More Firefox updates
What a week. Nothing like crunch time and a really really firm deadline to screw with your sleep schedule. I’ve been meaning to carve out time to write this up, but the daily grind and sleep deprivation caught up to me hard.
Late last week I managed to slip out to the coast and sit down with various people at the Mozilla Foundation and Google. To reiterate what I’ve said previously, the people we already have working on Mozilla full-time are passionate and still focused on the ultimate goal: shipping great software. There’s some adjustments being made, and some great resources being brought online. Now we need to focus and drive through the next three months and ship a great pair of 1.1 releases. Whatever burnout I was feeling was gone by the end of Friday, and now I’m really excited about the prospects going forward. Focus, like everything else in life, will remain key, but I firmly believe we’re on a good track.
Part of being on that good track involves making hard and unpopular decisions. Like dropping Zip builds for win32, which has evoked some very passionate reactions, but it was a step we needed to take. Chase is, simply put, The Man. Last Friday was my first exposure to Chase, and I was absolutely impressed at the energy and focus he exhibits. The more people we can bring in like him, the better.
Another tough decision is “what features to try to get in for 1.1″ which came up in a lot of my discussions. There’s a proto-spec/proposal evolving here regarding a security zone implementation for Firefox. Right now, we’re scratching the surface on content/site controls, and in a fairly clunky and complex setup. I believe that we can use a zone-based system to simplify our site management, and lower the bar to users controlling their experience without excessive UI/interaction. Since Michiel van Leeuwen has done a great deal of work (not yet exposed UI-wise) with blocking scripts/objects(plugins)/stylesheets/etc we have a lot more power than we’re exposing, but another bunch of exception lists is not a viable answer.
Finally, a big topic was community-building, and reviews (rather unsurprisingly). I have another draft on the go about hacking Firefox, since that was one of the big slashdot rants. Of course, getting the reviews done is a bottleneck, but there’s a plan that’ll come into effect in the next month or so to alleviate that. More on that another time, its time to head back to the dark depths of PHP.
The zones idea is fine, but the reason I hate them in IE is that when a page doesn’t work I don’t know why.
I would suggest some kind of indication of what was blocked. Something similar to the yellow popup blocker indicator would be good.
March 26th, 2005 at 10:02 pmcolumns
Now this is a nifty Gecko feature. Maybe I’ll start using columns here. What do you all think? Oh, and Mike Connor, who recently visited us at the MoFo headquarters, has a good Firefox blog post. If you’re interested in Firefox dev, you should keep a…
March 28th, 2005 at 12:11 am[...] rf… Meinung und ihre Mache Bin mal gespannt, ob der neuste Blogeintrag von Mike Connor sich auch so sehr in den Medien wiederspiegeln wird wie ein vorheriger, der -w [...]
March 28th, 2005 at 10:06 amGood design, great content…consider me subscribed.
March 28th, 2005 at 10:27 amThe answer for the “which features to put in 1.1″ _should_ be “whatever features were in 1.0, plus the 1.8 Gecko”. That was the original plan, and we seem to be slipping from it rather heavily.
March 28th, 2005 at 2:23 pmblocking java on a per site basis would be great, now that spyware authors seem to use java to target both Firefox but as much as I love Firefox I must admit that I’ve never seen a program leaking as much memory, so I would vote to find and fix memory leaks first.
March 28th, 2005 at 6:00 pmI have some suggestions for features
1. Make some security settings similar to the way Netscape 8 does it (with the security page linked to the tab, that’s an appropriate place for it – as well as the close button).
2. Dynamic fonts! It would be so cool to not have to save 600 header graphics ever again (I build sites for a living, and man do I spend a lot of time cropping and saving header images, just to get the look of a certain font). This would help with SVG too (CEF fonts).
3. Support new file formats (SVG, jpeg2000, MNG).
4. Support some fancy filters like blur and dropshadows – would help with SVG too.
5. XULRunner is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while, I can’t wait to have one Gecko engine to run all my Moz apps on (FF, TB, SB, etc.).
6. Oh, and please fix this annoying bug (it seems simple, I’d fix it myself – and have tried – but the source is a bit out of my league).
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233533
Well that’s my wishlist – you can get to these when you are done with the thousands of other more important things
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BTW, if posting this here is in anyway inappropriate, then I apologize.
April 16th, 2005 at 1:01 amWhen will Firefox be able to open a new window on the mac version when just the download manager window is open ?
As long as i can think back, it has been this way – DL window open -> no menu appears
Also i am soo much missing the “mac key functionality” of the up/down arrows to go to the end/start of a textfield – since while in this mode, they don’t seem to serve any other purpose (the keys) do they ?
thanks – know its wriong place, just felt like posting, excuse
April 26th, 2005 at 11:35 amBois de santal de di de kelowna di albergo….
Albergo bed and breakfast. Albergo pasadena napoli. Albergo abruzzi. Albergo un torino. Albergo del senato hotel. Albergo del senato. Albergo a mestre….
December 9th, 2006 at 10:31 pmAs a website graphic designer I had quite a bit of problems at first with Firefox. I’d create webpages that looked grat in IE but once I looked at them in Firefox — the graphics seemed to lose their integrity.
This turned out to be a good thing. I’d been using an old website editor to create my websites and this problem with Firefox forced me to learn Dreamweaver. Now all the graphics on the web page look good in both IE and Firefox.
Firefox has since become my favorite browser. I’ve also downloaded their plug in for java scripts which has gone a long way towards reducing the spyware my computer routinely caught.
GrafxExtreme.com
December 12th, 2006 at 9:28 pm