Fortunately Firefox

Firefox 9.0.1 released

2011-12-21T20:03:00.000-08:00

I dropped by the Mozilla web site tonight. I discovered on their Firefox news page, that Firefox 9.0.1 has already been released.

I am pretty excited because this version dramatically speeds up some web pages which use JavaScript. I read elsewhere this evening that the developers used some clever optimization techniques to get the higher performance.

Apparently, MathML support has been improved too.

On a side note, this is my first post using the draft version of the new version of Google's Blogger service which will be getting an update soon.

It seems nice. This is certainly one of those changes that you notice. The post-a-blog-entry page is nothing like the old one they have had for years. Saying it is different is a radical understatement.

Firefox 3.6.12 released to patch a vulnerability being exploited in the wild

2010-10-28T04:13:00.000-07:00

The Nobel Peace Prize web site and others have been infected with malware that in turn infects computers via Firefox if the user is not running the just released update of Firefox - version 3.6.12 (or the 3.5 equivalent).

The vulnerability was in the JavaScript interpreter. It was of a category named use-after-free. Memory was dynamically allocated, then freed - and then use continued after that. It is not terribly uncommon in large, complex programs written in C and C++. This type of bug cannot be written directly in Java because Java uses garbage collection instead of letting application programmers do alloc/free themselves.

Users running NoScript addon for Firefox were safe all along, unless they expressly gave permission to an infected web site to run JavaScript.

Had addon(s) problems arise in Firefox 3.6 few days ago

2010-08-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

Supposedly, there is a software conflict between Google Toolbar and Personas 1.6 in Firefox, when an update for one of them came out a few days ago.

After reading some technical support pages for a different addon which was the one exposing symptoms but apparently as an innocent bystander, I decided to switch to my default Theme in Personnas and then disable: Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, Personnas - and uninstall that other addon.

Note that since at least one of the addons was malfunctioning very badly and interfering with lots of things, including the ability to display the Addon manager window (!) I had to start up Firefox in "safe" mode. On the Macintosh, this is easy: simply hold down the Option key on your keyboard while launching Firefox. I did not check any buttons on the safe mode dialog that appeared when I did this; just clicked the button to tell it to start up in safe mode.

This procedure cleared up the problem. I was pretty concerned about this since Firefox is by far the web browser I use the most, most of the time.

I was very much relieved to discover this was simply a problem with some addons. Firefox itself was not the problem, nor is there apparent permanent damage to my Firefox install!

Problem solved.

suspicious activity by Firefox on Macintosh

2010-06-05T05:06:00.000-07:00

My iMac running latest, up-to-date Mac OS X (10.6.3) blue screened while I was typing in Safari and went through a reboot process. It seemed to take extra long compared to a warm boot; seemed like a cold boot or even a boot that did some kind of update.

At the time it happened, I had Safari in the foreground and I had Firefox sitting idle in the background.

Other applications were not running. I have 5.6 GB of disk storage free on my boot drive. My computer was downstairs on the western facing side of the house. So there were no free disk space or ambient temperature problems.

When the system came back up, I was naturally curious what was in the logs at the point it crashed and just before that so I ran the Console application that comes as part of the Mac OS. What I saw surprised me.

There was a process called "firefox-bin" running and it was running amuck. The process was logging over a dozen messages per second. Every message was the same error:

6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:10 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:11 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001) 6/5/10 7:36:12 AM firefox-bin[4299] _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001)

Well, I am pretty sure I had not launched Firefox yet! It had not been opened, yet firefox-bin, the main Firefox application process, was already running. Not only that, it was stuck in a loop trying to do something it could not do, over and over really quickly.

I checked and this error message repeatedly being output has been reported by other users back in late 2009, running Mac OS X 10.5 (older than my 10.6) and an older version of Firefox than I have.

Here is the discussion thread on it at support.mozilla.com: System.log shows that Firefox is spamming the following error in large chunks . The person who posted that message listed the error message absolutely identical to the one on spotted above on my system. They said they updated Firefox, and the problem went away.

Oh, and someone reported the same problem (same error message) being output by iCal in December 2009: _NXGetScreenRect: error getting display bounds (1001). Completely unrelated application gave the same error message.

I killed the process, by the way. I am not sure why it was running, what it was doing, why it had this error and why it was apparently doing it really fast over and over in a tight loop. Nothing about it seemed kosher or okay.

Here is me killing the rogue, runaway Firefox process:

John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ ps 4299 PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND 4299 ?? Ss 19:26.69 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ ps -elf 4299 UID PID PPID F CPU PRI NI SZ RSS WCHAN S ADDR TTY TIME CMD STIME 501 4299 1 4000 0 57 0 517184 189464 - Ss 40a5000 ?? 19:27.11 /Applications/Fi 4:01.47 John-intel-iMac:~ jcollins$ kill -9 4299

I am running Firefox 3.6.3 which has a reported file size of 55,240,723 bytes on my system. I am really sure about those two numbers because I copied and pasted them directly from the Get Info pane in the Finder.

I am really disturbed by this highly unusual and unexpected behavior on my system. Nothing like this has ever happened before on this computer. In all the 2 or 3 years I have had it, it has never spontaneously rebooted.

I am going to look into this further because clearly something is wrong with my system at that point on the basis of the reboot. Why Firefox was running and why it had this error message being logged at an absurdly rapid rate over and over is an issue too. Whether they are related or not, I cannot say at this point but I hope to find out soon.

I verified my Mac was up to date immediately after the reboot. It was except for printer software which must have been updated in the past week.

Firefox 3.6.2 released March 22 to fix security flaw

2010-03-23T04:23:00.000-07:00

Firefox 3.6.2 was released yesterday to fix a remote code execution vulnerability and some other bugs. A cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in SVG content handling was also fixed.

Html Validatør updated for Firefox 3.6

2010-02-17T05:51:00.000-08:00

The famous Html Validator add-on for Firefox has been updated to be compatible with the current version of Firefox 3.6. If you have the old version, tell it to go to its home page, uninstall the old version, then install the new version from its home page.

WebGL: 3D animation JavaScript graphics library for web browsers

2010-01-27T05:16:00.000-08:00

A new 3D graphics library for World Wide Web browser programmers is emerging: WebGL.

WebGL is an open, industry-wide JavaScript API that looks like it will be appearing in the major web browsers soon. Perhaps as early as this year. So far, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have all endorsed it and already have it in their nightly builds.

Based on that, I think it would be very surprising if you did not see WebGL rolled out by all three leaders before the end of this year.

Internet Explorer, hardly a leader when it comes to web standards, still has not implemented the 2D graphics web standard approved back in the 1990's. However, nobody looks to Microsoft when they want open, interoperable standards.

Sure, in areas like SQL where everything is fragmented, basic standards are difficult because the standard seems to embrace incompatible dialects. Some say Microsoft had a hand in this a decade and a half ago. Could be.

Nowadays, the leading web browser makers are working together in two ways: defining open/interoperable standards and making products that follow those standards. That is the reason the web has been advancing so quickly lately.

The idea of cloud based computing depends on having very advanced, standards-based, web browsers that do not get hacked a lot. Since business, government sites, political, and scientific web sites are going to have a lot of statistics on them visualization is going to be a key ingredient for them to be effective at getting their message across. That is where WebGL will really let those sites shine.

If you are interested in doing fast 3D graphics on the web, take a look at the WebGL Tutorial.

Good news for Firefox users: Microsoft was wrong; hackers try to hack Firefox frequently, and fail

2010-01-27T04:59:00.000-08:00

Brian Krebs, independent computer security blogger and former columnist at the Washington Post reported on a commercial web browser exploit toolkit for hackers. Note when I say commercial that does not in any way imply it is legal or anyone in there right minds endorses it.

What it does say is that hackers go after web users systematically and would like no marks to get away, regardless of the browser the user has chosen.

However, the statistics published in the screenshots of the article show that the user's choice of web browser has the most drastic choice on whether he gets successfully hacked or not.

In the statistics sampled, Firefox 3.5.6 registered several successful attacks against it, but others were left unscarred.

Internet Explorer, you ask? Oh, my god! It gets mauled when it shows up on an infected web site!! The article shows that IE is like some barroom brawler that cannot possibly walk away from a fight. Though the successful attack rate against Internet Explorer has been steadily decreasing since version 5.0 (about 2/3 successful attacks) the rate of successful attacks for IE 8.0 is a little over 1/10.

Another interesting thing is that Firefox 3.5.x was seen twice as much as Internet Explorer 8.0 by the toolkit.

To me, these statistic say when Microsoft has been saying for the past 6 years that Firefox was not getting infected a lot was because few people are using it is not just one lie but two. Apparently, Firefox is seen quite a bit by infected web sites. However, for the most part these sites can look but they cannot touch.

The other surprise is that plugins do get attacked and sometimes the attacks are successful: Java, Adobe plugins, etc. are attacked. Java attacks are rarely successful but you do see a grouping of some successful attacks against a recent but non-current version of Java 6. The lesson there is clear: keep your Java web browser plugin up to date in all of your web browsers!

Another interesting though perhaps malleable fact is that the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Flash attacks that are wildly successful on Windows when running IE, just do not currently work against the Macintosh. Another case for the argument that a lot of people should have switched from Firefox to Macintosh years ago. If they had, then this web hacker industry would not be quite so large and wealthy as it is now. There is no question the minions and gangs in this industry are making quite a lot of money.

Perhaps, if IE users want to be slightly safer on the web, they will update their browsers and avoid installing plugins - like, say Silverlight. But if they want to cut there risk by another ten to hundredfold, they will install Firefox. At least then they will not be reeling around like a punch drunk barfly with a glass jaw.

Lesson learned: avoid Internet Exploder - run Firefox instead - beware Adobe plugins, and keep Java plugin up to date if you have it installed in your web browser.

Firefox 3.6 is here!!

2010-01-21T15:54:00.000-08:00

At last, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 has arrived. It got here a few weeks, well, exactly 3, after the end of 20009. Not bad though. The speed improvements from the newly improved JavaScript interpreter might make up for it.

Firefox 3.6 could go final any week now

2010-01-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

An article in IT online newspaper The Register says that Firefox 3.6 might go final next week.

I will not hold my breath, but with 3.6 RC1 having already come out earlier this month we really could see Firefox 3.6 go final soon.

Turn off Javascript in Adobe Acrobat and leave it off

2009-12-27T13:04:00.000-08:00

Adobe Acrobat Reader has been plagued countless times throughout this entire decade with malware vulnerabilities arising from programming errors related to its built-in JavasScript interpreter.

As usual, Adobe has instructed users to go into the Preferences for Acrobat and disable the JavaScript interpreter.

I recommend doing that, and also I recommend uninstalling the Acrobat Reader plugin. Looking at PDF files in a web page with Acrobat is too dangerous. This JavaScript problem keeps hitting it. Adobe needs to provide a permanent solution - not a perpetual problem.

Macintosh computers come with the Preview application, which was written by Apple. Macs also have an OS that actually understands PDF really well. The Mac Preview application will not execute JavaScript that is in PDF files. So it is the way to go if you have a Mac. It is bad, actually, to install Acrobat Reader on a Mac. No good will come from it.

For MS Windows computers, just deactivate JavaScript in Adobe Acrobat Reader, and uninstall its plugin. That will make an incredibly huge improvement in the safety of your Windows PC. Keep it that way.

Thinking about Thunderbird?

2009-12-27T12:58:00.000-08:00

This month a new version of the Mozilla Thunderbird email client was released. Thunderbird is the email counterpart of the web browser. They share a lot of the same technology.

MS Windows users disturbed by Internet Explorer and Outlook problems can get a nice boost in terms of standards support and computer safety by installing Thunderbird and using it as their email client.

Outlook has a very troubling history. Thunderbird is worth looking into. The latest version has some very nice, fresh, new features.

Firefox 3.5 the most popular of any version of any brand of web browser

2009-12-27T12:46:00.000-08:00

The ultra-popular Mozilla Firefox 3.5, the latest released version of Firefox is the most popular of any particular version of any web browser for any brand.

The first popular web browser, Mosaic, was created by programmers at NCSA, located at UIUC - a university in the US. That was back around 1993.

They were subsequently lured away to create a new web browser, Netscape, at a new start-up company by that name in California. Netscape was wildly successful, and then in the late 1990's, suddenly lost marketshare to the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. Ironically, Microsoft did not write IE, they bought Mosaic from the University, which had spun it off and renamed it Spyglass.

Netscape responded by founding a non-profit organization, Mozilla, and set about creating the Mozilla web browser under its auspices. The Mozilla browser was very popular but never came close to recapturing all of Netscape's former market share.

However, a sleeker, faster, more powerful web browser was created from Mozilla. This new one was called Firefox.

Now, Firefox is one of the most advanced, standards-compliant web browsers around. Internet Explorer, in classic tortoise-hare fashion, is one of the least.

And correspondingly, it is now Firefox that has the most popular web browser version around.

Update to Firefox 3.5.6!

2009-12-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

There are issues fixed by updating to Firefox 3.5.6. It is very important at this time to keep Firefox up to date.

That goes for the Firefox application program itself, the extensions you have installed, and the plugins.

Unfortunately, Firefox lacks a built-in, automated way to check for out-of-date plugins and offer to update them for you.

However, there is at least a web page at the Mozilla web site that will do that for you. Using Firefox web browser, click the shiny bit of blog bling in the lower left corner of my weblog page here, so you can get that done.

That simply takes you to their web page. Their page does all the work. Just read it carefully. Make sure you bookmark their page, by the way. You will want to visit that web page regularly. I recommend doing it about once a week.

Updating Ad-ons in Firefox is easy. Just go to the Tools menu in Firefox, Choose Add-ons menu item, and click the Find Updates button at the bottom of the dialog box that appears. It will let you know if there are any updates that need to be applied and then display a Restart button if there are.

To update Firefox itself, you should go to its Help menu and choose the Check for Updates menu item.

If software developers at Mozilla update Firefox, but you never get those updates from them - then your computer just gets more and more at risk. Plus, you are not going to get improvements. The same goes for updating its third-party plugins and add-ons.

At least you can make Firefox safe: update plugins!

2009-12-27T11:50:00.000-08:00

Firefox has a pretty cool web page. It came out this autumn and it tells you if Firefox has any out of date plugins. Plugins can do anything. Since flaws are constantly being discovered in plugins for every web browser, and updates keep coming out for them - you need to know when that happens and take measures to update them.

Firefox plugin check

Tell your Firefox-using friends about the page that points to so they can be safer too.

Hopefully, this feature will get built into the web browser in the future. It seems awkward to be passing around a crucial feature by its URL.

Why you might want to install Noscript addon

2009-11-06T11:16:00.000-08:00

The Noscript addon for Firefox makes Firefox even safer. It blocks executable content like Flash and other things that have caused browsers to be compromised before.

It is a pretty powerful defense against drive by web attacks. If you are not displaying/executing the content that is trying to attack you, it cannot do any harm.

Noscript will not stop image exploits so you still have to be concerned about where you go. Firefox just fixed some image-handling vulnerabilities this week. Image exploits for various file types like WMF, JPG, and GIF have cropped up on Windows. While I do not recall reading in the news about any attacks on Macs using them, I do recall some vulnerabilities involving them getting fixed on Macs.

Image file vulnerabilities make me uncomfortable because we never seem to get to a place on any computer where they are solved. And since browsers might use the operating system to display an image, that poses a problem for everyone who browses the web, reads newsfeeds, or reads email.

Flash is something different though. Flash is not a part of any web standards. Flash is a plugin that runs on IE and on Firefox. It follows their standards for plugins so it can run in the browsers.

Some sites need it to run but most do not. Some ads need it. Some ads actually exploit flaws in Flash to hack your computer. This keeps happening in recent years.

Even when running Firefox on a Macintosh, Flash vulnerabilities could hurt. The ones that were in the news last month used IE-specific technology. But someday the authors of Flash malware might embrace Firefox or even the Macintosh as well.

With Noscript, all they will get back is the cold shoulder!

For sites you really trust a lot and figure you can trust their ads, you can enable their content. If a site does not use Flash for ads, it poses less hazard. The safest ads I have noticed so far are the Google Adsense ads. I have managed to get them turned on yet myself but I have seen them enough times to notice I never see any images in them. I think more advertisers need to consider text-only ads as something worth looking into.

To get some protection against Flash for Safari web browser on the Macintosh computer, get the ClickToFlash webkit plugin.

Reducing malware risks just takes making safer choices.

upgraded to Firefox 3.5 today

2009-11-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

I finally upgraded from Firefox 3.0 to 3.5 today.

Firefox 3.5 has been out for a number of months. My reasons for not upgrading right away is that I wanted stability issues to be addressed and I wanted to wait for upgrades the addons I use to be upgraded.

Another thing that pushed me to make the upgrade is that I do not want to get left behind.

Old versions eventually get less attention from maintainers, for one thing. So there can be new vulnerabilities arising. That is not good for a program whose job it is to display files from the Internet all the time

There is more support for new standards in Firefox 3.5. HTML 5 is gonig to be a good deal and I wanted to be able to start authoring some pages that take advantage the increased support for it in Firefox. CSS 3 is another area where things are getting better and better.

Last week, Firefox 3.5 was patched to fix some possibly exploitable flaws in the graphic media libraries that arose during a retooling of them as part of the 3.0 to 3.5 evolution. I feel as confident about 3.5 as I did about 3.0 now. The paint is not wet anymore.

Flash has become a real risk though much less for me than a lot of people. The folks that are getting harmed by it are running Microsoft Windows and IE.

Unless I am testing web pages I am developing, running Windows Update to install security updates and bug fixes from Microsoft, or accessing a work-specific portal I give IE a wide berth.

I have been using the web since back in the old days when there was no IE or Netscape, just Mosaic. I have learned a thing or two. One of them is avoid the highest risk places, software, and media.

I also found out recently that the addons I use were as ready as they were going to get for 3.5.

Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to Google "Bookmarks" as Google announced last month they are no longer going to support it. I have not used it in a good while so as brilliant a tool as it is, I probably will not miss it anytime soon. So addons, one of the things that usually holds me up a while when a new version of Firefox comes out are no longer an issue.

One of my relatives recently upgraded to 3.5 too and I wanted to stay in sync with them to make it easier to give tech support when they had questions or problems.

Firefox 3.5 seems really fast. I hope it stays this fast. I have noticed for years that when I do a browser upgrade as opposed to a minor patch, it really speeds up. Then it gradually slows down. Not sure if this has to do with some disk caching of pages or RSS feeds or what. If Firefox 3.5 keeps operating at the speed it is right now I am going to be extremely happy.

My Firefox 1.3 be illin'

2008-08-04T05:46:00.001-07:00

A few minutes ago, my Firefox started locking up every time I run it.

The only pages I have visited since booting this morning are: www.yahoo.com, news.google.com, several news web pages linked to those 2 portal pages, delicious.com and one or two pages I found on the delicious.com Popular page.

I have not added any new addons to Firefox in a couple of weeks. I have the latest version of Firefox 3.0.1.

Not sure what the cause of the problem is but I am really irritated by it.

Firefox 3, FTW!

2008-07-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

Firefox 3 is the biggest leap forward for web browsers since Firefox 1.0 was released several years ago. In fact, I think it might be the biggest improvement to the state of the art for web browsing since the beginning - back in the early 1990s.

Tagging in Firefox 3 is great. The only feature that is missing is bulk editing of tags. This is an essential feature but did ont make the Firefox 3.0 release. It had to be pushed back until Firefox 3.1. I guess that means I will not be getting that before the end of this year.

I might write my own. I studied the Places system in Firefox and read the API docs for the different services Places provides. It looks very powerful and, at the same time - very easy to use in Javascript programs.

I reckon I will probably have to create an extension in order to provide an execution environment. However, that would probably be necessary in any case. I would probably want to have a sidebar that I could use to browse and edit my tags, kind of like the one that comes with Firefox 3, but slanted just towards bulk editing bookmarks' tags.

Once you start tagging a lot you will really notice how cool the new location bar (AKA, The Awesome Bar) is.

Type words in it and they become search terms applied to all the tags, page titles, and URLs in your bookmarks. Maybe your browsing history too. Anyway, I like this feature. Some people complain it could be an embarrassment at work but c'mon, what kind of sites are you visiting then?

There is another great feature in Firefox that is somewhat related to bookmarks. They use URNs to define search criteria for dynamic bookmark lists. Think of these as "smart folders" in iTunes or in the Mac OS X Finder (desktop) if you have iTunes or a Macintosh.

I will not go into the details of that feature. If you already know what a URN is, you do not need any explanation. If you do not, then you can find explanations of it better than I could give over on the Mozilla/Firefox web site or in Wikipedia.

Firefox 3 is fast - very fast. Firefox 2 ran slower on the Mac than it did on MS-Windows. It was almost if not quite a dot compared to Safari 3. Well, now the canine costume is on the other foot. Safari 3 needs to be sped up slightly on the Mac to hold its record, I think.

That is just my subjective opinion. I saw some benchmarks this week that indicate that Safari 3 generally faster than Firefox.

Some of my favorite Firefox addons like these have not been updated to work with Firefox 3 yet:

Firebug
HTML Validator
View Source Chart
XForms

But most are already working with Firefox 3. These include:

Adblock
EditCSS
ForecastFox
Google Toolbar
Google Notebook
Selenium IDE
Web Developer
Yahoo! Toolbar
Greasemonkey

The new features that let you see how much confidence you can have in a web site are nice. Very easy. And this sort of "transparency" for web sties to the user is long overdue! Hopefully, every browser will make it as easy as Firefox 3 to see if a site as kosher as it appears to be.

So, if you have been hanging back, waiting for other people to "check out" Firefox 3 before you upgrade - hey, it's checked out now!

If you use a Macintosh running Mac OS X, you will be really impressed with how much faster Firefox runs and how much cleaner it looks. Regardless of which operating system you run it on, you will be really happy with the new features. I cannot think of anything that got harder to do, more complicated, or slower. Things just improved across the board.

Another nice thing is that Firefox 3 uses less memory than earlier versions. It is a rare day when a program runs faster and uses less memory. But tht is the case with Firefox 3.

Come on in, the water is fine! Fast, fun, and feature-packed!

Firefox 3.0 Final released!!

2008-06-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

The long awaited Firefox web browser version 3 came out this afternoon (morning, if you live on west coast of US).

I just downloaded it. I am very excited. In addition so improvements designed to make it faster, less memory intensive, and stable - it reportedly was going to include an improved bookmark manager.

More details after I have had a chance to install it and check it out. In the meantime, grab your own copy.

The Mozilla guys are pushing to see how many people they can get to download and try it out in the first 24 hours. The clock started ticking today a little before or after noon today - depending on where in the US you live. If you live elsewhere, it probably came out around 10 AM PDT (GMT-7, considering daylight savings time is on now).

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 available

2008-06-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

Firefox 3 RC 2 is out now. Here are the release notes.

I am looking forward to the improvements this release brings.

A lot of web 2.0 stuff that has been worked out on web sites over the past half decade will soon be getting even more help from the web browser.

Web applications will become more powerful. More possibilities for developers and users will be opened. Firefox 3 will probably revolutionize web portals too.

The feature that makes this happen is web-based protocol-handlers. Mark Finkle description of web-based protocol handlers has a pretty illuminating example of how the familiar mailto: protocol handler could be redefined for a particular web site.

We have already seen how AJAX has revolutionized web user interfaces.

I have a hunch that after Firefox 3 final is released we will see web frameworks be released for managing data.

Personally, I would love to see users be able to match the best user interface to the best data/action service.

This is something desktop application programmers have been able to develop for years when they write SQL database applications.

One catch: for safety reasons, the web protocol handler must reside on the same server as the web page that uses it.

At first blush this sensible limitation will prevent decoupling UI+service that I claim will be possible.

However, in reality I think that operators of major portals will maintain some of the more popular free protocol handler enabled frameworks on their server.

Users will eventually be able to select which one to use for which applications - the native one, or one of the 3rd party ones.

These choices will wind up being just one more configuration item in the Settings page for web sites.

There they will join themes, content selection options, filters, signatures, and so forth that web users already have among their personalization options.

More than one organization will be able to contribute to the richness of a web application. This could really shake things up.

It could surprise a lot of people by expanding what web applications can do.

I predict when this happens, many folks will be impressed at how economically it can do these things from a software/design standpoint.

Installed Flock 1.2.1 this evening

2008-06-08T19:26:00.000-07:00

I installed Flock 1.2.1 an hour or two ago. Finally upgraded from version 1 which came out about a year ago.

I have to say, I am pretty impressed.

The feel of this browser is very smooth now.

The only problem that sliightly detracted from its use was I got some long pauses. This happened especially when I hit the backspace key.

Other than that, Flock 1.2.1 is a very neat program. If you like having your online world at your fingertips - this is the browser to have. Social web stuff is its forté.

Mozilla addons site redesigned this week

2008-03-31T18:16:00.000-07:00

The new design of the addons.mozilla.org web site has a really clean, polished, professional look to it now.

It has looked nice for a long time. Now, it looks better than nice. It looks really solid, powerful, and up to date. In a word: "modern".

Firefox 2.0.0.2 has been released

2007-02-24T17:03:00.000-08:00

A new version of Firefox (2.0.0.2) has been released to fix some problems and to help it work better with Microsoft Vista.

HubLog points out MSN.co.uk doesn't rank Firefox

2006-11-05T21:52:00.000-08:00

Hublog calls attention to a bizarre phenomenon. If you search for Firefox using the Microsoft search engine, it manages not to find it!

HubLog: MSN.co.uk doesn't rank Firefox:

When you install Windows on a new PC, open Internet Explorer and type 'firefox' into the search box, you get a page of search results from MSN.co.uk (using Windows Live Search), of which none link to the official Mozilla download site for Firefox.

I tried this and it is true.

Microsoft is playing a round of hide the firefox.

Try it with Yahoo or Google search.

They put the official Firefox site up in the first or second slot, which is where any statistical ranking system would put it.

What kind of a ranking system are they using at MSN?

Firefox 2 - wow!

2006-10-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

I have been running Firefox 2 since the hour it came out.

I am really impressed.

The upgrade was smooth and easy. I figured I would all but have to start over from scratch - reload all my bookmarks, reinstall all my extensions, re-enter all my usernames/passwords, and set up all my cookies again.

I was wrong.

All I had to do was replace the Firefox.app file I had in my Mac /Applications folder with the new one, and that was it.

After I launched the new version (from /Applications) it walked me through the upgrade process. I barely had to do anything; just a couple mouse clicks.

It runs like lightening. People are not expressing how fast it is.

Safari is fast on the Mac.

Firefox seems just as fast as Safari on the Mac.

This time around, the conversion of extensions seems to have been done virtually all in advance. Going from Firefox 1.0 to 1.5, I waited days, weeks, and in one case months for the authors to upgrade their extensions. This time extensions being Firefox 2 ready when Firefox 2 was ready was the rule, not the exception.

Even the developer tools I run all the time were ready to use.

Some websites, like TV.com, work way better with Firefox 2 than they did with Firefox 1.5. Particularly, the WYSIWYG editor for posting blog entries and forum posts.

Upgrading to Firefox 2 was a really great experience.

IE7 Vs. Firefox 2.0: Why This Browser Battle Matters To Businesses - News by InformationWeek

2006-10-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

Firefox has a couple of edges on IE, according to an article at the InformationWeek website.

IE7 Vs. Firefox 2.0: InformationWeek article:

Working in Firefox's favor are more than 1,800 free extensions that can be downloaded to customize the browser, including ad blockers, development and testing tools, and different types of tab management.

The article also points out that the RSS display in IE is more friendly than RSS display in Firefox 1.5, something I would have to agree with.

However, in about 7 months (May 2007) Firefox 3 will come out and remedy that.

Eleven months after that, it says, Microsoft will release another new version of Internet Explorer.

Guess the race is back on.

Technorati tags: msie, ie7, firefox

Mozilla Firefox 2 RC2 has been released

2006-10-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Firefox 2.0 RC2 (release candidate 2) is already out. Looks like they really will get a release out by Halloween.

Read the Mozilla Firefox 2 RC 2 Release Notes for details.

Technorati tags: firefox, web, software

Firefox frailties were faked

2006-10-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

I wonder what could cause people to falsely claim that there were vulnerabilities in Firefox, when in fact they were not there and they just made them up.

But that is apparently what happened according to article titled Mozilla duped by hackers humorous demo.

Man.

I wonder if money changed hands that made these amateur comedians professionals. Interesting question, eh?

First of all, there was the use of astroturfing back in the 1990s, when a computer company convicted of monopolistic trust activities, a pattern of them in fact - paid a marketing company to pen letters to federal politicians saying they did not care about the problems, and forge names of fictitious (well, one hopes they were fictitious) people to them.

Around that time it came out that the same company paid computer industry journalists to write articles aimed at time to get the corporation off the hook in terms of sentencing. Without the journalists were paid to write that, of course.

Then, there was the claim a few months ago that there was a vulnerability in Apple's wireless networking, that was retracted by the company whose employees made the claim.

Now, we find out that the Firefox flaw frenzy over the weekend was a big put on. In a familiar pattern, these individuals were motivated to make these claims to the benefit of one company and the detriment of others at a strategic time for the company who benefits from their actions.

And is this a new pattern - or a continuation of an old one?

JavaScript 1.7 - mother tongue of DHTML/AJAX in Firefox 2.0

2006-09-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

JavaScript is a popular programming language, to say the least.

Aside from known strengths and weaknesses, it is the de facto standard programming language for web browsing clients.

Firefox is renowned for keeping up with web standards, JavaScript included.

The page cited below describes the new features of JavaScript 1.7.

New in JavaScript 1.7 - MDC

JavaScript 1.7 has become extra relevant this year. That is because next month, Firefox 2.0 is going to be released.

What version of JavaScript comes in Firefox 2.0, you ask?

That is right - you guessed it. It is JavaScript 1.7.

The neat features introduced this time include:

Iterators
Generators
Array Comprehensions
Let statement (specially scoped variable assignments)

Schematron, the well-known assertion/rule based XML standard for validating XML files by defining assert/report rules also recently added support for a let statement that has a similar purpose/usage.

Iterators are familiar to everybody; C++, Java, Python, and other programming language users.

Generators are familiar at least to Python programmers, as are list comprehensions.

One of the driving forces behind JavaScript 1.7 recently described Python as a major influence on the design of the JavaScript 1.7 language additions.

Being well-versed in a number of programming languages is beginning to pay off.

You learn several when they start to become well-used by early adopters. You then get to be experienced at using a brand-new feature in a brand-new language version - because it is not new to you anymore.

I think it is usually easier to lead the target than to chase the target.

That is just me, though.

Technorati tags: javascript, firefox, programming, scripting, web, mozilla, opensource

Getting Things Done Gmail Firefox Extension

2006-08-24T05:30:00.000-07:00

At this point, tons of people have heard of Getting Things Done - a book (and a technique) for organizing things in your life so you can accomplish more each day.

Now someone has written a Firefox extension that makes the labels you use in Firefox a little more organized themselves. It tunes them to work in the GTD scheme of things.

Getting Things Done Gmail Firefox Extension at gHacks tech news:

Labels are structured into Statuses, Contexts, Projects and References. Status simply describes the current status of the task, is it finished or should it be the next action that you perform ? Context is the context that you have to be in to complete the task. A task that would require a computer for instance could have either the Desk, Home or Office context associated with.

I have a copy of the GTD book on order that is supposed to arrive any day now. If it gets here by this weekend, maybe I will try this extension out after I read the book.

Practically all my friends and relatives, even extended family relatives, are using Firefox now. People just like it; programmers, engineers, my mother, everybody.

Personally, I have found it invaluable during the past couple of years. I know for a fact the Firefox extensions have really helped my productivity - and output quality - quite a bit.

Technorati tags: gtd, gmail, firefox

Mozilla Delays Firefox 2.0 slightly, chooses target ship date

2006-08-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

According to this recent articel, Mozilla Delays Firefox 2.0 - Softpedia - Mozilla is shooting for an October 24, 2006 release date for Firefox 2.0.

That is the first specific date I have heard for the new version. I think the most definite one I heard before was Fall 2006. Sounds like they will make it.

It sounds like it is tentative, so I am not going to write it on my wall calendar with a red pen.

Sounds like the actual ship date will at least be in the same ballpark and the October 24 date might turn out to be the real one.

Looks like the release dates for major upcoming software is falling into line like this:

1. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 - October 2006
2. Microsoft Vista - January 2007
3. Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) - April 2007

I think Firefox is planning a Firefox 2.1 to come out sometime in 2007, sort of completing the cycle that begins in the latter part of this year.

I doubt we will see updated operating systems from Apple and Microsoft again for several more years, however. Unless Microsoft surprises everyone by coming out with a MS Linux distro sometime after Vista ships.

Firefox seems to be evolving faster than the major operating systems and all the other major browsers combined.

coming of Firefox 2 presaged by a crop circle

2006-08-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

In the 1990s, one company distinguished itself by using what it claimed was a grass roots campaign of people supporting it and its products.

When the truth came out, their efforts were quickly renamed astro-turfing by the real public, people that actually exist - not ones that are made up.

Firefox is a web browser that has a lot of support. The enthusiasm is for how many of the official file formats it supports, the fidelity with which it renders these things, and how up-to-date it is with things like JavaScript.

Plus, people do not mind that when they just have to switch operating systems because they have too many problems with their computer - they can use Firefox on their new one. Firefox knows how to run on lots of types of computers and operating systems. It is smarter than a lot of browsers in that regard too.

Anyway, this year a couple marketing interns at Mozilla had a dream. They wanted to create a huge crop circle to draw attention to the new release, which at this point is just months, or maybe only weeks, away. You can download the movie, which is in standard QuickTime format (works with (Macintosh and MS-Windows), by clicking on one of the pictures in the blog entry linked to below.

The Road to Firefox 2 Blog Archive Behind the Scenes: The Firefox crop circle!:

...not only completed successful internships as documentary filmmakers for Mozilla, but also left a 45,000 sq. foot crop circle in our wake. Through our video blogging, we brought people a little bit closer to the heart of Mozilla...

It is kind of cool that they came up for the idea of something like this.

It is way better than some huge corporation that comes up with a plan to write graffiti all over some city's sidewalks, streets, and buildings.

Also, people tend to think of the Fall as the time of harvests and mysterious things. Humans have been harvesting their crops for thousands of years during the Fall.

This fall, they will be harvesting Firefox 2!

Technorati tags: firefox, marketing, video, blogging, opensource

The SeaMonkey Project - another Mozilla for the Mac

2006-08-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

Many people use Macintosh computers at home or work these days.

Some of them like Firefox but miss the halcyon days when the Mozilla group had not just a browser and news/email/feed reader - but a whole suite of programs integrated into one application known simply as Mozilla.

Fortunately for them, the Mozilla project known as SeaMonkey carries on that tradition - and that codebase.

In addition to the things you get with the Firefox+Thunderbird combination, you also get: HTML WYSIWYG editing, IRC, and a more advanced/powerful email editor.

Best of all, it runs natively on the Mac.

The SeaMonkey Project:

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality
releases of code derived from the application formerly known as
"Mozilla Application Suite".
Whereas the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation is on Mozilla Firefox and
Mozilla Thunderbird, our group of dedicated volunteers works to ensure
that you can have "everything but the kitchen sink" %u2014 and have it stable
enough for corporate use.

Technorati tags: mozilla, opensource, web, software, macosx

Firefox market share keeps growing

2006-08-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

Firefox, the famous open source web browser, continues to gain popularity - and users.

The percentage of users using it inched upward this summer.

mozilla links - Firefox market share keeps growing:

mbers reflect an overall growth for Firefox compared to May numbers: in Europe, market share increased

I was at a party last night and I was surprised at the number of my relatives that use it now. I think I was the first in my family to use it.

I heard about it from a friend of mine, who is even more aggressive than me in keeping up with the latest computing technology. (People that know me are noticing their jaws have dropped all of a sudden now.)

LOL, lots of people are.

Fortunately for all of us, Firefox continues to grow in popularity and that helps insure its continued viability.

After all, when users stop using a product, its team tends to stop updating it. When a team stops updating it, it rapidly becomes less interesting than other programs in the same functional area. That causes more people to abandon it, and thus a vicious cycle is formed.

Firefox is in a rather pleasant cycle.

Technorati tags: firefox, web, software, free, opensource

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 will take another week to prepare

2006-08-09T04:24:00.000-07:00

The plan was to ship the 2^end beta of Firefox 2.0 yesterday (Tuesday). Instead, it will ship one week later, on August 15.

Gregg Keizer, Techweb:

Firefox 2.0, which appeared as Beta 1 last month, was to shift into Beta 2 Aug. 8, but will now be posted Tuesday, Aug. 15

In any case, it looks like Firefox 2.0 is entering its home stretch.

Firefox is not one of the companies that seems to favor epically-long beta periods.

Their beta cycles tend to measure a few months, not several years.

These days, unless you are Apple - who tends to promise a delivery date - and then beat it - slipping a schedule of a major software product by only a week is pretty wonderful.

Technorati tags: firefox

Talk Digger: find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Internet.

2006-08-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

I came across this pretty interesting-sounding website this morning. It is called Talk Digger.

Talk Digger lets you see what is going on with a certain web page in terms of interest in it. At least interest in it so far as people are writing its URL down and saving it on the web. Presumably, in the interest of saying something about it or remembering it.

The explanation below is taken from the Talk Digger home page. It explains it better than I can. (Note if you are in China, the author says you cannot reach his page, his site, or his service.)

Talk Digger:

It is simple. You have in hand the URL of a piece of news of the BBC, a blog post, a product page,
or any other web page, and you want to know who is talking about it, you want to know what people
have to say about it. You copy that URL, paste it in the Talk Digger search box
and press Dig it!

Talk Digger will then return results from various search engines. All the results returned contain
a link to the URL. This is what we call a conversation: a multitude of people, all over the Internet,
linking to a specific URL.

Technorati tags: social, web, software, communicating

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.5 has just been released

2006-07-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

Firefox is rapidly working its way toward releasing Firefox 2.0, which at this point is just a couple of months off.

If the meantime, they have released an update to Firefox 1.5 - this one is Firefox 1.5.0.5.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.5 Release Notes:

We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

I assume everyone who has Firefox 1.5 knows they can update their browser in just a couple of minutes by pulling down the Help menu and choosing the Check for Updates... command.

However, it relaxes me to say it, so I do it anyway.

Technorati tags: firefox, software, opensource

Drawing Graphics with Canvas - MDC

2006-07-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

Few things on the page - be it printed or displayed - as as captivating and illuminating as graphics.

Apple and some other companies invented a neat addition to the now rather ancient HTML 4.01 standard last year. The addition is a new element for HTML/XHTML web pages. The element in question is the canvas element.

Apple rolled out their support for canvas in April 2005. It is part of Tiger (Mac OS 10.4). It is an important part; used in both Safari and the handy Dashboard feature that is one of the selling points of OS 10.4.

Firefox introduced their support for the canvas element later the same year, when they rolled out Firefox 1.5.

Now both browsers support it. That makes it worth using. In addition to making it easy for a programmer to create compelling graphics in the first place, it also enables those graphical creations to run on a wide variety of platforms:

Windows 98 - Windows XP, and not doubt Vista when it is introduced next year or whenever
Macintosh OS X

There is a simple introduction to the Canvas element for JavaScript programmers on the page cited below.

Drawing Graphics with Canvas - MDC:

With Firefox 1.5, Firefox includes a new HTML element for programmable graphics.

The home page for a longer, more in-depth Canvas tutorial can be found on the same site as well.

I had an idea a week ago for something neat that could be done with Firefox. It is not too hard to hit upon. Just think of one unique feature of the Firefox web browser, combined with the best known application of Canvas elements on the Macintosh platform, and there you have it.

I was struck with another use of Canvas elements - or SVG documents - this morning. This one would be easiest to work in a browser, though unlike the other one, it would not necessarily require it. However, by using the Canvas element, I think it would make it more accessible - more easily used/experienced by more people.

The former idea might actually be pretty useful. The latter idea, the one I cam up with this morning, is mostly whimsical and frivolous but you never know. It might actually have some useful applications as well.

Fortunately, Firefox can serve as the platform to realize both my visions. They are both graphical, mostly.

If I implement both using Firefox, the two could even conceivably be combined. It is a big country in that thar browser, ya know.

Technorati tags: canvas, firefox, safari, graphics, javascript, web, programming, html, xhtml

FireBug - modern debugging for a modernized web

2006-07-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Web tools have changed a lot since their birth a little over a dozen years ago.

If you look at the whole front of web development, not just one piece of it - it is a huge front that has been progressing steadily for years.

The first web browsers did not have:

AJAX: AJAX stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML and that is just what it is. AJAX is like DHTML on steroids. Unlike back in the 1990s when DHTML was trying to make its way, the JavaScript DOMs used by leading browsers are more compatible, despite lingering fundamental differences. For the latter, today there exist very powerful libraries that separate JavaScript programs from these differences - while integrating them with the capabilities inherent in the modern browser web capabilities.
CSS: Cascading StyleSheets are rule-based instructions for controlling the visual appearance of a web page - be it written in HTML, XHTML, or constructed as a raw XML data/information document.
DHTML: DHTML stands for dynamic HTML. Very simply put, DHTML is the phenomena that occurs when a JavaScript program in a web browser manipulates the contents and/or structure of a web page by interacting with it as if it were a program data structure, through something called the DOM, the document object model.
DOM: Document Object Model; the hidden data structure of a web page - replete with both information and semantics, it is like a parse tree for a program. However, instead of describing a program - it describes a web page. JavaScript programs view the web page as a data structure; this data structure in particular, actually.
JavaScript: The scripting scripting for web browsers that resembles a highly extended form of the C language - which is really a dynamic language more akin to LISP under its covers. Many pages use it. It is the key to popular derived technologies such as DHTML and AJAX.
Java applets: Java applets are still supported in all major browsers, thanks to Sun's Java plugin. Through Netscape's LiveWire feature, JavaScript programs and Java applets can interact with each other - sharing the goods of each other's realms on a web page.
structured graphics: The web has had graphics since its inception or it probably would not have taken off the way it has. Modern web browsers include support for scalable vector graphics (SVG), which is another XML document standard - for graphical image drawings, graphs/diagrams, and illustrations. The canvas element that was introduced in 2005 is a way that JavaScript programs can draw images in a div element of a web page. Both canvas elements and SVG graphics can be directly controlled, manipulated, and generated by JavaScript programs in a web page.

Today's browser, Firefox in particular, has all these things going on for it. And JavaScript programs can see and interact with all these assets of sophisticated web pages.

This creates a lot more complicated environment than existed a decade ago.

So, there needs to be a web page debugging tool that not only sees the JavaScript and the traditional parts of the web page, but some of these relatively newer parts as well.

Fortunately, FireBug can and does see a lot of these directly. So you, the web programmer can too.

FireBug - JoeHewitt.com:

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

It is kind of interesting that someone has created a powerful enough tool to herd this menagerie of neat capabilities that have cropped up around JavaScript in the past eleven years.

JavaScript is enjoying its second decade of use now.

A useful debugger for JavaScript not only has to let one interact with and observe the execution of code. It also has to let one interact with and observe different aspects and views of the structured information of a web page that JavaScript programs operate upon.

FireBug does that.

FireBug lets you:

Set breakpoints in a JavaScript program.
Monitor runtime errors.
Perform logging easily within a program.
Perform unit testing with JUnit-like assertWhatever methods.
Find definition errors in the page.
Monitor events in the page, as they unfold. Given that many pages are interactive, there is a lot going on. Adding to that DHTML, and there is even more happening! Hard to debug what you cannot see directly, so now you can.
Monitor AJAX requests by letting you observe the traffic they generate.
Study and change the DOM for the web page directly.

Sounds like FireFox is a revolutionary tool.

Not everything is perfect in something so advanced, so early on, however. As the author of FireBug - and the Venkmen JavaScript debugger author too, as it turns out - points out: some of these capabilities are things that Firefox/Mozilla designer-programmers did not set out to support. And there are still some bugs in various parts of Firefox that get in the way of such a demanding tool as this.

I hope that Firefox's designers look hard at the need of this tool and Venkemen as they work on post-2.0 versions of Firefox. It would be great if they could see what they can do to make this guy's life easier - so he can do everything he can possibly think of to make web programmer's lives easier.

In the end, that is what makes users happier. Or at least makes it possible to bring them the utmost in exciting designs and powerful capabilities.

Technorati tags: javascript, dom, dhtml, html, css, ajax, debugging, software, firefox, extension, logging, testing, unittest, qa, free

XForms for Firefox (1.5) version 0.6 released last week

2006-07-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

Fortunately, Firefox has pretty good support for web standards.

So it follows Firefox would have a project going to support the most powerful - yet simplest - GUI form standard from the W3.

On the surface, the old CGI forms that have been a mainstay of HTML/HTTP powered web browsers for a dozen years are just fine. It would seem they do all you need.

But they really do not. Hence, the proliferation of more complicated, sometimes irksome technologies like:

* AJAX
* DHTML
* Flash
* Java applets
* JavaScript (or its cousin, JScript)
* VBScript
* XUL/XBL

Suddenly, good old HTML forms do not look so good anymore - just old!

XForms was a brilliant idea someone had back in the late 1990s, when XML was quite young.

The idea was this: why not take the same MVC (model view controller) program design pattern that was so successful for creating word processors, spreadsheets, and graphics programs - and bring it to the world of data entry forms for the web?

That is exactly what XForms is. And since XML is a standard data format - with a lot of popularity as a data interchange format which enjoys lots of tool support - they chose XML as the format for exchanging the data between the client and the server.

The standard has been approved for years now.

All that remains is to put it into the browsers. And that is just what the Mozilla group is doing, with some financial and manpower support from IBM.

The XForms for Firefox author is Doron Rosenberg. He has also written a Gmail Notifier.

Mozilla XForms :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software:

Mozilla XForms 0.6, by Doron Rosenberg, released on Jul 14, 2006

It seems like XForms is steadily closing on its goal of a final release soon. For the past year, every several months they have come out with a new point release.

XForms lets web page designers look forward to creating really nice-looking, smoothly operating forms without all the craziness that JavaScript/JScript/VBScript introduce.

No more dilemmas of what scripting language to use, whether to use Java applets or Flash or Shockwave. Fewer headaches for IT managers, more devices supported automagically for mobile/computer users.

Since XForms fully supports CSS, nobody leaves the HTML party empty-handed. In fact, XForms works fine with XHTML - as well as SVG. So, people are not losing a familiar web standard - they are simply gaining a better standard for information input forms.

Fortunately, Firefox is the first player in its arena to make that happen. And since it is free and works across the major operating systems, it really is the best one for the job.

Technorati tags: xforms, mozilla, opensource, xml, firefox, web, software, free

Firefox 2 Beta 1 released for developers to begin testing

2006-07-12T20:47:00.000-07:00

Fortunately, Firefox continues to be improved in 2006.

Mozilla Developer News: Blog Archive: Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone released:

Firefox 2 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the fourth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 2.

Some of the coolest-sounding features - to me, anyway - are:

Microsummaries
Javascript 1.7
SVG graphics standard - adding support for its svg:textPath element
spell checking in text boxes
ability to easily delete unwanted search plugins

Lest you get too carried away, note the caveat below taken from the page cited above:

Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 2 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.

In other words, this is not a build to play with in a carefree fashion. It is to do serious testing on, so the kinks can be found and gotten out before Firefox 2 is released to everyone at large.

If you don't want to try it, you can still look at it. Lifehacker has posted Firefox 2 beta 1 screenshots.

Technorati tags: firefox, web, software, svg, opensource, javascript

XML Namespaces Firefox 1.5 recognizes

2006-07-11T22:34:00.000-07:00

Firefox recognizes a respectable number of XML namespaces now. Here is a brief list of them.

xmlns	standard	purpose
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml	XHTML	general purpose documents; text, prose, tables, images, lists, headings, forms, etc.
http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML	MathML	mathematical expressions/equations/formulas
http://www.w3.org/2000/svg	SVG	scalable vector graphics
http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul	XUL	Mozilla-specific user interface presentation and data entry form elements

There are also 7 non-visual standards supported as well. Here are the most commonly used 4 of them.

xmlns	standard	purpose
http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace	XML namespace	you are looking at it right here!
http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns	XML namespace (newer)	namepaces
http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink	XLink	hyperlinks for XML documents
http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform	XSLT	XML stylesheet templates

See Firefox Hacks by Nigel McFarlane for more information.

This is a really nice weblog template

2006-06-27T17:39:00.000-07:00

All the other Blogspot templates I have used have a fixed width body - and it is narrow. This one has a smarter layout and it will expand the body as needed.

I might retrofit that capability onto some of my other blogs. It is really practical. Listing for snippets of code, CSS rules, XML and XSLT files - all that stuff - winds up being too wide for the other blogs. Here it should display just fine.

Firefox is a fifth-generation web browser

2006-06-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

Firefox represents a fifth generation in web browsing technology. Very briefly, those 4 generations are:

original web browser created at CERN (Cello?)
Mosaic from NCSA (first web browser created in the US)
Netscape created by some members of the original Mosaic team
Mozilla created by Netscape
Firefox (Mozilla but with platform-native UI components

Along the way, Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass, Inc. - who in turn had licensed Mosaic from UIUC who owned NCSA - and created Internet Explorer from it.

There are many web standards today. Fortunately, Firefox supports almost all the popular ones. That includes: HTML, XHTML, CSS, XSLT, SVG, MathML, Javascript, and a bunch of others.

A couple interesting spin-offs from Firefox are:

Flock, a social web browser
Camino, a custom-enhanced web browser for the Macintosh