Oy. Ok, I tried to like it, I really did. I used to for almost a week now. It is faster than Seamonkey, but I’m really missing some features, and tonight, I hit the wall. First, I can’t middle-click from Mailnews anymore, because it opens a link in a new Mozilla tab, instead of a new Firefox tab, and non-Linux users don’t get anything like Linux’s -remote openURL([URL],new-tab) funtionality (bugs 104204 and 121969). I’ve lived with that for a long time, and it wasn’t TOO bad since I use Mozilla for mailnews and browsing.

Second was the nice dialog for selecting with remembered login set for sites where you have saved multiple logins. Clicking in the username field, typing the first letter of the login you want to use, then selecting it from a drop down, THEN logging in or whatevre is NOT easier that clicking on a list in a popup dialog.

Third was sidebars. I use the HTML 4.01, CSS2, and DOM2 reference sidebars constantly. I could live without them if I had to, just use bookmarks in new tabs.

Fourth is the numerous toggles I’ve got to flip to get it more Seamonkey like in function. Also livable, since I don’t have to do it too often.

The last straw was tonight though. There’s no decent download dialogs. I hated the Download Manager when it debuted in Mozilla, and it’s prettier but just as useless in Firefox, and now there’s no alternative. This is bug 233122 which is Verified Wontfix. Frankly, this sucks.

There’s a lot to like about Firefox, but these make it unacceptable to me. I can’t wait until someone whips up an extention for these issues. Pulling odd features and moving UI points is one thing, but removing commonly used features like download progress dialogs is just dumb. A simple XUL dialog like Mozilla has, and even a toggle in about:config would be far far better than this situation.

Boris Zbarsky and commenters replying to him made some great points. Warning, he describes feelings as opposed to facts, so don’t freak out.

I’ve finally been able to pin down what it is that really bugs me about Firefox, by the way. It’s not having a say in the behavior of a product in which I’m investing a lot of time and effort. Feeling that you’re irrelevant (and easily replaceable) slave labor is no fun.

This is a keen insight. A commenter in that post named LarryB made a good point, which can be paraphrased that while a common-end-user focus is good, one must not then ignore or disregard the community that built and supports all things Mozilla. Deciding we’re wrong, that’s acceptable if done with respect. Deciding we’re wrong and saying, “shut up and smile” won’t cut it. Yes, I’m saying the community must be treated with respect. Companies who lose focus and ignore their clients lose, such as SCO, Netscape, 3DFX (yes, I spend far too much time in the IT world, since I can’t name any non-IT related failures off the top of my head). They all lost focus of the market and their clients, and died (SCO is near death, after actively damaging their clients by suing them for NOT buying the crappy products and going to competing products).

Now, Brendan still gets the idea of market focus, and core features.

First, let me just say that there is no way Firefox would ship without View / Source or any other UI that goes back to Netscape 1, and is therefore part of the “body plan” of browsers. Not while I’m around and involved, at any rate.

Bravo. Sure it’s a somewhat geeky feature. It’s also been around forever in Internet terms. Brendan also has a few other extremely interesting and insightful things to say, and you’ll come out ahead by spending a few minutes to read them.

Asa then made a follow-up post to his own blog, which also offers some intersting points. And while I disagree with Asa at times, this guy is an asshole. I did the math, and at worst, Asa is a papercut. But seriously folks, this guy is way out of line. Bugzilla is not for that kind of verbal vitriol. Sadly, this wasn’t this clown’s first transgression. His first was posted under the Bugzilla account mozbugs@gl00on.net where he said:

------- Additional Comment #507 From mozbugs@gl00on.net 2004-08-18 09:10 PDT ------
Changing this to "enhancement" and removing the "regression" keyword is a lie and a skewing of the past.
I unfortunately can't undo those changes myself due to a lack of privileges, but I hope someone who does will.
And to asa, a heart-felt "fuck you".

That account was suspended. He was told he needed to re-read the Bugzilla rules and ettiquette, and send a mail in saying he understood and would play by the rules. Apparently, he did because he later then poster:

------- Additional Comment #514 From mozbugs2@gl00on.net 2004-08-19 13:52 PDT -------
Asa: your abuse of power to censor unpleasant opinions just shows again why I said what I said (and why I still mean it).

That’s when he created a second account as Micky Mouse and posted the hitler/cancer comment twice in seven minutes. This guy’s a goon and a twerp, and the project as a whole is better off without him.

[03:25] * Wolf loves the part where people think aviary meetings are top secret and filled with ideas on how to take away more features. 😉
[03:26] <nosebleed> they aren’t?
[03:26] <jesus_X> they’re not?

A lot of work is happening with respect to Firefox even though Ben is currently off in Kiwiland. It just seems that it’s work in removing stuff that’s happening lately. It’s been coming to light the various features that are being hidden due to not-ready-for-prime-time issues, which is valid in many cases. Not so in others. Thankfully, bug 256213 has been argued down for 1.0 (removing the menuitem for the JS console), but bug 213950 is still alive, and calls for separating the JS console for removal by Firefox 1.5, and being moved to the Developer addon where DOMI and other tools live.

But there are other somewhat interesting choices the Firefox team is making as well. Removing the Profile Manager UI, which will make testing profile issues a bitch. Really, this should be accessable through a command line switch only, as opposed to being removed altogether. Remove alternate stylesheet UI, which is debatable.Yeah, it’s somewhat buggy, but as Glazou has noted, it’s a requisite for CSS2 conformance. Maybe it’s better to try to fix some of the issues in the interim before release than cut it? After all, release has been pushed back to October 11 (and we know how good release dates are kept in this industry). There’s also the hiding of the buggy offline feature set (my favorite commend, “Removing features after the PR could have negative PR impact around 1.0. We should plan on doing this ASAP.“), removal of the bookmark notification panel, etc.

Now, I’m not saying all these are bad, some are good ideas (broken non-features). But I think that with the broken items being pulled, they’re pulling too much in this common-user focus. View Source _is_ a common user feature. No it’s not used by everyone, but it _is_ used by even the average user whey trying to figure out why a page is horribly mangled, not displaying, etc, even when they have no idea what they’re looking for or looking at. I have seen it myself working with common users in various capacities. The idea has been moved off the radar for now, but I think we need to help re-educate the developers before 1.5 and these become issues again.

Surprisngly, when I reposted my Mozilla Password Manager Tricks page, I got a huge influx of traffic. Apparently, this still useful, which is gratifying. Especially since there is a “Show Passwords” button in the Password Manager in newer versions of Mozilla.

Now, for a while (off and on) I’ve been trying to figure out how Firefox encodes passwords. While it looks like base64, it’s not (at least not totally, it’s possible that’s part of the method). It is some form of actual encryption, although I’m sure not too terribly strong. Now, since the code is freely available, it shouldn’t be too difficult to determine the method used to obscure the passwords in the signons.txt file (located in the profile directory). The question is, is this encoding unique to the user’s installation or PC somehow, making a web-based tool hard-to-inpossible, or is there a single key that’s used? If it’s a single method, we can create a tool similar to this for Firefox passwords. This would be very useful since Firefox has no such “Show Passwords” button in the Password Manager. Bookmarklets can’t help reveal passwords in HTTPAuth dialogs, or other username/password dialog boxes, and many people would be unable to use DOMI to view it’s contents.

So, anyone want to step up to the plate? If so, mail me,

I’ve been getting a number of emails lately about my old Password Manager Tricks page, which was easy to find on my old domain (which squatters now grabbed) and I keep forgetting to re-link it. Well, here it is, again.

I started with this idea a couple weeks ago. Well, I decided, why not blog a few more. Ideas are good to spread around, as you have a better chance to make it happen.

First up is some New Tab issues. Linux folks have -remote openURL([url], new-tab) but those of us on Win32 have no external options for specifying a new tab or window, only one-size-fits-all preference settings. I’m so used to middle-clicking links in Mailnews that I don’t think I can bear going back.

And the ability to specify a new tab using the target= attribute on links would be nice too, but that ship has sailed.

Another tab thing would be tab-reordering built in. Asa blogged about an extension called MiniT+indicator, but a simple featureset like this should be built into Firefox.

Ever use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Acrobat Reader? I love how holding the spacebar lets your grab and move the document around freely. I would absolutely adore an extenstion that added this feature. And not just for pages; for images that are larger than the viewport it would rock too (no, I hate image auto-resizing so don’t even speak of it). Anything with a scrollbar.

I’m sure I’ll think of more later on, or rather, remember more later on. 🙂

So far, Firefox has really been kicking ass and taking names. But a recent letter to Infoworld from a happy convert made me stop and think for a moment. The user’s only complaints were a few rare sites coded for IE, and of course Microsoft’s Windows Update. Now,there’s not much we can do about sites coded for IE, but there is something we can do about Windows Update. If you change your user agent string to look like IE, the Windows Update site loads fine, with some minor visual differences, although the ActiveX control doesn’t load since Firefox doesn’t support AX controls. But there is some work on supporting AX, such as with limited instances of AX in Netscape. Lots of people bemoan the fact they still need to use IE for Windows Update, in fact. So, what we need is an extension specifically written for Windows Update. It could come with a custom style sheet so the page renders better, and some mechanism for triggering the AX control on Windows systems when the Windows Update site is visited. Yes, this would only be useful for one site, but that one site is incredibly important for Windows users, and the ability to use it would give many people the reason to never load IE again.

Ok, at this moment, I’m trying to retrace a browsing-path I made two to four days ago. History isn’t helpful here, as I’m looking for paths that I took through Google. So, I realized something. A Google Search History extension for Mozilla or Firefox would be a huge help. But something far more than IE’s pathetic little dropdown. Maybe that would be a start at least. Give the Googlebox Search box in Firefox a dropdown history of the past X days or past X searches entered there. Then you could build on it that the extension would remember which links you visited from the search result, and show you their URLs, or generate a page with only the links you visited from that search term’s result list. Like how you can browse where images in your cache came from. Or has this invention already been invented?

I’ve done two more Mozilla posters, which are all now located here. Also, I noticed a few small flaws in the original SVG, either there originally or maybe created during the importation into Illustrator 11 (it was originally made and exported to SVG by Illustrator 9). I fixed those up, and saved it as an SVG, and as a PDF for folks without SVG capabilities. Everything is there in the directory, all in PDFs, with previews in PNG. These are not original works, I have just remake them in a scalable vector format. They’re all based on works on the Mozilla.org website, in raster format, usually small, and all unsuitable for large scale printing. I’ve already gotten word of folks in Japan enjoying them printed and hung on the walls, so let me know what you do with them, too. 🙂