of IE’s placement of Internet Options. It’s odd that they ignore user expectations for one item and pay attention to it for the other.

They also brought back the Go menu.

I’m sure that headline could be used daily. I’ve upgraded to the October 6 nightly of Phoenix and am happy to see several long awaited changes. My bookmark toolbar gained a chevron and drop-down menu (like IE) when it was sized too small to fit all the bookmarks in the window (perhaps fixed by bug 171604). Favicons are back in the bookmark menus for Phoenix. I’d forgotten how nice they were before they were yanked from Mozilla. Finally, after years of waiting, bug 28583 was fixed. Tabbing into text fields or focusing them (except with a click) now selects all the text as it should. This means JavaScript prompt with default text also works. This change affected both Mozilla and Phoenix.

All is not perfect with Phoenix, however. I’m quite disappointed that bug 171892 (the Phoenix version of Mozilla’s bug 65121) was wontfixed. I believe this is a big mistake and will continue to cause annoyance and confusion, especially for IE users trying to switch. I had noticed a while ago that the most troublesome dialogs (bookmark manager, javascript console, etc.) no longer have the exit menu item, so Phoenix is somewhat better than Mozilla. Thanks to the person that fixed them!

The October 2 Mozilla Status Update provides a good, quick overview of all that’s going on in the Mozilla world. It mentions the quick progress of Phoenix, that the spellchecker may be coming to Mozilla soon, and the release of IBM Web Browser 2.0 for OS/2.

Doug Turner’s pictures of Phoenix Evolution is especially funny now that Asa has released a screen shot of his Phoenix customization.

It’s looking really, really good. The only changes I noticed from the previous build I commented on is that the sidebar now has a close button and the scripts and tabbed browsing preferences are now back. Go download it.

Mike Shaver writes what I’ve been thinking: “I guess it’s a little embarrassing that a handful of hackers can produce better autocomplete, better toolbar management, and much better performance than that found in the much more heavily attended Mozilla CVS tree. But we’ve always known that small, sharp teams are vastly more productive than those diluted with a few dozen mediocre-or-worse additions, so it’s certainly not surprising.”

I’ve switched from Mozilla to Phoenix as my primary browser (mostly to test it out) and miss a few things. Type ahead find which was working in previous Phoenix nightlies is now broken. Image blocking is also missing. Look for both in 0.3. I can’t wait to be able to add back some of the Mozilla extensions. I most miss having chatzilla a click of a bookmark away.

Wow! The latest Phoenix nightly builds have some terrific improvements (I played with 2002-09-29-15 windows):

• Customize the toolbars by dragging and dropping the buttons directly on the toolbar (no dialog necessary)
• Ability to add new toolbars (create a separate one for URL, for example)
• History, bookmarks, and downloads can now be sidebars (and you can add toolbar buttons to toggle them on and off)
• In-form field autocompletion as with IE (start typing in a field and it gives you suggestions from previous things you’ve typed)
• An interesting search box to add to the toolbar (I think I’d rather have a Find button.)
• Drag and drop bookmarks to the bookmarks menu (This may have been there for a while, but I just noticed it)
• Did I mention that it’s fast?

I’ve gotten some questions about how Phoenix relates to Mozilla. Here’s how I see things as an interested bystander that doesn’t have any inside knowledge about the project. (David Hyatt’s quiz may also help you understand the differences between Phoenix and Mozilla.)

The Phoenix Project’s goal is to build the best web browser for most people. The Phoenix readme says “the interface will not be ‛geeky’ nor will it have a ‛hacker-focus’. Nor will it be ‛minimal’.” The project was started and is run by some of the core Mozilla developers that were frustrated by the restrictions and pressures placed on the Mozilla browser. They didn’t like the compromises forced on Mozilla due to marketing and other pressures within Netscape/AOL. They also wanted to work more quickly and with fewer check-in restrictions. In some cases they wanted to experiment with optimizations that may also be applied to the Mozilla code.

Will Phoenix replace Mozilla? Well, I suppose that depends upon what Mozilla means to you. Phoenix currently builds on top of Mozilla and shares a bunch of the code. Most of the changes in Phoenix are related to the user interface (UI), which is the part of the browser that you see and interact with (menus, toolbars, buttons, dialogs, etc.) Phoenix is going to be just a browser, not an entire suite of applications (email, address book, news reader, irc client, HTML editor, slicer-dicer, julienne fry maker). Don’t let that disappoint you, though. The Minotaur Project is working on a standalone mail client. Other Mozilla components will likely be available as add-on extensions.

The developers hope that if they focus on a particular application they will be able to build it better and make better decisions. They recognize the importance of being able extend the application and are planning for it.

On Monday the Mozilla Phoenix project released its first milestone, version 0.1. Download it and try it out. This is a terrific first milestone. Because of its heavy use of Mozilla, this browser behaves more like a 1.0 release in terms of the quality and capabilities of its page layout and rendering. Yes, there are many parts that still need polish, but this is awesome. Keep up the good work, guys.

Of all the things the Phoenix developers are doing, I believe the plug-in/add-on manager is one of the most important. It is getting more difficult for add-ons to integrate into Mozilla, let alone the Gecko-based browsers that they should also work with. In most cases, the add-ons make assumptions about what menus are available and add overlays. I was thinking the other day, what if Windows 95 had included a generic program installer. Every program does similar things when installing. It would have made more sense to just have a standard package format and script for the installer to run. Of course then InstallShield would be out of business and Microsoft would be charging for installs of everyone’s apps. In any case, it would be nice if Phoenix could set up well-defined hooks into the application that mean that the add-on doesn’t need to know much about the menu structure. Microsoft products, especially Word, have had this kind of extensibility for years.

Off the top of my head, here’s a few application hooks that I believe will be important for add-on creators. I’m thinking new menus, new toolbars, and new buttons for specific toolbars will be heavily used, particularly now that toolbar customization is a reality. Event hooks to support things like mouse gestures and context menu changes also need to be considered. I suspect there are more exotic kinds of hooks that haven’t even been considered because nobody’s invented useful things for them yet. For example, I can imagine automatic spell checking of textareas and inputs or adding user page load filters. I’m hoping that Phoenix will provide an elegant mechanism for adding on to the application and managing these add-ons. If they do this right, I hope it can become a part of all Mozilla-based browsers.

I’ve been trying out the latest nightly of Phoenix and was about to complain that form scrollbars were broken. Turns out that bug 170184 is undoubtably the cause. Sharing most of the codebase with the Mozilla trunk has many advantages, but running into this kind of problem when you’re trying to release a milestone has got to be frustrating. Since Phoenix contains so much of Mozilla, determining where a bug is may be challenging. At least they’re in the same bug tracking system so it will be easy to move them if they’re incorrectly classified.

Find out all about the accessibility work going on for the Mozilla project through the groovy shortcut URL of the day: www.accessmozilla.org

Thanks Blake for responding to my earlier comments about Phoenix. It’s always nice to get the scoop direct from the developers. I’m delighted to hear that Phoenix will be for “normal users” and that you’ll be working on it for a 0.1 release soon. I’m looking forward to it.

Asa pleasantly surprised me by pointing out the following:

mpt omits something that has to be one of the most important usability flaws in IE, that the main browser scrollbar has a fat border to the right of it forcing the user to actually look where he puts his mouse pointer rather than just tossing it against the edge of the screen and knowing you’ve hit your target.

Since I rarely use Mozilla or IE maximized, I wouldn’t have noticed this. Mozilla happily eliminates the typical window border and takes advantage of Fitts’s Law. In brief testing, it seems almo