Mozilla

Firefox, Linux and Flash Transparency

20after4 — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:15:39 -0600

I just discovered this hack to make it possible to use html-above-embedded flash. I'm continually disappointed with Adobe and Mozilla for ignoring this long standing and very annoying bug. At least there is a hackish solution that will work for some but it doesn't really solve the problem, just helps only a little bit. Thanks to marcoos for figuring it out by reverse-engineering the google video site and thanks to google for providing the solution for our reverse-engineered pleasure . . . ;)

MozPad

20after4 — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:12:08 -0600

MozPad is a group of developers which was started by Matt at AllPeers to focus on development of the Mozilla development platform (and Mozilla's cross-platform runtime, XULRunner.)

More Information

More information about MozPad can be found at the following sites:

MozPad.org - the main project wiki.
MozPad moon - the project news aggregator.
mozilla.community.mozpad - community newsgroup
MozPad Dashboard - summary of mozpad activity and links to related resources.
The #mozpad IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org

Certificate Change Notifier

20after4 — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 02:20:20 -0600

I'm working on a simple extension for Firefox that would notify the user when an SSL/TLS site's certificate changes. This way an informed user could decide if the certificate change was valid / expected and opt out of an ssl session in questionable circumstances. Is there any interest in such an extension? My friend ask me whether there was a way to do it so I'm working on proof of concept code, I will release it as open source if anyone cares.

Update:

Working proof of concept code released. See XPI attachment below. Note: this is tested in Firefox 3.0 beta 2 and it uses mozStorage (sqlite) to keep track of the url/certificate mappings. This isn't really usable, it's simply a proof of concept with no useful user interface. It will pop up an alert when you visit a site that has changed it's certificate since your last visit.

Update #2:

An updated version of this extension is now available on addons.mozilla.org (it's in the sandbox until it's been reviewed.) You have to log in before you can view the sandbox: Addon #6415

XUL Controls Example

20after4 — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:07:25 -0600

Tonight I threw together a little XUL file that demonstrates most of the major user interface [controls|widgets|whatever] so that I could get a quick idea of how any given GTK theme would look on a variety of different interface elements. I'm sure there is a GTK application that does this but I thought that it would be an interesting use for XULExplorer.

So without further ado I present you with my mostly useless example-widgets.xul

jabber for mozilla: sameplace.cc

20after4 — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:37:51 -0600

I just came across a really nice extension for Mozilla applications which supports Firefox, Thunderbird and even Flock! It's called SamePlace, it's open source and the interface is really slick.

Obligatory screenshot:

Check out their site for more info!

PsycZilla

20after4 — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:36:49 -0500

About PSYC:

"Imagine smartly multicasted chat and conferencing, non-proprietary instant messaging, distributed social networking and data sharing. And now imagine all of this rolled into one. PSYC is an open source protocol and technology, bringing the useful and amazing aspects of several technologies, some of which have been proprietary too long, together." Read More.

PsycZilla is a PSYC Client for the Mozilla platform. PsycZilla started as a PSYC extension for Firefox and eventually branched out into standalone XULRunner applications for Linux and Mac OS X. You can read more about PsycZilla at http://www.psyc.us

Mozilla kills Thunderbird

20after4 — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:44:05 -0500

Warning: This blog contains biased, inflammatory and quite possibly unpopular personal opinions. My apologies to everyone at Mozpad. You have been warned. I am horrified. I guess we all saw it coming but WTF!? I have officially lost faith in Mozilla co. Before I let negativity take over, I must emphasize that I think the Mozilla community is wonderful. I am proud to participate in such a diverse and interesting group, however small my contributions may be. I have been using Thunderbird exclusively for years. I have been a major advocate of Firefox for years. I will continue to advocate open standards and open software. I will continue to support mozilla, with some reservations, to the extent that mozilla earns my support. Now, the negativity: I don't think Mozilla corporation deserves to have the name Mozilla. Mozilla, to me, means Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Camino, Sunbird. etc. Mozilla corporation should be called simply "Firefox, Inc." P.S: This article says it better than I just did: http://www.bengoodger.com/2007/04/the_autonomous_future.html Update: Daniel Glazman has an interesting take on this matter: http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2007/07/30/3721-thunderbird

Improving Drupal's support for the rel-tag Microformat

20after4 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:27:40 -0500

I recently installed the Operator extension for Firefox. Operator is an interesting little extension which attempts to expose microformats embedded in web pages through a toolbar in the browser.

While browsing this site with Operator installed I noticed a problem with the tags that are typically attached to each post to organize the site into categories. Drupal attempts to conform to the rel-tag microformat by attaching a rel="tag" attribute to each tag link (Look at the section titled Tags: at the top of this post.) The problem is that drupal uses numbers for each category (aka "Taxonomy Term.") and numbers don't make very readable tags. As several others have already pointed out, this could be considered a deficiency in the microformat. The rel-tag specification doesn't provide any alternate way to specify a text-version of the tag, other than the last segment of the url. In the case of drupal, the last segment of a taxonomy url is the taxonomy term id, which is a number.

Fortunately, this is one case where the flexibility of Drupal's API comes to the rescue. I did a quick search of Drupal.org and turned up this post. The solution offered was not up to date with Drupal 5.x and it didn't work for my version, however, that article mentioned a new API hook in Drupal HEAD called hook_link_alter, a feature that eventually made it's way into the final release for Drupal 5. Using hook_link_alter I was able to hack together a short function that rewrites the tag links so that they end with the tag name instead of a number. Fortunately for us, Drupal's taxonomy system ignores the extra baggage on the end of taxonomy URLs and everything still works as expected.

All of this explanation has quickly become much longer than the code that I am describing. Without further delay, here is some code that you can place in your drupal theme's template.php to make more sensible rel-tag taxonomy links:


/* Alter rel-tag links to include the link tag name in the url */
function blog_link_alter(&$node, &$links) {
        foreach ($links AS $module => $link) {
                if ($link['attributes']['rel'] == 'tag' && !empty($link['title'])) {
                        $links[$module]['href'] .= "/".$link['title'];
                }
        }
}

Warning: This is slightly hackish because I am placing a drupal api hook inside a theme template.php - this hook is prefixed with the blog module name and it actually belongs inside the blog module, however, I don't want to alter drupal core code so I chose to place this in my theme.

Technorati tags: drupal, rel-tag

Tagging in Firefox 3

20after4 — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:35:06 -0500

I just read this on planet mozilla: Tagging Extension Available ...So I downloaded the extension and tried it out. Well, it's a little rough around the edges but it's a great start towards the perfect bookmarks/tagging feature. This is something that I have been wanting to see for a long time, I even spent considerable effort working on a dead-end project last year to implement something like this. I'm glad to see it implemented in Firefox, hopefully I can contribute to developing this further, that is if I can find the time to work on yet another project.

Some cool developments

20after4 — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:12:38 -0500

I would like to share a couple of random, somewhat unrelated items:

A new version 0.1.3 of POW was released recently. This version adds stability and bug fixes and some cool new features. The interesting stuff: Firebug Support and Standalone Server Support. This should be very interesting!
Mark Finkle wrote an interesting introduction to WebRunner - a "Site-Specific Browser" that can run your webapps in a separate process from your normal browser. This makes web applications feel more like desktop applications and helps keep your main browser from getting too bloated with the overhead from sites like Google Reader or G-Mail. I'm looking forward to trying this out, I will report back once I have had a chance to use it for a few days.

More rambling below... I tried to comment on Mark Finkle's blog but I'm too daft to find the comment form. So here is my comment, it will not make much sense if you have not read the post about WebRunner...

A lot of features that I find myself wanting in an XULRunner app are things that have already been implemented by Firefox, such as some that you have put into webrunner and for example the ctrl - +/- to resize text. I would love to see a section on devmo that detailed how to get those features working in XULRunner apps and I'm willing to help write it ;)