[ music | OMC – How Bizarre ]

Well I guess I can talk about it now. The papers are signed and the plane tickets are bought. I’ve been hired by Mozilla Corp! Since everyone knows that MoCo has been in freefall since the release of FF2, with a precipitous drop in revenue, I’ve been brought in to revitalize the company. The first step is to bring direction back to development. To further that goal, we’re dropping Gecko and moving to WebKit. WebKit is obviously more stable and well developed, and has much more room for growth than Gecko. Gecko is stagnant and has reached the limit of its expandability. This has been a well kept secret, and everyone’s been denying it for several years. WebKit is lighter and faster, and Gecko is just getting too bogged down with too much code only bz understands.

Second on the agenda will be to move WebKit development onto Vista. Vista is obviously the future, with people upgrading by the dozens every week. This will also allow us to leverage Vista’s enhanced Digital Rights Management features for the third prong of my new Mozilla Corp plan, SecureWeb.

SecureWeb is an entirely new way of browsing the web, and delivering content in a completely secure manner. SecureWeb puts content owners and developers where they should be, in control of the user. With total control over the browser experience, things like browser incompatibilities are a thing of the past because you can’t browse SecureWeb without Firefox 3 Secure Edition, and that only runs on Vista. And since content developers are in total control, there’s no worry about security breaches because only Licensed Content Providers are allowed to develop for SecureWeb. Content Providers will be approved by the LCP Board, which is comprised of Mozilla, Microsoft (our Fully Qualified Partner), Google (another Fully Qualified Partner, and SecureWeb cofounder), the MPAA, the RIAA, and SCO.

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who made this possible, and it’ll be an interesting ride!

[ music | Badly Drawn Boy – Pissing In The Wind ]

MozillaZine’s forums are nearly worthless these days. I know of moderators that have been complaining about other mods for ages, but now they’ve taken to new lows. Today, Daifne has seen fit to mouth off and scurrilously accuse the wife of a lead developer of trying to scam people out of personal data. Basically, the egos on some of these people would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

For the sake of this discussion, we’re going to ignore how Lucy was the prime mover on the “Bookmarks missing after installing Firefox 2” problem when FF2 was first released. Why? Well, because Daifne did. Either out of ignorance, or because she was too lazy to check up on a person before accusing them of nefarious activities, she put her foot squarely in her mouth, with her sidekick “malliz” there to keep the foot embedded. When learning identities later, Daifne didn’t bother to do anything like apologize or even acknowledge a mistake, she instead decided to defame and insult Mike Connor.

And yes, after watching the forums at MozillaZine go downhill for years, I had enough. I made a statement. I stand by it. There are too many trollish moderators at MozillaZine. And it’s sad.

At least Lucy was able to still help the user. Not that it mattered to the mods.

P.S. Wow, ok, well, they’re still at it. Daifne? Can you hear me honey? You’re a troll. And I’m not the only one who is saying so. (Please don’t post, just read unless you’re going to be constructive)

P.P.S. Ok, Dartman? You can go to hell too.

P.P.P.S. Wow. Mega kudos to Alex Bishop for this post. He said everything I was thinking in a far more cogent manner than I did off the cuff. Bravo.

[ music | Dave Brubeck – Unsquare Dance ]

Now, first off, I think The Rumbling Edge is a nice blog that does a great job of covering Thunderbird related updates, much like The Burning Edge does for Firefox related changes. However, considering it is being hosted by MozillaZine, I think it’s a little top-heavy about ads. Here’s an illustrated screencap of the first screen, or “above the fold”, what you see before you scroll down. My screen is 800 pixels high, and I’ve cut out most of the chrome in the screenshot. The numbers below deal just with the content pane, also. Red is ads, green is content, blue is “chrome” like the title and RSS feed link, and the grey is whitespace.

Now, roughly 43% of that is whitespace. 46% is ad space or revenue-generating links such as the ones to download Firefox, etc. 6% is actual content, namely links to recent builds, and the download counter. I’m being generous with the term “content” here by defining it as useful updated information. Lastly, 5% is the title and tagline, and the RSS feed link. Even adding that into content, 46% of the above-the-fold area is ads, 11% is content. There is more ad-spade than whitespace. Further down there are two separate Paypal donation buttons. I’m all for making money off your work, but this is a little offensive. I have ads here, but none of it blocks content, and you don’t have to scroll to get to the content. I only hope some of that ad revenue is going back to MozillaZine.

[ music | Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life – Monty Python ]

Oh crap. Actually, someone informed me earlier tonight, but I’m surprised that many people care. I’m on the case. News to follow as events warrant, i.e., as soon as I hear. Stay tuned.

Spinfox 0.7.1. All it does is bump the maxversion for Firefox 2.0.0.1 and beyond. Nothing else new, yet.

[ music | Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round ]

Wow, over a month with no posts. It’s been a crazy busy month though. To all my friends whom I have neglected email, I’m sorry, I’ll catch up this weekend I swear. 🙂

Now on to the topic. Spinfox. This is announcing a release!

Thanks to the ever so awesome Euan Ritchie
and his herd of domesticated Puppeteers, Spinfox is now an XPI installable Extension. Currently this is 0.7 because I have some
additional stuff to enhance. Next features are replacing the throbber on tabs, maybe extra large sizes (we’ll see how that works),
possibly smoothing the images a little more, etc. Neither Euan nor myself are responsible if you put your eye out installing this.

Spinfox 0.7 XPI.

UPDATE:Link fixed. Had a dash instead of an equals sign. Oops.

[ music | Herbie Hancock – Rockit ]

Awesome. That is all.

[ music | Michael Buble – I’ve Got You Under My Skin ]

I upgraded to Firefox 2, but Prefbar 3.3.1 isn’t compatible yet. Anyone know anything about it?

Update: Dude! The originator of the Prefbar extension commented, and alerted me to some issues with the whole situation. I hope the community can help find a way out of this and bring back an incredibly handy tool.

[ music | Queen – We Are The Champions ]

The secret is out. Firefox beat the pants off IE’s download numbers. From Beltzner’s blog:

Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.

Schwing.

[ music | KT Tunstall – False Alarm ]

So, I’m reading Lucy’s (Majken) blog post on her introduction to the Credits panel in Firefox. She’s SUCH an attention whore. But her calling me at 3 in the morning mewing like a cat is entirely off the topic. Oh, wait, no, that’s someone else. Anyway. So what do I see? I see this:

Yep. It’s too late for me to make some crucial contribution to get my name in the credits. Damn. Guess I’ll have to wait for Firefox 2.0.0.0.0.0.1.

Anyway, so Lucy (still Majken) has made it into the credits. She’s the other Connor above Mike, but below Mary Colvig. Look closely, you’ll see her name…