Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on mozilla http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic mozilla Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb What M$crosoft can do with IE Wed, 04 Jun 2003 15:18:17 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> Microsoft goes to rehab?. Following up on my righteous indignation of last Friday, CNet gets some props for trying to get MSoft to comment more officially on the <A href="http://rss.com.com/2100-1032_3-1012943.html?type=pt&part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news">status of IE updates.</A> Given that the author of the quote was a security guy, one might think that security updates will require Longhorn, but that the statement can't be generalized beyond that. CNet quotes a MS rep: <BLOCKQUOTE>"There will be continued innovation and improvement"</BLOCKQUOTE> Yeah, continuing where they left off in 2001. How can we convince Microsoft to acknowledge IE's mismatch with standards and commit to a course of action for getting in synch? In the long run, the Mozilla  public bug database, where one can actually be heard with regard to feature requests and issues,  could be a major factor.  A final note on this issue, without the blogging world, I doubt CNet would have picked up this tidbit. [<A href="http://surfmind.com/musings/">Surf*Mind*Musings</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> On the basis of the original article I decided to take a better look at Mozilla and installed the new <A href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/">Firebird</A> release.  For reasons I find hard to explain I found Firebird a much nicer browser than vanilla Moz and could even see myself using it as my every day browser if two problems could be solved: <OL> <LI>When I click a link in another application I want Firebird to open it in a new tab automatically <LI>I want to be able to edit Radio postings using WYSIWYG mode</LI></OL> With these conditions satisfied I am happy for M$crosoft to stick IE where the sun don't shine and good luck to them! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001466.html Goddamnit Firebird fly!!! Thu, 05 Jun 2003 16:23:21 +0100 I've been running Mozilla Firebird on my backup (Win98) laptop for a few days now and really liked it.  Now that my WinXP laptop is back up and running and it seemed natural to get Firebird going there and phase out Internet Exploder.  But I'm damned if I can get Firebird running. It hangs every time I try to open it.  Usually just after displaying the opening window with the status bar saying "resolving host www.mozilla.org".   This is so frustrating! I've tried both the Nightly build version and the 0.6 release.  I've uninstalled regular Mozilla 1.4b and deleted all the pre-existing profile information but Firebird won't fly. Colour me very disappointed... Update... Since writing this I have found that Firebird has suddenly started working and that Internet Explorer has started to play up. It's obviously realised the game is up! Also <a href="http://www.dellah.com/orient/">Paul Freeman</a> pointed me at some useful <a href="http://texturizer.net/firebird/tips.html">Mozilla Firebird tips</a> including how to make Firebird open links from external apps in a new tab. Thanks Paul! So all I need now is a good solution to HTML editing for Radio... I really, really hate the idea of hand editing my posts! Updated, update... Micah I fixed the link to the Mozilla tips http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001467.html Fly in the Firebird ointment Fri, 06 Jun 2003 11:35:58 +0100 Okay I can really see myself replacing IE with Firebird for all my day-to-day browsing needs.  It's just a superior browser.  However what I can't live with is editing posts in a poxy textarea with <blockquote> and friends.  It just aint gonna happen.  None of my searches for a solution yielded any results.  Does anyone know what is the state of play for WYSIWYG editing in Firebird? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001468.html Mozilla ascendant Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:02:04 +0100 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000285.html">Mozilla Foundation Launches</A>. From the press release: MOZILLA.ORG ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION TO LEAD OPEN-SOURCE BROWSER EFFORTS America Online Pledges $2... [<A href="http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/">Mitch Kapor's Weblog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> Does this herald a period of reinvigoration for the browser? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001513.html Mozilla tolerances Sun, 12 Oct 2003 07:46:54 +0100 Has anyone else noticed that Win Mozilla (1.5) is much pickier about selecting checkboxes than Win IE?  I really notice this using Radio's news page where I find myself clicking down a long (sometimes several hundred) list of items.  With IE I found that I rarely missed, with Moz I seem to do it all the time and it's really irritating. Has anyone else noticed this? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001670.html Sidebar frenzy Wed, 15 Oct 2003 20:05:50 +0100 <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://www.truerwords.net/3488">Mozillas Gone Wild!</a>. </div> The Mozilla foundation has released new versions of most of their toys today. Just released: <ul style="margin-left: 40px;"> <li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.5/README.html#new">Mozilla 1.5</a> (the browser/email/composer/etc. suite)</li> <li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/">Mozilla Firebird 0.7</a> (standalone browser)</li> <li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/">Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3</a> (standalone email client)</li> </ul> I'm still using the full Suite. Firebird doesn't have Mozilla's sidebars, which I find extremely useful (specifically, the dev-centric sidebars for HTML, CSS, JS,... [<a href="http://www.truerwords.net/index">TruerWords</a>] Mozilla 1.5 + <a href="http://multizilla.mozdev.org/">MultiZilla</a> (to improve the tab support) is a great browser combination which has fully displaced IE as my default browser. I do have 2 complaint thoughs: <ul> <li>Checkbox selection is really fiddly in Mozilla compared to IE</li> <li>Ctrl+Arrow changes tab rather than moving the cursor forward/backword by word.</li> </ul>Unfortunately both of these are big usability gremlins for me. The keyboard override is particularly painful. Taking a well known text selection combo and overloading it (with no obvious way back) seems to me a pathologically bad thing to do. Does anyone know of a fix? I'm also just beginning to learn about the power of the sidebar. It seems that <a href="http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/sidebar/">writing new sidebars</a> is dead easy and there are <a href="http://devedge.netscape.com/toolbox/sidebars/">many cool sidebars available</a> (e.g. Javascript reference, DOM inspector). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001675.html Another Mozilla UI headache Sun, 09 Nov 2003 15:27:01 +0000 Does anyone know of a way to remove the option "Close Other Tabs" from the Mozilla tab menu?  I can't count the number of times I have hit this by accident and lost a load of open tabs and, yet, I have never had occasion to use it deliberately.   Seems like a UI blunder to me. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001711.html Talking of Thunderbird issues Mon, 10 Nov 2003 13:50:17 +0000 A couple of Thunderbird gripes (I should probably start a page for all this sort of stuff): <ul> <li>One of my mailboxes doesn't seem to be collecting automatically even though it is configured that way</li> <li>I have had a case where the UI appeared to stall collecting mail. Turned out it was fine once I clicked on a mailbox but it looked frozen (hourglass cursor and all)</li> <li>Collapsed threads aren't marked unread if the top-level item is read</li> <li>I can't seem to delete a thread in one go</li> </ul> Now all of these are pretty minor, especially when you consider that this is still an early beta. I'm very impressed with the Thunderbird experience so far. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001715.html Weigh anchor Fri, 19 Dec 2003 23:32:20 +0000 Apologies if I wasn't very clear about my anchor problem. As <a href="http://www.faganfinder.com/me/">Michael Fagan</a> realised; What I wanted was to be able to go to an arbitrary page and see all the anchors available in the page. Michaal was able to suggest a possible <a href="http://www.nils.org.au/ais/web/resources/toolbar/">solution for IE users</a> however I am Mozilla convert these days. Not to be out-done I learned <a href="http://subsimple.com/bookmarklets/writeyourown.asp">how to write a bookmarklet</a> to do the job. Drag this <a href="javascript:{ try { var doc = window.document; var anchors = doc.anchors; for( var i=0; i<anchors.length; i++ ) { var a = doc.createElement( 'a' ); a.href = doc.location.href + '#' + anchors[i].name; a.appendChild( doc.createTextNode( '[*]' ) ); var pn = anchors[i].parentNode; try { pn.insertBefore( a, anchors[i] ); } catch( ex ) { alert( ex ); } }; alert( doc.anchors.length + ' anchors made visible.' ); } catch( ex ) { alert( ex ); } void(close());}">link</a> to your toolbar and call it something like Show Anchors. Then go to a page that you know there will be some anchors hidden in and click the button. All anchors will appear as link with text [*] and whose href is the fully qualified URL of the anchor point. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001788.html Mozilla bug bear Wed, 14 Jan 2004 10:07:15 +0000 Dear god someone on the Mozilla team PLEASE move the Close Other Tabs command away from the Close Tab command on the Mozilla context menu. I cannot count the number of times I hit the wrong one and it's driving me nuts!! http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001802.html Toggling checkboxes in the Radio news aggregator Tue, 17 Feb 2004 20:51:29 +0000 A while back I wrote a modification to the Radio news aggregator page which added a button for toggling all the checkboxes on or off. This was pretty handy but trashed by a Userland update. I could never muster the willpower to figure out how I did it again, and watch it disappear again at some unspecified point in the future so i've done without. Today I slapped myself for being a fool and wrote a JavaScript <a href="javascript:(function(){var inputs=document.getElementsByTagName('input');for(var i=0;i<inputs.length;i++){if(inputs[i].type=='checkbox'){inputs[i].checked=!inputs[i].checked;}}})()">bookmarket</a> which does the same thing. It just toggles every checkbox it finds on the page. I've learned some more <a href="http://subsimple.com/bookmarklets/tips.asp#Encapsulation">tricks</a> for writing Bookmarklets, since last time, so this one should work the same on IE and Mozilla (although I won't be testing it on IE). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001902.html Javascript for open in new tab Fri, 06 Aug 2004 20:23:35 +0100 Does anyone know a way to have Javascript code open a link in a new Mozilla tab?  What I want to be able to do is automatically add a "handle" to every link on the page which, when you click it, opens the link in a tab. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002430.html The experts have it Fri, 06 Aug 2004 21:07:13 +0100 For £6 I signed up to <a href="http://www.experts-exchange.com/">Experts Exchange</a> for a month since they were the only site that appeared to have an answer for my question about opening tabs via Javascript.  I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what I was buying and, indeed, the <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105409">answer</a> is in the negative.  Oh well.  EE looks like a good resource and I have a month to ask more questions. An interesting side note: Most of the reasoning given for why programmatic tab control is "a bad thing" was about user choice and, yet, I am a user and I want this choice which has been denied me. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002433.html Firefox not XSLT standards compliant? Sat, 07 May 2005 09:46:51 +0100 <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/index.html" title="All Topics"><img style="padding: 10px;" align="right" border="0" src="http://matt.blogs.it/images/alltopics_clipping.jpg"></a>As I wrote yesterday, I'm now rendering <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/adaptive-resonance-theory.xml">individual </a> <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/trillian.xml">topic</a> <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/rss.xml">feeds</a>. Each is a (slightly bare) RSS feed of posts on a particular topic. Taking slighly more than a leaf out of the <a href="http://www.feedburner.com/">FeedBurner</a> playbook each feed has an XSLT stylesheet which renders it for display in the browser. That way the same file that you can subscribe to in your aggregator can also do dual purpose as a cross-reference index of my blog. So far, so good. <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/adaptive-resonance-theory.xml" title="A Topic"><img style="padding: 10px;" align="left" border="0" src="http://matt.blogs.it/images/topic_clipping.jpg"></a>What sucks is that, when you view a feed in FireFox, the HTML pokes through instead of being rendered as part of the page. I've spent some time this morning trying to figure it out and just couldn't seem to make it work. I called on <a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/">Don Park</a> who gave me some useful pointers. Then I made an interesting discovery. In both IE and XML-SPY the output from the StyleSheet appeared to be correct, i.e. the entities were decoded and the HTML took it's rightful place. Some hunting turned up a <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/faq.html#d-o-e">FAQ on Mozilla XSLT</a> which seems to hold the answer: Mozilla's XSLT engine does not respect the <tt>disable-output-escaping</tt> option. They claim it causes trouble and I'm not in a position to disagree, however it also appears that this means Mozilla and FireFox aren't XSLT standards compliant which, if true, is both irritating and hypocritical because, as far as I can see, it's not an optional part of the standard. How is the Mozilla team picking and choosing which bits of the XSLT standard they choose to implement any different to situations in which other vendors do it, and get called on it? I'm not in a position to contribute to the Mozilla codebase or to look at this problem so it's unfair of me to gripe. Nevertheless I will. The reasons given are that it causes crashes and can slow down rendering. Both are reasonable first responses when pushing to get a 1.0 product out the door. But neither Mozilla nor FireFox are 1.0 products any more and these reasons don't stand up. Crashes can be solved (write better quality code) and, ultimately, judgements of rendering speed should be down to the user, not the developer. In short, I think it sucks. On a more practical note I really do want to see if I can figure out a way around this. I am a FireFox user and I care more about FireFox users than I do about IE users (for whom the feed renders properly, damnit!) Since I am generating the XML for the feeds myself is there perhaps another way of solving this? Some way of getting the HTML in the <tt><description></tt> field through XML validation but without requiring the entities to be unescaped in the XSLT? Any help you could give me would be much appreciated. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002553.html