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 . . . ;)

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

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

Obligatory screenshot:

Check out their site for more info!

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. More...

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.

More...

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.

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... More...