Recently in Mozilla Category

This is something to get excited about - a Thunderbird test build with inline spellchecking included. This means that instead of manually clicking on the 'check spelling' button or have Thunderbird check your spelling when you send the message, you'll instead get the dotted red underlining like you do in Word. Here's a screenshot of the feature in action.

I'm going to download it now, but make sure you read the notes in the thread - this is a test build from the Gecko 1.8 trunk and isn't as stable as TB 1.0. You would be wise to install it in a separate folder.

It's yet another feature that sets it apart from Outlook Express. There really is barely any excuse to use that client now.

Nightly builds of Firefox for Windows now come in three flavours - the standard zip file, the installer build and now a build that can install using Windows Installer (MSI). From what I can gather, this has been done to aid deployment of Firefox across Windows-based enterprises.

Thankfully, Mozilla seem to be going down the route of offering the MSI build in addition to the standard installer, instead of replacing it altogether. I'm not a big fan of MSI - it's very slow, especially when uninstalling, and doesn't offer the best compression ratios - the MSI build is 5.4MB as opposed to the standard installer's 4.6MB (although the zip build is bigger at 6.3MB). The standard installer on the other hand is quite fast in comparison. OpenOffice.org appear to have taken the other route and with their preview of version 2.0 have only provided an MSI build, even though I didn't see anything much wrong with the installer they're currently using for 1.1.4.

The MSI file looks like it has been made with the freeware MakeMSI tool, instead of WiX which was Microsoft's famous first entrance into the open source arena (more details here). Make of that what you will.

While I've been using Thunderbird for over a year now, what hadn't quite occurred to me was just how much over a year I'd been using it for. Turns out I switched in June 2003 - almost 18 months ago. Thunderbird, at this point, wasn't even at version 0.1.

It's great to see how the client has matured over that time, and turned from a good enough client (version 0.1) to something that truly rocks (version 1.0). If you're still using Outlook Express - why? Reclaim your inbox, now!

incidentally I have 18 reasons why Thunderbird is better than Outlook Express, along with a further 5 reasons. If 23 reasons isn't enough for you to switch then I don't know what is...

Thunderbird 1.0 is out. It's now time to reclaim your inbox. :)

I've installed and had a play with Netscape Browser, the new prototype Netscape based on Firefox (CNet news story). I'd do a full review if I had time, but, in summary...

it sucks.

I'm really sorry to the people who developed it but it does symbolise Netscape's problems of the past 6 years, which, from the looks of things they've yet to learn from. Here's what I don't like about it:

• The theme, while looking okay generally, is too dark and non-Windows-ish. The main window just doesn't feel like a Windows program
• The main windows is far too cramped. Firefox gets it right with the 5 key buttons, address bar, search box and user bookmarks toolbar. Netscape tries to throw in a whole load of extras that just clutter it up
• Those scrolling newstickers are very annoying. Especially as there's 2 of them.
• And I don't like the weather thing either. Sure, ask me if I'd like those things installed but don't provide them for me
• The 'new tab' button is huge, and I don't like the extra clutter in the tabs (close button and security indicator)
• From a security standpoint I'm concerned about support for IE's rendering engine. Sure, it's disabled by default and is initially only used for microsoft.com, but the very fact it's there at all is a little disturbing, considering the current flaws in the system. incidentally when using the IE engine the browser identifies itself entirely as IE and doesn't modify the user agent in any way.
• Opening a new tab with Ctrl+T by default loads the current tab in the new tab by default. You can turn it off but personally I find this annoying.
• Why is the menu bar on to the right of the screen? Almost every other application bar RealPlayer puts it on the left where people expect it.
• Boy is this thing bloated. Firefox is under 5MB to download, Netscape is nearly 12MB - larger than the Mozilla suite, which of course includes an email client, web page editor and chat program in the package. It's also pretty big once installed, yet I'm at pains to nail down exactly what makes it so much bigger.
• And boy is this thing slow. Even the Mozilla Suite is faster than this. Opening Help caused the browser to hang for a full 20 seconds.
• Obviously it's a prototype but I'm sure Kevin Gerich and Steven Horlander will be pleased to know that they've apparently been credited with this theme in the Themes dialog. There are other bugs, like the Help menu disappearing off the right of the screen when maximised.
• Being able to manage browser settings on a per-site basis is a nice touch, but why are popups allowed by default on netscape.com? Surely if one of its key features is popup blocking (which even has an icon on the default toolbar) then it should block popups on the default homepage?
• While I'd expect it to add icons to my start menu, I'd prefer not to have desktop and quick launch icons, especially if I didn't ask for them. Apple's QuickTime is also guilty of this but that doesn't make it any more right.

I did point out a couple of things I liked about this but to be honest I'm really not impressed, and to some extent saddened that this release is so poor. To sum up, it's too ugly, cramped and bloated, and unless something is done to address those then I can't see it taking off, especially when pitted against its nearest relative, Firefox.

Henrik Gemal has some screenshots if you're interested.

Update: Alex Bishop of MozillaZine has a more in-depth review.

If the following applies to you:

• You have Internet Explorer 6
• You don't use Windows XP, or you haven't installed XP Service Pack 2
• You visited The Register between 6am and 12:30pm GMT on Saturday morning

then it is possible that you may have been infected with the Bofra worm. This worm spreads through a flaw in Internet Explorer, which so far has only been fixed for users of Windows XP SP2. Users who have yet to install SP2, or who use IE on another version of Windows, may well have been infected with Bofra.

I would urge you to run a virus scanner to make sure you were not infected. Here is an official explanation from El Reg - the offending adverts were provided by a third-party advertising company which El Reg has suspended dealings with for the time being.

The fact that this is a third-party company makes this more worrying as other sites may well be affected too. I urge you not to use IE and instead use a browser like Mozilla Firefox or Opera for the time being.

Update: Falk, the company concerned, has issued a statement. It appears that one of their load balancers was hacked.

I say old chaps, those good eggs at Mozilla have released a British English version of Firefox 1.0. It's awfully spiffy, as one might say.

Now if only those dastardly people at Microsoft would do the same the world would a much more joyous place, what what?

Via Waxy's Links is this article on Gadgetopia about Firefox and alt attributes for images. As you may know, Firefox does not show the alt attribute of an image as a tooltip when you hover over it like IE does. This was done because the HTML specification says that this is incorrect behvaiour and should only happen with title attributes instead.

Anyway, someone's created an extension to emulate IE's behaviour, and now there's a flame war started because this will somehow cause the internet to implode, or something. Personally I think that if someone cares so much about this that they want to install an extension to correct it, then let them do that. Firefox, as it is, is doing the right thing as it's supposed to. As long as the default behaviour stays as it is now, I don't think there's a problem.

Sidenote: they're alt attributes, not alt tags. If it were a tag, it'd be called <alt />.

I think I've found quite a big bug in Thunderbird. Could anyone with a Bugzilla account confirm this for me?

It's been over 24 hours since Firefox 1.0 landed, and it's already been downloaded over 1 million times. Naturally I've already upgraded, as well as upgrading my copy of Portable Firefox at university which has been updated to use version 1.0 code.

It's great to see all the media coverage - CNet News.com has had several articles over the past couple of days and it even made BBC News and The Guardian's Leader Comment (darn me for not buying the Guardian yesterday...). The reaction from bloggers has been equally great and I'd certainly say that a majority of the people on my blogroll said something positive about Firefox yesterday. That may of course say something about who I read, but if it's a trend then that amounts to some serious grassroots support.

For me it was an exciting day - I felt like a teacher who had taught a student all the way through school, all the time thinking he'd make it big, and then finally seeing that come true. I started using Phoenix 2 years ago and bar a brief period during the 0.5 phase (when the browser was annoying to use due to crashing caused by a bug in autocomplete) I've stuck with it ever since, during which time it's turned in from a somewhat hotch-potch fork of Mozilla into a work of art that sets the standard. It's been great to see just how many other people have seen the light during that time too, and refreshing to have a product that has picked up fans by simply being good and not through expensive advertising campaigns or dirty tricks.

Of course, this isn't the end of all. Going back to my analogy the browser has left school and doing well in the big wide world, but now it needs to keep it up by constantly being better than the rest. Firefox outshines the competition but it is not perfect - it could do with being a bit faster and could perhaps do with a few more innovative features.

So, while now's the time to celebrate the success of 1.0, in the not too distant future we've got 1.1 to look forward to.

It's out!

If you're having trouble downloading it, try this mirror, this mirror or this mirror, or try this torrent, this torrent or this torrent for the Windows build.

...Firefox gained an installer. This was significant as it was a major step towards making Firefox more usable for the masses. Of course, at this point Firefox was still Firebird and it was to be another 3 months before the first official release with the installer.

It's now only 2 days to go until Firefox 1.0 is out. I'm immensely excited - in the 6 weeks or so since 1.0PR there have been a little short of 8 million downloads of Firefox. Just think what's going to happen come Tuesday.

This is good news. As of January, all the computers in the School of Informatics here at Bradford will have Mozilla Firefox installed under Windows. :)

The Linux machines all have Mozilla 1.7.3 (as well as Konqueror) and the tech staff seem to be a little reluctant to install Firefox as well. But it's a start.

incidentally, this required no campaigning on my part. Still, it would be nice to have it rolled out across the rest of the university next.

From the comments on my FTP Uploads in Firefox article, it seems like a lot of people would appreciate better FTP support in Firefox. Currently it allows browsing of FTP servers but there is no support for uploading (a feature which its bigger brother Mozilla acquired recently).

Thankfully, there's now an extension called FireFTP which adds a full FTP client to Firefox as an extension. While it's not an all-singing-all-dancing client, it does what most people would need and is a lot less annoying than WS_FTP LE, the client that is on the university computers. So if you were hanging on to IE for its FTP support, now you have one less reason for sticking with it :) .

The latest SpreadFirefox campaign is to get a full-page advert for Firefox in the New York Times around the time of the 1.0 release. Obviously it's not going to be cheap so they're asking for donations - those that donate will get their name on the ad. I just donated $10 as a student, and I hope you will all do the same. Any money left over will be used for other promotion campaigns or to support the work of the Mozilla Foundation, so either way you're helping Mozilla and its products to improve.

I'll try to get hold of a copy if the NYT that day so that I can see my name in print in a distinguished publication :) .

10 years ago, Netscape Communications released the first version of Netscape Navigator, which at the time was the most advanced and user-friendly browser available. It's fitting then that 10 years on, CNet News.com has an interview with Firefox developer Ben Goodger, as I'd argue that Firefox is, right now, the most advanced and user-friendly browser available, and one that can trace its routes all the way back to Navigator all those years ago.

The interview is very interesting and offers a good insight into the development of the browser. While Firefox is an ancestor of Navigator, it has come on a long way and the article explains some of the changes that were made along the way, including the introduction of Gecko.

Yesterday I was in a group meeting for one of the two group projects I have to do this semester, and one of the other group members was telling me how she thought Firefox rocked. It's great to be able to talk to "real people" - not computer geeks - who have downloaded Firefox themselves and found it to be much better than IE.

Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird are two apps that I can done with finding earlier. The university computers don't have Firefox or Thunderbird installed (although the Linux clusters do have Mozilla 1.7.3) and so I've had Fx and TB installed to my user space. Alas, upgrading to the latest versions has caused them to go a bit odd, so having proper portable versions is very welcome. I gave Portable Firefox a spin today and it seems to work as advertised and I'll get Portable Thunderbird installed at the next opportunity.

I don't yet own a USB keychain but if I do get one I'll be installing them to one. This is what I like about open source - it allows innovative uses of the product like this which proprietary software couldn't do. Take Knoppix for example - you can't (easily) do that with Windows, can you?

Firefox 0.10.1, a minor update to fix a security vunerabilty, has been released. Here's the press release with more details about the flaw. If you're running Firefox 1.0PR (aka 0.10), just click on the red icon next to the throbber when it appears to update, or install the XPI manually.

You could, however, get yourself a nightly build and take advantage of the new tabbed browsing options which allows you to force links to open in new tabs instead of new windows and have URLs sent from other applications open in new tabs. In effect, it takes the options from Tabbrowser Preferences and merges them with the Firefox core. Very cool :)

If you visit Powergen's site in Firefox, you're told that your browser isn't supported. Except it is.

The script looks at the Gecko user agent and then reads the version string at the very end to see if it's 7.02 or above, as it's designed for Netscape 7.02 or above. It sees Firefox's version number (currently 0.10) and rejects it, because it's less than 7.02. This is despite the fact that Firefox is built upon a newer version of Gecko than NS 7.02. It is, however, fine with classic Mozilla, Opera, Safari and even Konqueror. Should you override your user agent in Firefox, you'll find the site works fine. I wouldn't normally kick up a fuss about specific sites but fixing the site would be so trivial I'm surprised no-one's done it yet, especially considering Firefox's adoption recently.

Browser detection scripts are usually never a good thing because they always lock out legitimate users whose browsers are configured differently. The best approach is to design your site so that it works on all browsers (although glossing over NS4.x is usually excusable) and then do away with detection altogether. Amazingly enough, designing to web standards achieves this. Funny that.

incidentally Powergen is listed at Defending The Fox, a hall of shame of sites that don't work in Firefox and contact details for their webmasters.

A second round of release candidates have been released for Firefox 1.0PR, and one of the new features is "external protocol handler whitelisting". What this means is that if Firefox doesn't recognise the protocol being used in a request, it'll consult a list of 'safe' protocols that it can then pass to external applications. If the protocol is not on the list, it will now pop up a dialog box, asking the user whether they want to launch the external application. Here's a screenshot of that dialog.

This is partly in answer to a problem with the shell: protocol being used for exploiting a security flaw in Windows - now, if a web site tries to make you click on a link using that protocol, you'll get a dialog.

There isn't yet a UI for configuring what protocols should be enabled or not, but you can use about:config to edit the handlers or provide defaults if you're rolling your own copy of Firefox (for example if your enterprise has an intranet system which relies on the shell: protocol working). You need to add a pref called 'network.protocol-handler.external.[protocol]' and set it to true to hide the dialog (false will show it) - replace [protocol] with the name of the protocol, for example 'telnet', 'magnet', 'aim', 'feed', 'ed2k' or whatever. By default, 'mailto' and 'news' are set to true, i.e. safe.

Other security fixes mean that popup windows will always have the status bar and address bar shown, so that the user knows what web site they're browsing. And, when connected to secure sites, the status bar gives the domain of the secure site - so if you think you're at Paypal but the status bar tells you that you're using a secure connection at www.dodgysite.com, then you know that you're at a fraud site.

And in case this is the only Mozilla weblog you read, Stylesheet Switching and Work Offline are back! The bugs that lead to their removal have been fixed so they're now back in nightly builds and will make it into Firefox 1.0PR.

Woohoo! Bug 101190 has been fixed!

Throughout the 2 years I have been using Mozilla products, this has been by far the most annoying bug. It causes user-initiated (i.e. nice) popups to be surpressed if the page is still loading. All that the user sees is the 'popup blocked' icon appear, and if the page is one of those that takes 5 minutes to load because of a server problem, you can only view that popup if you enable that site to show popups. It also affects opening Bookmarklets, like MT's QuickPost, while the page is still loading.

Bring on Firefox 1.0PR!

At risk of joining the echo chamber and merely re-iterating what has already been said, I'd like to offer my own opinions on this piece by Adam Kalsey. I'd urge you to read it through before reading this entry here, but if you can't be bothered, he basically says that Firefox isn't yet ready for all users and that to be marketing it so aggressively is dangerous.

Update: There is now a fully-featured FTP extension for Firefox called FireFTP. Here's my review of it.

One new feature of Mozilla 1.7.x which has saved me from going completely insane these past couple of days has been FTP Upload. If you're browsing an FTP site, you can go to File and choose FTP Upload, and then upload a file to the current directory. While it's no replacement for a proper FTP client like SmartFTP - you can't delete or rename anything - to be able to upload files quickly without having to open another program can be very useful.

Now, Firefox doesn't have this feature. That's not a problem - whereas Mozilla includes a web browser, mail client, web page editor, address book, chat program, complimentary bar towel and kitchen sink as standard, Firefox is just a web browser and adding this natively would be extra bloat that only a few people would actually use. Features like that are acceptable on the geek-driven Mozilla but it wouldn't be a good addition to the streamlined Firefox.

But surely a feature like this could be added as an extension, for the 47 people and the dachshund named Colin who will actually use this feature. Alas, no extension currently exists, as far as I know. So this goes out as a LazyWeb request in the hope that someone either knows of such an extension or could knock one together. I'm sure you can base it on the code already implemented in Mozilla.

This isn't a particularly interesting post to most of you, other than that I finally downloaded another Firefox nightly. Until today I'd been using an August 12th nightly, and this was the first time I'd updated since the 'feature seepage' happened. Consequently, the stylesheet switching, bookmark notification and offline working functions are gone from this release.

Other changes I've noticed is that the 'tell a friend' feature has gone after less than a month, although 'Promote Firefox' is still there. On the 'View' menu, there's now a 'Text Size' submenu which has the 'increase' and 'decrease' options, but also now a 'Normal' option for quickly returning the text size back to normal. This was a feature in Mozilla that was sorely missing from Firefox and I'm pleased to see it be added. There's also a keyboard shortcut for it - Ctrl+0. Finally, the quicksearch box now includes eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and Dictionary.com as well as Google, which makes it far more useful.

Update: Be careful with this build. I had to rebuild my profile as otherwise Firefox would crash if you used the quicksearch box. Update again: This is a bug and it's fixed in today's build.

I'm now no longer using Tabbrowser Extensions in Firefox, instead using these three separate extensions:

1. Mini-T - allows you to re-arrange tabs using drag+drop
2. Tabbrowser Preferences - adds various advanced options for working with tabs
3. Undo Close Tab - adds an 'Undo close tab' item to the tab context menu to re-open the last closed tab in case you closed it by mistake

The main reason why I've made the change is because TBE was always buggy, and as soon as one bug got fixed another one cropped up. With having three extensions which do the same job, I can disable one without losing the functionality of the others. That said, I do miss the Ctrl+Shift+Z keyboard combo for re-opening closed tabs - hopefully Undo Close Tab will add that in a future release.

Finally, if it interests you, my current theme is still Phoenity, with the Office XP look, Cute menus and tabs-as-buttons hacks. I'm still using Charamel in Thunderbird.

In the latest episode of "Neil comments on some controversial issue in the world of IT" we have the feature 'seepage' in Firefox prior to its 1.0 release. In summary, it was suggested that web developer features like View Source, JS Console and DOM Inspector and buggy features like Bookmark Notification, Work Offline and Stylesheet Switching were removed from Firefox 1.0. Fans of the various features were predictably outraged, to the point at which personal attacks were occuring.

Via Dave's Rants is a list of freeware tools for Windows. It's aimed at people who, after installing the OS, don't have any money left over and want to freeload instead of buy software. You can actually get pretty far before needing to pay for anything these days, especially with the continual rise of open source software.

I will have to make one point about Firefox - the article's author does not recommend because of its memory leak problems. Firefox, along with other Mozilla.org products, does have issues with memory management and leaks, however I do contest his 60-70MB figures. I've been running this for the over 2 hours and the maximum it has used is 47MB, and that includes the Flash plugin. I have had it over 100 when a web page required Java, Flash and QuickTime but that was an extreme example. This isn't just on my own machine, which has 512MB of RAM - I've had it run fine on a very underpowered 128MB machine.

I do hope that in time the memory issues will get alleviated. In the meantime, Outer Technologies' free CacheMan utility is worth running as it can return leaked memory to the operating system and offers better control of virtual memory on systems with only a small amount of RAM.

Of all the geeky things I've done, this is probably one of the geekiest. The wallpaper on my Sony Ericsson T300 is now the Firefox logo. I took a copy of the logo, shrunk it down, set it to 256 colours, saved it as a GIF and then used infrared to send it across (since the phone doesn't have Bluetooth).

Of course it currently isn't possible to run Firefox on a mobile device but Minimo is hopefully going to do just that for Mozilla.

Another feature that's coming to Firefox 1.0 is the 'Tell a friend' feature in the help menu. Here's a screenshot:

Clicking on the menu item goes to SpreadFirefox.com, which currently isn't showing anything. The 'Promote Firefox' item also goes to the website, although it refers to a page that doesn't yet exist. The domain is registered to the Mozilla Foundation in the name of Blake Ross who has been in charge of some of the community-orientated Firefox promotion campaigns lately.

Update: According to today's Burning Edge entry, the SpreadFirefox site will not be active until PR1 (Preview Release 1) is out in a few weeks time.

incidentally it appears the 'Release Notes' item has now disappeared. This feature is included in nightly build from today. For the curious, there's also a test build of Firefox 0.9.3 for Windows, however this may not be the final release.

Via Jesse is news that Mozilla is offering a bounty for people who find critical security bugs in its software. Should you find one, and you satisfy the critirea, you will receive a bounty of $500. The scheme is part-funded by Linspire, who use the Mozilla suite as the main web browser package in the Linspire OS and who fund the development of Nvu, a web page editor based on Mozilla Composer, so it's in their interests to ensure that Mozilla is as secure as possible as it makes their product look better.

This is good news for everyone as hopefully it will encourage security researchers to uncover flaws before they get into the wild and underline Mozilla Foundation products as more secure alternatives to Microsoft's offerings. Starting the fund now is good timing as hopefully some flaws will be found and fixed before Firefox hits 1.0.

There's yet another maintenance release of Firefox coming, to fix some security vunerabilities found since 0.9.2. According to this MozillaZine forum thread, a branch has been created which includes three bug fixes related to security. Apparently there will also be maintenance releases to the main Mozilla tree too, making a 1.7.2 release, and a 1.4.3 release for those running the 1.4.x branch (the previous stable branch before 1.7.x). I have no idea whether this will affect Thunderbird.

It's highly unlikely that this will be a feature release, but it will be a required update for all Firefox users.

Reports of security vunerabilities in Firefox have been coming through with increased frequency lately - hopefully this is because of increased testing by security researchers due to Fx's increased popularity. On the plus side, these have all come prior to the 1.0 release.

And in totally unrelated news, this is the 2000th post on this weblog in just over 2 1/2 years.

Cheah Chu Yeow has some screenshots of RSS and Atom support in Thunderbird, which got turned on in today's builds. This is one of the big new features in 0.8, along with local folders support for POP3 accounts and a better quicksearch toolbar and is a very welcome addition.

I downloaded it myself today (being the inquisitive fellow that I am) - in the installer builds, it is an option if you choose Custom Setup. Once installed, you need to create a 'RSS News & Blogs Account' in the same way that you would add a new mail or newsgroup account. The account then appears in the folder pane, and any feeds you add become subfolders of that account. It seems to work okay, although there are a few bugs still to be worked out - by default it checks feeds for new items every 10 minutes(!) and there's also no autodiscovery. I don't think I'll use it as my primary RSS reader since FeedDemon is currently serving me very well. And I paid for it.

This feature is good for both Thunderbird and the wider RSS and Atom community - Thunderbird will gain because this is an excellent new feature which will help set it apart from its rivals, and the syndication community gains because now more people will have the software to get involved. While Microsoft have promised an RSS reader for Windows this won't come until Longhorn appears in the dim and distant future.

Oh, and while you're looking at the screenshots, see if you recognise the feed used :) .

Today we mourn the passing of a Firefox legend - the cookies placeholder. As Jesse mentions, the label "Cookies are delicious delicacies." has been replaced with "Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data."

While it's a shame to see it go, the message is now more intuitive and will hopefully help those that are unsure why they need cookies. Still, here's one last screenshot for old time's sake.

Cheah Chu Yeow has an excellent run-down of the new features in Thunderbird 0.8 (with screenshots), which is apparently due out shortly. These include:

• RSS (and Atom) integration - this hasn't yet been activated in nightly builds, but will work like Forumzilla does now.
• Better blocking of remote images - the behaviour is now more like Outlook Express 6 SP2 where a message is shown if images are blocked. It's also turned on by default.
• Global Inbox - when adding a new POP3 account, you can choose to have mail delivered to Local Folders, as opposed to creating a new set of folders for each account. This was a big gripe among some users with many accounts, and it now means that Thunderbird can more closely imitate OE
• Get All Mail - the Get Messages icon now has a submenu that also lets you get mail from all accounts or select a specific account. This is a feature in Mozilla Mail that was missing in Thunderbird.
• Better quick search - it offers a greater level of control and allows you to use it to search the message body too.
• Ability to import mail and settings from Mozilla Mail

I say this about every release, but Thunderbird 0.8 is going to rock. If you want to try these new features out for yourself, get yourself a nightly and start playing.

I'd like to attract a bit of attention to Firexplorer, a project run by my friends (and fellow Bradford* students) Richard Kirkcaldy and Andy Rogers. The project is to produce a version of Firefox which looks almost exactly like Microsoft Internet Explorer (including theme, application name, icons etc.), but is based on Firefox's more secure codebase. There's not much there at the moment other than a screenshot but stay tuned.

* = Yes, I know the university web site is down for maintenance. So is my university email :(

I did a post yesterday about this but today I've downloaded a nightly branch build and so here's the lowdown on what's new.

We were told that Firefox 1.0 would have no new features over 0.9, just bug fixes. And then three new features come along.

Rather than go over them, I'll hand you to Redemption in a Blog:

• RSS Feed Integration - shows an icon in the status bar when a feed is found and lets you add the feed as a bookmark, or 'livemark'
• Better UI for blocked popups - shows an information bar, like in IE6 SP2
• New Find Toolbar - an easier-to-use version of Find as you Type. A postscript to that article is that the old behaviour can be re-enabled by a hidden preference

While feature creep at such a late stage isn't usually a good thing, let's hope that it doesn't impact the quality of the finished product.

There's a certain irony associated with this Slate article that recommends Firefox because IE is now almost too risky to use. Slate is of course a Microsoft publication, published through their MSN portal, so the very fact that they are deriding Microsoft's own browser is somewhat amusing, but at the same time rather scary too. If it's got to the point that using IE is so risky that a Microsoft publication is pushing alternatives, then surely something is wrong.

But then, there are those of us who have stopped using IE as their primary browser for some time now, and, all we can say is: "we told you so" :) .

Found via Asa who rightly points out that the article doesn't emphasise how the Mozilla community has helped to shape the browser.

Firefox 0.9.1 is out. From what I can tell them only change from the release candidate is that the version number has been incremented, but if you're using 0.9 or earlier you might want to upgrade. Hopefully it'll solve any issues you've been having with the release.

This is quite cool - a Gmail notifier for Firefox. It sits on your toolbar and displays how many unread messages are in your Gmail inbox. There's a screenshot at Redemption in a Blog - it's not the prettiest thing in the world (yet) but it seems to work fine on my release candidate of Firefox 0.9.1. Clicking on the icon logs you into Gmail.

So far the RC of 0.9.1 is working fine, although the build I was using yesterday (built on Thursday) did suffer a couple of crashes. The final 0.9.1 should be out on Monday.

Finally, apologies for all the Mozilla-related posts lately, but there's a lot going on the world of 'zillaness.

That, my friends, is how Winstripe looks in Firefox 0.9.1. I'm not so sure whether I like it - to be honest I prefer the original Winstripe icons from 0.9, but then I don't tend to use the default theme, preferring Charamel (now 0.9-compatible). As far as I can tell, all my installed extensions - Tabbrowser Extensions, Firesomething and Web Developer Toolbar - work fine.

The only other theme changes affect the Theme and Extension Manager dialogs - here's a screenshot of the new Theme Manager dialog, with new buttons and a new icon for the default theme.

Firefox 0.9.1 obviously isn't out yet, but you can download a nightly like I did.

This is good news for anyone who's had trouble with Firefox 0.9 - a maintenance release is coming in a few days which will fix a few niggling bugs. It'll also have updates to the Winstripe theme.

The bugs are mostly related to issues with profiles and the theme and extension managers, and won't include cool new features like the new, easy to use Bookmarks Manager and better handling of secure sites - in newer builds, if you visit a secure site, an icon appears in the address bar (as opposed to the status bar) and the address bar turns a shade of yellow. But, this shouls hopefully silence some of the critics who are less than happy about the way that Firefox is going.

Go and get it. Now. Two things to point out from my review of the release candidate: Help is now working for me and I found out that I'd set the Bookmark Manager to sort alphabetically, hence the weirdness.

There's also a release candidate of Thunderbird 0.7, which includes the new theme and extension managers, along with various other improvements. The final release of that will probably come with the final release of Mozilla 1.7 which is also due out soon.

You can also download Firefox using a Gnutella client (or KaZaA 2.6+), an eDonkey client or via BitTorrent - use these if the mirrors are too slow.

Since the release candidate of Firefox 0.9 is out, I'll go through what is new in this version. There's actually quite a bit that has changed, mainly because of the new theme.

Last week, the size of the Firefox installer dropped from 6MB to 5.1MB, and even further to 4.6MB for the trunk builds since the branch builds now include Talkback for reporting crashes.

Well, now Thunderbird has dropped to 6.2MB - almost half the size of the very first alpha which was a hefty 12MB, and down nearly 2MB from version 0.6.

Both are now using 7-Zip's LZMA compression format which, as well as being entirely open source, offers much tighter compression than BZip2 and Zip (RAR also offers good compression but I think it's a closed format). Thunderbird now comes as a 'static' build, which means that instead of having loads of DLLs in the application folder, has them all compiled into the main executable - this makes both the download and installed sizes smaller. It could, in theory, improve performance too.

So, in total, Firefox and Thunderbird weigh in at 10.8MB (if you get a trunk Firefox build) - that's now less than the Mozilla Application Suite.

By the way, you can read my review of Minotaur 0.1a from April last year (Minotaur was what Thunderbird was called before the new name was chosen). To say it's come on a long way since then is a severe understatement.

Update: The bug described in this post has been fixed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

For the past week or so I'd been suffering with a Tabbrowser Extensions bug that meant that paste didn't work in newly created tabs. This meant that you couldn't copy a URL from an app, switch to Firefox, press Ctrl+T for a new tab and then Ctrl+V and enter to navigate to the page.

Anyway, a new version was released today which I installed, and the bug is fixed. Only now, popup windows opened by bookmarklets (such as the 'Post to MT Weblog' bookmarklet I use for posting entries to Smaller World) are completely disabled - they open, but you can't click anywhere in them. The only way you can close them is by closing Firefox completely and then killing its task in Task Manager. Bah.

Correction: Any new window opened is disabled.

Oh yeah, and I've probably just failed an exam this morning, hence my slightly ratty mood today.

Mozilla 1.7 RC2 is out, so I downloaded it to have a quick peek. Because I'm on dial-up and don't need the DOM Inspector or Debugger, I tend to opt for the Net installer.

I'm unsure whether I've noticed this before, but the download progress got to 100%, and then kept on going. There was still data to download. I took this screenshot at 102% (click on it to view it full size), but I think it reached 103. Very odd.

It's quite an old bug too, reported in September 2002 as Bug 169460 - view the attachments to see screenshots of it at 113 and 223%. But then again, I'm sure there are a lot more bugs out there which require fixing before this one does.

If I'm reading bug 232567 properly, Mozilla and Firefox have gained protection from one of the more common URL spoofing tactics, often used in phishing scams. They will now warn the user about addresses such as http://www.mozilla.org&item%3Dq:20933773d88383h2nf@example.com/fraud/evil , which makes the user think they're going to mozilla.org but are actually going to example.com.

It's about time. There has been much bickering over this issue, from the purists who say its unnecessary and breaks the standard, to those who can't see any reason at all for the username:password combination. As such, the solution is a compromise - if Firefox encounters a username:password@somewhere.com URL it prompts the user, asking whether he or she wants to continue. Furthermore, if the URL doesn't actually require authentification (using the HTTP 401 error code) then the user is warned as well.

In my mind, this is a good compromise, and better than what Microsoft did with IE - in that browser, all URLs of this variety fail with a syntax error. Opera also went down the compromise route - the screenshot shown is the message that appears when you go to one of these URLs (click on it to see it full size). It's better than nothing but I don't think the message is entirely clear.

The world's best consumer email client (probably) has been updated to version 0.6 - get yourself a copy.

It's funny how this is being released before Mozilla 1.7, but I'm guessing the Mozilla Foundation felt that it was better to stagger the releases of products, after what happened last time. Then, you could barely download anything because the mirrors were full to capacity, and many Mozilla-related sites were effectively DoSed by the sheer number of people visiting them.

For more information, view the release notes. The major improvements for this release include new artwork, a new theme for Mac OS X to match in with the new Firefox theme, a new, improved junk mail detection algorithm and an installer for Windows users (pictured, click on the screenshot to see it full size). There's also improved rendering and IMAP performance, and the usual raft of bug fixes.

Exactly two years ago, I posted about my first experiences with Mozilla, which in this case was Seamonkey 1.0 RC1. I wasn't too impressed, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt and hoped it would improve.

Two years on, and it's hard to find an entry on here that doesn't evangalise Mozilla or one of its relations in some way. Kudos to all the Mozillianites who have helped to make such excellent products.

I may be interpretting something wrongly here, but it seems like Firefox supports 256-bit AES encryption when viewing secure web pages. IE only supports 128-bit.

If that is true, then it's another reason to add to the list. Admittedly 128-bit encryption has yet to be cracked, and 256-bit will require more processing power, but still, it makes me feel better :).

Bah, I accidently wiped all of my cookies today. One of Firefox's good features is its ease of clearing all tracking features - cookies, history, cache, passwords, form information and download history - but sometimes I think it's all too easy.

What I mean is that you click the 'Clear' button for Cookies, and wham, they're gone. The thing is, I use those cookies for remembering login details and names when entering form details. I'd actually meant to click 'Stored Cookies...', the button underneath it, to browse through the cookies I had stored, with the intention of pruning and blocking those sites which might track usage habits. Firefox and Mozilla both make this easy as there's a simple checkbox that lets you also block sites when you delete their cookies.

But, I happened to mis-click, and then all my cookies disappeared. It would have been nice if a dialog popped up asking me if I was sure I wanted to do that. Because I didn't.

On a somewhat related note, SpywareBlaster 3.1 was released a few days ago. In the past I haven't used this program, favoruring the protection offered by Spybot S&D (mostly because it's one less program to install) but this product is actually pretty good and goes much further than Spybot does. It includes a nice tool that automatically adds the domains of dodgy sites to your Restricted Sites in IE (which stops them from running ActiveX controls or storing/accessing cookies), and can add them to the list of sites which cannot set cookies in Firefox too. Updates also seem to be more frequent than Spybot so it's well worth downloading.

Back in August, I came up with 18 reasons why Thunderbird was better than Outlook Express, which are, in summary:

1. Themes
2. Extensions
3. Junk Mail filtering
4. Better message filtering
5. Not full of security bugs
6. HTML Sanitization
7. Sanitization for Junk Mail
8. Cross platform
9. Text Zooming
10. Automatic folder compression
11. Javascript Console
12. Three-pane vertical layout
13. Customisable start page
14. On-screen alerts
15. Message labelling
16. Graphical emoticons
17. Spellchecker
18. Doesn't get hijacked

Now, in that article I was referring to Thunderbird 0.1, and since 0.6 is on the horizon I've come up with 5 more reasons that you should switch.

1. Message Truncation - fed up of downloading 150KB virus-infected emails? Enable message truncation, which allows you to download only the first, say, 50KB of a message. If you want the whole thing, fine, click a link. Otherwise you can delete the message without it hogging your connection.
2. IMAP IDLE support - a new feature for 0.6, this allows for better performance from IMAP servers that support it.
3. Threaded message checking - I only noticed this after I had to use OE for something today. OE checks accounts one after the other - if the first mail server is slow, then you have to wait for it before checking other accounts. Thunderbird checks them concurrently, so one slow server doesn't affect your other accounts.
4. Edit as new - allows you to edit existing emails as if they were new ones. I can't believe OE doesn't have this feature as I've used it so often. Nor can I believe I didn't put it in my original list.
5. Ability to associate multiple addresses with an account - this is still a backend feature with no UI as yet, but it's possible to have multiple email addresses associate with one account. I have my Scrapie email forwarded to my Bradford email account, yet I can reply as if the account was separate. Let's hope that a UI appears for this soon.

I could also throw in that it's open source but I don't really think that is all that advantagous to the end-user. Still, I've never looked back on my decision to dump OE - possibly the only feature missing from Thunderbird is Hotmail support and there are already several third-party programs that will get around that.

If it interests you, here's a list of extensions for Firefox that I have installed:

CuteMenus

Nice 26k extension that puts icons next to menu items and makes them look, well, cute. Works best with the default theme. Also works under classic Mozilla but not yet under Thunderbird.

Tabbrowser Extensions

Described by some as being almost mandatory - while I wouldn't go that far, it does have some useful features, like being able to control the tab context menu and re-order tabs. You can also move the tab bar around and force new windows to open in new tabs. Insanely powerful, but very useful.

Firesomething

Randomises the name of the browser. Just a bit of fun :) . Mozilla Waterkangaroo, anyone?

Link Toolbar

Brings back the link toolbar from classic Mozilla, but it appears at the right-hand side of the status bar instead and can be customised so that it only shows icons, thus taking up minimal screen space. Useful for finding sites with RSS/Atom feeds.

Show Failed URL

Mandatory for anyone who has XUL error pages enabled. With XUL error pages enabled, you get an IE-like page when Firefox cannot load, instead of a less descriptive and annoying dialog box, however, the address bar gets garbled. This fixes that. Should really be included as standard, but, eh.

Themer

Installed on the off chance that I decide to change themes and need to install a theme from a .jar file.

jsLib

I used to have a couple of extensions which required this, but neither are still installed. This is just here because I haven't removed it.

And yet, despite having all these extensions installed, Firefox still works fine :D .

There were a couple of nice checkins to Firefox yesterday. The first modifies the Download Manager so that if you download a program, it will show its icon, and not just a generic applications icon, thus making it easier to identify what you have downloaded. Ben has a screenshot showing this.

Then there's an improvement to Autocomplete - you can now use Shift+Delete to remove entries that you don't want. IE has had this feature for some time, simply using the Delete key, so it's a welcome addition to Firefox. Previously the only way of removing entries was using the Privacy tab of Options, which would remove all entries.

According to The Burning Edge, a new Import tool just landed on the Firefox trunk, ready for the 0.9 release which should be here at the end of this month or some time in April. It's one of the big new features of 0.9.

What this means is that if you're using Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 4.x or Opera, you can easily import your settings, history, bookmarks and passwords into Firefox, so if you're planning to switch to Firefox you won't have to start from scratch. I'm assuming it will also support Netscape 6.x/7.x but it doesn't say this specifically. As far as IE goes it appears that only bookmarks are imported, as has always been the case, but hopefully this will change.

The feature will appear in tomorrow's nightly builds, but if you're really desperate, try this unofficial build which has it. You may be best holding out until 0.9 is finally released, however.

It's definitely a welcome addition - I really hope that it will encourage more people to give Firefix a try.

Update: today's builds will let you import settings from IE. Great!

After reading Jesse Ruderman's Burning Edge FAQ, which explains what the various acronyms used to describe custom builds of Firefox are, I decided to have a look at one of these custom builds.

First thing to do was to find out what my processor could handle. I have a Mobile Intel Celeron, which could be based on either a Pentium 2, 3 or 4, so I needed to do a bit of further investigation. For this, I used AIDA 32, which reported that the chip supported SSE2, a set of instructions that was introduced with the Pentium 4 - therefore, I have a P4-based Celeron. This means I can download builds marked as SSE2, which requires a P4, and builds marked as G7, which doesn't require a P4 but is optimised for it.

The build I went for was mmoy's O2 G7 SSE2, which is based on trunk code from Thursday. It's about the same size as Firefox 0.8 but doesn't have a formal installer, just an SFX unpacker, but it does include many of the new features that will go into version 0.9 (a list of the big changes is also available from The Burning Edge). The only other difference between this and the 0.8 release is that this includes alternative artwork - the Firefox logos are trademarked so they only appear in the official releases and nightly builds.

Still with me? Good, because if you follow the above you may make yourself very, very happy. This optimised build is insanely fast - probably the fastest browser I've ever used. New tabs open instantly, menus appear as soon as you click on them, and page rendering is noticably faster. If you're willing to spend a few minutes trying to find a build that works best with your computer, then you'll be thanking yourself in future.

Asa has a very thorough roundup of what the bloggers are saying about Firefox - 45 in total, all with positive reviews of the browser.

Ben Goodger has also made his weblog block IE - IE users are redirected to a page encouraging them to upgrade. While I agree with the idea in principle, it makes viewing the page in FeedDemon somewhat difficult because that uses IE's rendering engine. He's also fixed his RSS feed so that the permalinks actually point to something now. Ben Goodger is one of the lead developers of Firefox, by the way.

Meanwhile, it appears I have another convert for Firefox - one of my friends got tired of IE and is now using that. She particularly likes the Firesomething extension, which, by the way, today I are be mostly using Mozilla Powersheep.

Someone out there has a sense of humour, since there's now an extension for Mozilla Firefox called Firesomething which chooses a random name for the browser every time you launch it or open a new window. So far I've had 'Fireworm', 'Spacelizard' and 'Moonpanda', and Asa, whom I found this through, has had 'Powergoat'.

You can also configure the names too, if you like - you could even called it Internet Explorer... (shudder)

One of the new features of Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 is 'multiple identities'. It allows you to associate more than one email address with an account, so that you can use one set of settings, but send and reply to email using more than one email address.

This is useful for me, since any mail I get through the magazine web site is forwarded to my university email address. This is fine, except any replies I send will use my university address and not the magazine address. With multiple identities, I can select to use the magazine address or my university address from the dropdown menu which you would usually use for selecting mail accounts.

Unfortunately, there isn't a dialog in the Thunderbird interface that lets you do this (at least not yet), but there is an official guide. I got it working but it took a bit of trial and error, though I imagine a future Thunderbird release will probably have a UI for this which would make things much easier.

Thanks to Henrik Gemal for finding this.

Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer of Camino, the native Mac browser based on the Gecko engine, has a post about the performance comparisons used on the page for Safari. As you'd expect, the statistics show that Safari is noticably faster than the competition, which includes IE for Mac, Netscape and Camino.

What is interesting is the choice of versions for Netscape and Camino. Although the statistics were altered to co-incide with the release of Safari 1.2, it still refers to Netscape 7.0.2, which has been updated to 7.1 and apparently includes some performance enhancements. Camino 0.8, which is due out around the same time as Mozilla 1.7, should also reap the benefits of some tweaks to the Gecko engine which have made both classic Mozilla and Firefox somewhat faster.

The fact that neither Mozilla or Firefox (which under its Firebird guise has been available for the Mac for some time now) is included also seems to suggest that Apple are being deliberately selective about their statistics to make the browser look better than it is. From what I have heard, having read a few blog entries and comments about Firefox, it looks like the small red panda could give Safari some real competition, particularly now that it has the new OS X-friendly interface.

If you're interested, here's a handful of screenshots showing what's new in FireFox 0.8. These are collected on one of the cluster machines at the university rather than my own machine since I haven't yet had chance to download it.

• Main window
• About window
• New credits window (with scrolling text!)
• New downloads dialog
• New tab in the Options dialog
• New 'Add Bookmark' window
• FireFox Installer (Windows) I
• FireFox Installer (Windows) II

Update: I now have this running on my laptop, downloaded from Oregon State University's FTP server. It's going to take some getting used to the new name, but I really like the new logo and About window, and the browser feels much more complete now and less like a 'technology preview'. The only other problem I have is that I need to re-install my extensions, since I used Mozilla Backup to do a partial reset of my profile, and naturally every Mozilla-related site is at a crawl today.

Update II: If you still can't download it, try the UK mirror service which now has the file. I've also added the Firefox button to the home page.

So, today's the big day - Thunderbird reaches version 0.5, and FireFox 0.8 finally makes the light of day. And before you look totally befuddled, the browser originally known as Phoenix, then as Firebird, then as Mozilla Firebird, is now (Mozilla) Firefox, and it's now a registered trademark. It also comes with a rather dandy new icon, which unsurprisingly features a fox.

You can read the press release for more information, plus all manner of blog entries which I don't have time to link. But in any case, you may want to download the latest version if you haven't done so already.

Although I didn't intend it, all the links posted to Smaller World today (so far) are browser-related. They're particularly interesting to Mozilla users, or those considering the switch, hence the reason why this is in the 'Mozilla' category, which has been somewhat neglected lately.

February should bring long-awaited new releases of Firebird and Thunderbird, so perhaps I'll have more to talk about.

Firebird 0.8 is just around the corner, with a final release hoped for this side of Christmas Day. As such, a branch has been cut specifically for this release, and, to get a sneak peek at what 0.8 will look like, I got myself a build.

I posted about what changes to expect in XP SP2 to Smaller World this morning but one thing occurred to me just now, relating to status bars.

The next IE will always show the status bar and title bar, even in popup windows, as a security precaution. That way, the user always knows what's going on, and I'd certainly say it's welcome. What made me think was that, by default, in Mozilla and Firebird, scripts are allowed to disable the status bar when opening windows (whether requested or not). Now, while there has been an option to prevent scripts from being able to open windows like that since Mozilla 1.0 (and almost certainly earlier), it is only an option, and not something that is turned on by default. Maybe the Mozilla developers should think about that one.

It's particularly important when you consider how buried the option is in Firebird. You have to go to Tools, Options, Web Features, and then next to 'Enable Javascript' click the 'Advanced' button, and then clear the tick next to 'Hide the status bar'. Joe User isn't going to see that.

The update to IE is, in general, very welcome, as it not only peps up security but will make the browser considerably less annoying to use. Of course, in some ways it's bad news for the Mozilla and Opera devs as I'm sure a number of people switch to the dark side over annoyances with IE - this will give them less reason to switch. Although I'm sure hell will freeze over the day that IE gets tabbed browsing.

Update: Looks like the Mozilla devs are considering it. Wahey! Also, have a look at this OS News article about IE in Longhorn which shows you what to expect and how the features will look - the same IE changes will make into the new version for XP in SP2.

It's extensions like this that make me love Firebird. imgtag, a 5KB extension, allows you to right click on any image on a web page, select 'Make IMG tag' and have FB copy the necessary XHTML code for inserting that image in another page. Simple, but potentially highly useful.

This may be violating the license agreement, but I now have FeedDemon working using the Gecko rendering engine instead of IE's. It works surprising well - about the only thing that stopped working was the comments icon - other than that it seems to work fine.

To do it to your FeedDemon, or to just about any application that uses embedded IE, go to Adam Lock's Mozilla ActiveX Control page, scroll right down to the bottom and download IEPatcher (link points to a .zip file). Then run it on feeddemon.exe (which will probably be in c:\Program Files\Bradbury\FeedDemon if you installed it to the default location) - it will probably say 'nothing to patch' but it worked for me.

You will also need to have the Mozilla ActiveX Control installed, and I would strongly suggest that you use the binary available on that same page, as opposed to setting up an existing installation of Mozilla (or another GRE program) - this has never worked for me.

For the past couple of weeks, my Firebird has been feeling rather ill. It just wouldn't take on any new extensions - any that I tried to install would result in the app starting, but then hanging before the UI appeared. It could only be closed by forcibly ending the task via Task Manager. Getting it to work again would require me deleting my Chrome folder, but the next time I installed an extension it would only break again.

Help was at hand, however. I backed up my profile using Mozilla Backup, then deleted it, and then restored it, and let Firebird automatically rebuild the other files.

So far so good - I've reinstalled CuteMenus without any problems, and will be adding things like Tabbrowser Extensions in due course. Since it seems to have worked, before upgrading to Thunderbird 0.4 I gave it the once over on my Thunderbird profile in the hope that it will make that all spick and span too.

Update: Ooops. Don't do that with Thunderbird - it's messed up my mail filters and my bayesian filter training file. Fortunately I zipped up a copy of the original folder first before deleting it, so I'll restore that.

I know this is another Mozilla-related post, but I've had a play with the Toy Factory theme for Mozilla classic and I have to say it's brilliantly fun. It goes well with XP's Luna theme too (in blue mode).

Now all we need is versions for Firebird and Thunderbird :).

Although it was featured on MozillaZine two weeks ago, I've just got around to installing mozCC - an extension for Mozilla and Firebird that adds a new indicator to the bottom-right of the browser window which tells you if the page is covered by a Creative Commons license. It even displays the icons, and, if you click on them, gives full details of the license. Considering the growing number of sites with Creative Commons licenses, it could be quite useful.

Note that the screenshots on the site don't do the extension justice - certainly on my XP machine it looks a lot nicer in reality.

Update: While we're on the topic of Creative Commons licensing, check out Common Content. It's a web directory of sites and resources released under Creative Commons licenses. If you register, you can add more resources, as long as they are licensed.

Thanks to Asa, I've now installed CuteMenus, an extension for Mozilla and Firebird that puts icons next to most of the menu items in the browser. The icons match well with the default Qute theme in FB and make the browser so much nicer to use. I'd thoroughly recommend installing it. In fact, this is another one of those extensions that I really hope will get included by default, since it's small and cool.

I would have only posted this on Smaller World but when I realised how cool it was I felt it needed a full entry. A similar extension for Thunderbird would also be very cool.

In a previous entry, troworld commented that he'd like to use a version of FeedReader built around the Gecko or Opera rendering engines, as opposed to IE's Trident engine. I then came across this entry from Henrik which linked to a post about a technology preview program called Comparator. Comparator is a dual-paned browser - one pane shows the page using Trident, the other using Gecko, so you can compare how a site would appear in each browser without running them both similtaneously.

The program isn't yet available to download, but a look at the source code would be nice, if the author is willing. I'm guessing the program was written in .Net, so it's certainly possible that a future SharpReader could display with Gecko and not IE. Talking of which, a new release of SR was released over the weekend.

K-Meleon is a web browser I haven't tried yet, and, seeing as version 0.8 was released yesterday, I thought I'd give it a spin.

K-Meleon is tecnhically a Mozilla-derivitive, since it uses the Gecko rendering engine to display pages. However, unlike Firebird, Mozilla and Netscape it has a native Windows interface rather than one that is generated using XUL. It's not the only browser to do this - Camino does it on Mac OS X, and Galeon and Epiphany do it in Linux. The theory is that by using a native interface, not only does it look like a proper Windows app, but it should be faster since it doesn't need to use the rendering engine to render everything, just the pages.

Alas, that isn't the case. K-Meleon is in fact slower on my machine than the entirely XUL-based Firebird. It's also rather ugly - the look is very much like IE 3.0, complete with the strange squiggly toolbar background. It looks terrible in Windows XP as a result.

There are some advantages however; it's a smaller download than Firebird and is much more customisable, and it comes with an installer, which until last week Firebird was lacking. But I much, much prefer Firebird to K-Meleon.

Had Firebird not been around, I could have maybe lived with these shortfalls. But with FB development having progressed so well I'm afraid K-Meleon just doesn't cut it anymore. That said, a more Luna-friendly interface and a few speed enhancements and I may not be so critical of it.

Meanwhile, while on the subject of Mozilla-related thingamibobs, there's a new Thunderbird build out for Windows. It's so new that mscott has yet to post to the MozillaZine forums about it, but it seems to run okay.

Firebird builds for Windows can now be downloaded with an installer. This should be a huge step forward for less savvy Windows users, or more savvy ones that are just lazy.

The zipped version is still available as before.

Yep, it's out. One of its more... interesting features is:

One step closer to the kitchen sink, about:about has been implemented. Typing about:about in the address field will give the user a nice list of available about:s

I'm sure I'll find that 'immensely' useful. Release Notes.

Yesterday, Firebird 0.7.1 was released. It's only for Mac OS X - not Windows or Linux - but fixes some key bugs with that platform. Those who subscribe to The Burning Edge will know that Mac nightly builds have only just become available again very recently, and past Mac builds of Firebird have apparently sucked somewhat.

Hopefully this should change. Version 0.8 will use the Pinstripe theme as standard, which will make Firebird look and feel a lot more like an OS X application. This is key - Apple computers are, to some extent, a fashion statement, and you can make the fastest and most easy to use browser in the world but if it looks ugly then Mac users are less likely to want it. It's probably why many still use Camino despite the lack of updates recently. The Qute theme is fine in Windows, particularly in XP, but it just doesn't work with Aqua.

MozillaZine has a whole variety of other Mozilla-related news from yesterday, including updates to three other Gecko browsers, so you may like to have a gander at that.

Even though the trunk has just frozen for Mozilla 1.6 Alpha, I finally got around to updating my copy of classic Mozilla to 1.5 final. Since switching full-time to Firebird and Thunderbird, I've hardly used their big brother, so I felt a little play around this morning was called for.

I now know why I switched: Firebird and Thunderbird are so much nicer to use. Mozilla's default theme is ugly, the preferences dialog is confusing (or at least it is after a few months with FB), and the 'tab loading' animation looks really jerky compared to the smooth transitions usually shown on. What's worse is that my favourite Orbit 3+1 theme hasn't been updated for it :'-( .

One new thing that did make me chuckle was on the help menu - there's now a special page in the help file to help Internet Explorer users get used to the different layout :). Of course, FB and TB work in a way that is closer to IE anyway, but it seems like more of an attempt at revenge at the Help menu item for Netscape users in IE.

I really hope that 1.6 finally sees Seamonkey (the old browser suite) replaced by the *Bird applications - it will do wonders for Mozilla's image.

An item I submitted for inclusion on MozillaZine got published :). Wee!

Today's the day - Mozilla 1.5, Firebird 0.7 and Thunderbird 0.3 are all finally released, along with a new version of the mozilla.org website, designed by the guy behind Mezzoblue. Phew!

At the moment ftp.mozilla.org is being hammered, so I'm downloading Firebird from the UK Mirror Service - if you're having trouble, try this URL for it. It doesn't yet have Mozilla or Thunderbird up, only Firebird, but I guess they'll arrive soon, probably later today or tomorrow.

Around about 6 hours ago, Release Candidate 3 of Mozilla Thunderbird was released. This includes some minor bug fixes and a a fix for a security issue inherited from the main Mozilla tree.

Currently only a Windows build is available but presuambly builds for Linux and Mac OS X are on their way. The final release of 0.3 should co-incide with the releases of Mozilla 1.5 and, presumably, Firebird 0.7.

Release candidate builds of Mozilla Firebird 0.7 are now out for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. A few minutes of playing with this latest release shows no bugs, but plenty of improvements (i.e. no internal comments on dialogs etc.)

Because of the change in how themes are used, there aren't as many themes available for this version as the majority haven't been updated, but all the extensions should work. So go on, get it now :).

Update: Talking of extensions, the new (3rd September release) Tabbrowser Extensions seriously rock, thus making them even more mandatory.

The slightly surprising announcement that end-user telephone support will soon be available for Mozilla is further evidence that Mozilla is now flourishing after AOL spun it off. Now that it is free from the shackles of being Netscape's little brother, Mozilla can aim itself at home and corporate users and not just nerdy geeks, and this is exactly the sort of thing it needs.

While $40 per incident is pricy, corporations who want to talk to a real person when diagnosing problems will find it invaluable, and I'm sure it will help take-up in the corporate arena. Mozilla is already the browser of choice in most Linux distros, and will probably replace Netscape Communicator in those companies still using it when they get around to upgrading, seeing as Netscape is no longer being updated.

Mozilla 1.5 RC2 is also out.

It seems like I missed at least one Thunderbird build, because 0.3 RC2 is now the most current version available, which I've installed. No showstoppers yet, but then there never have been - the 0.3 version number is only justified by a few missing features and not because of the program's stability as it seems almost rock solid to me. Mozilla 1.5 RC2 and the final release of 1.4.1 are imminent, delayed only by FTP server issues.

One tip for UK users - The UK Mirror Service mirrors ftp.mozilla.org so if you need any Mozilla-related downloads you may wish to go there first as it may well be faster. Similarly SourceForge and OpenOffice.org are mirrored, which is very useful when you consider how big OpenOffice is. Most Linux distros are on there too.

Talking of OpenOffice, I now have 1.1 RC5 installed, seeing as I can get broadband from the university library if I need it. The whole 63.5MB package took just 15 minutes to download, which rounds off at a rather tasty 70KB/sec download rate. In actual fact it the speed should be nearer 100KB/sec but it wasn't consistent. Still, 70 is better than 5.4...

Ctrl + T and Ctrl + W are so amazingly useful, I wonder why it's taken me so long to find out about them. Tabbed browsing is wonderful :).

Been to Edinburgh today, and had to put up with at least three people playing Scottish bagpipes. Notice how no-one in Newcastle plays the Northumbrian pipes. Anyhow, it was a nice sunny day and I quite enjoyed myself. Oh yeah, and Dad got himself a decent digital camera, which arrives on Tuesday. And naturally, it's better than mine, so I'm now in envy.

I've come across one major problem with Firebird - choosing a theme.

No, seriously, it's a problem - there's so many. I'm used to normal Mozilla where there are only really 2 decent themes (Modern and Orbit 3+1 - the others are either the same but in a different colour or look like they've been done in MS Paint). Firebird, on the other hand, has many, many good themes.

If you're interested, I'm currently flicking between the following:

• Crystal - inspired by KDE - nice and colourful with a metallic look and a cute penguin as the throbber :)
• Phoenity Christmas - okay so Christmas is months away yet but it looks more professional than plain vanilla Phoenity. And the PNG transparency is cool.
• Orbit 4 - nice big chunky theme. Still got a way to go yet though.
• Bluemonkey - cool retro theme! It has the look of the 'Modern' Mozilla theme from late 1999, which I actually still like. And the Options dialog looks really good too.
• MZ - a theme using the colours from MozillaZine, which incidentally celebrated its 5th birthday yesterday. There's quite a cool chronology there at present.

You see, all you IE users are missing out on this. You're stuck with your boring default colours, unless you use some registry hack to change your toolbar background. Or use Hotbar, but then you'd be putting known spyware on your computer.

The candidate build for Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 is out, and trust me, it rocks. It's now a much smaller download (7.3 MB for Windows), and much, much faster, both at launch and in use - you can zip between messages and folders with almost no delay now. There's a new icon, icons in the Options dialog (like in Firebird), a similarly redesigned About window, better handling of attachment opening, and many bug fixes.

You might want to hold out until the final 0.2 build, which should co-incide with Mozilla 1.5 beta (due any day now), but if you can't wait then you won't be disappointed.

Here's reason 19 for using Thunderbird instead of OE - mail truncation. Someone's computer is sending me virus infected emails at around 2 a minute, which have attachments that can be 100+ kilobytes. I've told Thunderbird to truncate any messages over 50KB, so all I get is the 1KB message minus the attachment :). Certainly saves a considerable amount of bandwidth, that's for sure.

You may have heard that despite reports earlier in the week, Microsoft will still develop Outlook Express after all. But unless Microsoft pull off something truly remarkable, I'm not going to switch back from my beloved Mozilla Thunderbird. And what's more, I've given you a list of reasons why I'm not switching, in no particular order :).

In the past, I have ranted that Argos.co.uk does not work in Mozilla. It now does. Therefore I officially withdraw my main complaints with them and can now recommend them.

Heads up courtesy of Andy.

Okay, I appreciate that it's only been 12 days since I last upgraded Firebird, but hey, I'm inquisitive! And this latest nightly build is interesting. MozillaZine says it will have a similar article up today, but tough, I beat them to it >:-).

Yesterday saw two important new releases from the Mozilla Foundation: Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1, the latter being the first official release of the program. And - you've guessed it - I've downloaded and installed them.

Firebird is much more stable. Part of this was due to the extra time being put into stablising Mozilla 1.5 Alpha, which it inherits the Gecko engine from, but also the fixing of the annoying Autocomplete crash bug. Hopefully this will silence those who criticised Firebird as being unstable in its last release. It's certainly worth the upgrade if you were still using 0.6 or earlier.

There don't appear to be that many new features in Thunderbird but it does seem a little speedier this time around.

Another update to note is the Crystal Firebird theme has been updated and it now looks and works much better than previously, although it doesn't yet have the new cut/copy/paste buttons that are introduced in Firebird 0.6.1.

The Daily Sucker is only a relatively recent addition to the blogroll. But I'm already having second thoughts about whether it deserves to be there.

It boils down to this: its author, Vincent Flanders, has been describing Mozilla and Netscape as being on 'life-support machines', following the announcement that Netscape Communications will not release any new versions and that the Mozilla Foundation has been spun off. There is, of course, some truth in that: Netscape is officially dead. I'm not arguing that point.

What I want to argue about is the idea that Mozilla is also dead, because from where I'm sat it quite blatantly isn't. Look at these past couple of weeks - Mozilla 1.5 alpha was released, along with a release candidate of Firebird and another build of Thunderbird. Mozilla Sunbird has just started development, and the Mozilla home page has just been redesigned to target end users. If anything, the Mozilla Foundation is more active than it ever was.

Of course, if Vincent happened to be 'just another blogger', this may not have mattered. But he isn't - he's published two books and is seen as an authority on sensible web design. People listen to him, and if he says that Mozilla is dead, then they take note.

It seems strange when you consider that one of the ideas he is trying to put across is that sites should work in all browsers. Yet I see barely any mention of Opera or any of the other browsers (like Safari or Konqueror). Yes, most people use IE, I'll give him that. But if you're preaching interoperability, and then criticising the opposition, you're giving very confused messages.

So far, I've only removed two blogs from the blogroll because I haven't agreed with them, and they were both more than a year ago. I don't really want to have to do it again. Vincent: while you're entitled to your opinion, try doing your homework before you reveal it so publicly.

Now this is more like it. There's a maintenance release of Firebird coming soon, that fixes the AutoComplete crashing bug and introduces the new features brought in with the recent nightlies (such as the Cut, Copy and Paste toolbar buttons). The releases Asa links to aren't the final 0.6.1 builds, but you may want to play with them and report back any bugs so that they can be fixed for 0.6.1 final.

I'm actually writing this entry from Konqueror 3.1.0, which, when combined with Mandrake's Galaxy theme and smoothed fonts, looks pretty darn cool. Certainly it looks nicer than Mozilla does. I mainly wanted to check how the site looked in it (seems to work absolutely fine, although the fonts are smaller than I expected), but also see how well the KHTML engine works in comparison to Gecko. There were rendering issues with Zeldman.com (background was the wrong colour) and Dive Into Mark (tab hovering was wrong) but I imagine these will be fixed in time. It's certainly the fastest browser I've tried, that's for sure.

While I've pretty much switched to Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird for the time being, I suppose I'd better get myself a copy of Mozilla 1.5 Alpha. There isn't a huge amount of new features (most of them affect Composer and ChatZilla) but if I remember correctly Firebird and Thunderbird will be brought into the main trunk in 1.5 beta, so that'll be worth holding out for.

One interesting thing is that the format of the release notes has changed. Instead of being one long confusing document, it has been split up into several more manageable pages. It's probably related to the fact that Mozilla is now being marketed as an end-user browser, now that it is free from the shackles of Netscape and AOL, and breaking these documents up certainly makes them less daunting.

Asa has also hinted at a new logo - same dinosaur head is before, but in an aqua colour rather than sharp red. It'll probably look great on OS X, that's for sure.

We've got Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird, and now, there's Mozilla Sunbird, which will be a standalone version of Mozilla Calendar (currently an XPI add-in although it was supposed to be merged into the main application some time ago).

No binaries are available yet, but the link shown does include a logo. Unfortunately it's yellow so it hardly shows up against a white background.

A standalone version of Composer is/was being worked on by Daniel Glazman, so will this be the next program to be rebranded? 'Stormbird', perhaps? Or 'Hailbird'?

And what about ChatZilla? Talking of which, you can install the latest beta or install it in Firebird.

There has now been an official announcement from The Open Directory Project concerning the news that Netscape will no longer release new versions of its browser and the breaking off of the Mozilla Foundation. It has been posted to the ODP weblog, but here it is to save you the click:

DMOZ was never administered by the Mozilla group. Netscape basically leveraged the name when they acquired NewHoo. There are no immediate plans to move DMOZ (or ChefMoz) under the Mozilla Foundation, nor are there plans to sell it off to the highest bidder. DMOZ will continue being the DMOZ that you know and love, operating under the Netscape brand as it has been for nearly 5 years. The changes AOL is making at Netscape concerning browser development do not affect DMOZ.

The fact that the editing side of the ODP is down for maintenance this week is also unrelated. It's also bloody annoying :).

Update: editor morserj has posted his thoughts on the announcement to his weblog. He's also now on the blogroll.

Netscape is officially dead. 7.1 looks to be the last ever release, although it will remain supported. The Netscape.com portal isn't going anytime soon either.

MozillaZine has an article but CNet News.com has far more facts, including the news that the layoffs only affect less than 10% of employees. The Mozilla effort itself has been spun off into a separate, non-protit organisation: The Mozilla Foundation. AOL pledged $2 million to help get the thing going, and will pass all Mozilla-related trademarks over to them.

What this will mean for Mozilla remains to be seen, but hopefully the end result will be a good one.

As for ChefMoz and The Open Directory Project (whose editor side is currently down for a whole week for major server upgrades), these two will remain part of Netscape for the forseeable future.

If you're a Mozilla Firebird user, you may like the new Orbit 4 theme. As you may be able to guess, it's the next level up from Orbit 3+1, and looks pretty damn impressive. Don't be put off by the huge size of the icons - it does come with some nice smaller ones. Certainly it's going to be my default theme until I next change my mind, although the theme is still under development so things like the Options dialog have yet to be themed, and it doesn't have the new text editing buttons themed yet either. But at least it looks nice :).

If you were interested, my previous favourite was Crystal, based on a KDE theme of the same name. For Thunderbird, I'm using the default theme, although I like Phoenity. While I don't think Phoenity works well on Firebird, it looks the part on its emailing cousin.

Oh yeah, that's another thing you IE users are missing out on, isn't it? Themes...

For the past couple of months I've been using the 0.6 (final) build of Mozilla Firebird. However, today I've switched back to using a nightly, in this case one that was released on Saturday (20020712). Apparently it fixes the AutoComplete bug (where the browser would occasionally crash when you select an item from the autocomplete list), along with several others, including the 'Use this theme' option when installing new themes which now works as intended.

It also allows you to add 'Cut', 'Copy' and 'Paste' buttons to the toolbar, although as far as I know only the default theme has icons for them; in all other cases the buttons are blank, show only as text or look messed up. I imagine this will be fixed in time though.

There's still the sloppy text which shows under the 'Download Manager' section of the Privacy tab of the Options dialog, and Sidebars still haven't been implemented yet. My smooth scrolling also seems to have disappeared. But we at least have progress.

Added: It appears I've also lost any extensions I installed, including the Stylesheet switcher and Tabbrowser Extensions, which as Phil Ringnalda says, are mandatory. Drat and double drat. Now I'll have to reinstall them.

More Added: Actually, the loss of extensions may have been my own fault as I nuked the Chrome.rdf file after installing a faulty theme.

You're probably tired of these announcements, but Asa reports that Mozilla 1.4 RC3 is out. Slice it, dice it, and give it hell - then when it crashes, send the data in as Talkback reports, and the bugs might just get fixed for 1.4 Final.

The first alpha of Mozilla 1.5 is due on July 9th. In other mozillian news, NewsMonster has hit the release candidate stage, so it should be feature complete now. I'd use it, but unfortunately I've switched to Firebird.

Don't look now, but.... I have a new default email program. A few minutes with Thunderbird and I'm already won over.

You know you want it. Release Notes.

Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 1 released - the final build can't be long now.

Yes, you guessed it - it went off again. Matrix was brilliant - will have a full review when I'm more awake. See you in a bit.

LindowsOS, the home-user-orientated commercial Linux distro, will include Mozilla 1.3 in place of Netscape 7.0 in its forthcoming LindowsOS 4.0 release. Michael Robertson, who founded the company, has summed up what's so good about the new OS release, and has even said that it is better than XP. A bold claim to make.

Yesterday saw the long-awaited release of Firezillanix Phoebird 0.6, or whatever it's called. I've been using it on and off in the past, and I have to say this latest release is probably the most polished yet.

It's fast (although Mozilla is catching up), it has a clean and uncluttered interface, it has more themes than you can shake a stick at and it's only a 6MB download. If you don't mind using software that hasn't been tested fully and is still a bit rough around the edges, then get yourself a copy.

I am, for the most part impressed, but I do have some concerns:

• The first is that there is no help file, but I imagine this will be written when it comes around to integrating Firebird with the Mozilla trunk. That said, the Mozilla help file is also lacking in areas.
• The extensions support is flaky. I added the Site Navigation toolbar addon and it wouldn't appear. It also took a restart of the browser to disable it, but nothing told me that.
• Theme switching isn't polished, but they know about that so I won't rant too much. And at least in most cases you don't have to reload the browser to change the theme.
• Probably my biggest gripe relates to the Options dialog, which replaces the Preferences window. While I like the new look, and I'm glad it has been simplified, it becomes less useful for more savvy users like me. Currently, Firebird has two methods of changing preferences - the Options dialog, and about:config. The first is aimed at less-able users, and the latter is aimed at Mozilla experts. There's nothing in between for people who want to modify advanced settings, but don't want to manually modify confusing text strings. If any of the Firebird developers are reading this, how about a button called 'Advanced Options' which brings up another dialog similar to the one already used in Mozilla to configure the other options that have been taken out?
• No easy way to add more search engines. Yes, you can go to MyCroft, but how many users will know that? There should be an 'add more engines' link somewhere in the UI.

Other than these concerns, I am generally impressed by what I see.

Mozilla 1.4 Beta is out, so of course, I had to install it :).

You may remember my experience with 1.4 Alpha wasn't great - the change in how Mozilla handled the opening of new tabs annoyed me to the point at which I went back to 1.3 (1.3.1 final was also released today if you're less adventurous). That's been fixed - you can now choose what happens when a new tab is opened, and the default behaviour is set to how it's always been, which is good.

It's also nice to have smooth scrolling back - I complained about it last time but now I like it. Another longstanding peeve of mine was that if you downloaded an executable, you couldn't automatically click 'Launch file' - you had to copy the path, go to Start, Run, paste in the path and then click OK. Now you can, which should save a lot of effort in my part.

On the whole, I'm impressed - 1.4 will, in my opinion, be the best Mozilla release yet, although 1.5, with the inclusion of Mozilla Firebird, looks to be even better.

Looks like something went wrong with Firebird - the latest nightly is 42.9MB, instead of the usual 5.9MB. Bug 203819 has more details, as does this blog entry from Asa Dotzler.

Honestly, it's going to end up as bloated as IE this way ;).

It's not often that I would be able to include 'fish' and 'standards compliance' in the same entry, but this is one occasion when I can. MozillaZine reports that The Amazing Netscape Fishcam has been redesigned with a standards-compliant design. Netscape DevEdge reports how it was done.

If, like me, you're into this kind of thing, it's well worth a read, as it explains how the CSS was put together. Unfortunately, due to the header and footer code used in the page, it only makes it to HTML 4.01 Transitional - no Xs to be seen anywhere, sadly. But it's the thought that counts.

The Mozilla Organisation has published a page describing why you should switch to Firebird. It's mostly aimed at non-Mozilla users but it does mention a few features that Mozilla doesn't (yet) have.

It's in a remarkably similar style to Apple's Safari home page. Interesting.

Thanks to MozillaZine

RC1 of Mozilla 1.3.1 has been released. And it includes a fix for an annoying bug that would display an image from a page, rather than the page itself. Full details of what's changed is in the MozillaZine article.

While perusing BlogDex today, I noticed this Wired article about how IE for Mac is slow in the 'A Year Ago Today' section.

This is ironic, as on Friday, Detroit News carried an Associated Press article about faster browsers for the Mac, focussing on Camino and Safari, both of which leave IE in the dust.

Safari appears to be progressing well, from what I gather, including the welcome addition of tabs. I can't live without tabs in Mozilla - hopefully more people will see the light now that Safari supports them. There's a real possibility of another Mac browser war, this time with 4 contenders: IE, Mozilla, Camino and Safari. I just wish that the same could be said for Windows - a few less IE users would do the net a world of good, in my opinion.

I was determined not to install Mozilla 1.4 alpha, and instead wait for the beta. Which does not explain why I just downloaded and installed it. Ooops... :-o

minotaur, the Mozilla-based stand-alone mail client, finally reached the stage where a public build could be released this week (which, by the way, can be downloaded from ftp.mozilla.org). It's only at version 0.1a, and currently only available for Windows, but it's a start.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programme...

MozillaZine brings news of two (yes, two) new Mozilla releases in the coming weeks. The first is Mozilla 1.3.1, as announced in last week's staff meeting - a couple of issues have been identified (installing XPIs in OS X and memory leaks in Mail and News) which need fixing.

The second is Mozilla 1.4 Alpha, due out a week on Friday, according to the article. This release should see the addition of Mozilla Calendar, making it the sixth component in the set and making the Moz suite a more credible opponent to Outlook. It uses the iCal format, so it's compatible with Apple's iCal utility, although as yet there's no XPI for OS X... The page also has listings of public holidays by country that you can download and import, to help you plan out.

... is out :). Get it now, you know you want to ;)

Those Mozilla developers just can't stop beavering, can they? Asa reports that Mozilla 1.3 RC2 is now out. I think I'll skip this one - another 12MB download is too much...

And besides, this is just a bug fix release - no new features. I think any Mozilla 1.3alpha/beta users would be best waiting for 1.3 final, unless you like bug squashing. It won't be long now, I imagine.

After a little encouragement and a lot of waiting, Mozilla 1.3 RC1 is finally downloaded and installed. There are a few changes over Mozilla 1.3 beta:

• A new splash screen in Windows. Except it's boring and brown, and doesn't have Mozzie on anymore :(
• Removal of the Debug and QA menus, and the build number from the title bar (since this is a release candidate and is therefore designed to be like the final release)
• Re-ordering of the items on the menu shown when you right-click a tab - 'Close' is now at the top, which makes more sense in my opinion.
• Even better popup controls. If you choose to allow popups by default, you can have a blacklist of sites you want to block. On the other hand, if you block them by default, you can have a whitelist. So everyone's happy.

And while I'm here, there's a new Phoenix win32 build from yesterday, and a Linux one from today. It includes a fix for the XUL error shown instead of the Security tab on the Page Info dialog, and presumably other stuff that I've not found yet.

The final non-beta build of Mozilla 1.3 is due out very soon, with the candidate builds released yesterday (call it Mozilla 1.3 RC1 if you will). They are available for Windows, Linux and MacOS via Asa Dotzler's blog and MozillaZine.

Typically I find this out after coming back to Uni, where I don't have a broadband connection.

Although no 0.6 release has been made yet, on the advice of a couple of ODP editors I downloaded the latest nightly build of Phoenix. 0.5 was very buggy, and basically put me off the browser. In the time since, I have tried a nightly, but again, it was very buggy - the address bar didn't even work properly.

But I can say that the latest nightly build is very nice. The theme is different - it's no longer based on Orbit which never looked right outside Mozilla, and it actually works alright. The speed is generally good too. If you're a Phoenix user, you may want to give this build a test run.

My favourite theme still is the MozillaZine theme, available from Phoenix Help, but the default is still nice.

Courtesy of MozillaZine, here's an article by the creator of Metafilter: Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App. It describes how Mozilla is one of the best browsers for bloggers, and highlights some of its very cool features.

I can relate to the beginning of the article, where the author describes how he became hooked on the browser. While I didn't switch out of real necessity, I was getting tired at how IE was(n't) working, and decided to take the plunge and make Moz my default browser. I haven't looked back since.

This'll delight all of the British Mozilla users who are tired of US spellings: a student at the University of York (in my home town ;)) has created an en-gb language pack for Mozilla.

There aren't many changes, since American and British English are fundamentally the same language, but it makes the interface seem a little more friendlier.

I say, how about a nice game of croquet, what what?

Mozilla 1.3 beta has a nifty up-and-coming feature called 'Intelligent Autocomplete'. Normally, when you start typing an address in the address bar, a menu pops up with suggestions, based on your browsing history. However, this system is about to get more intelligent, thanks to the machine learning project. All you have to do is enable a preference in your user.js file and then after about 2 weeks send back a file which contains data for the Mozilla team to analyse. From this data, the Mozilla developers can create a more intelligent list of items in the pull-down menu, so that it will show the pages you are most likely to want nearer the top. It's all rather cool, really.

I have to say I'm very happy with Mozilla 1.3 beta. It's not crashed on me yet, and seems marginally faster than its predecessor (this is backed up by findings from AppleLinks.com, from which I got the information above from). The popup whitelisting system is great, and is a much needed feature from Phoenix. The ChatZilla improvements are welcome, as are the much improved mail and spam filters - now I can have a filter for 'everyone in my address book', rather than having to maintain a special list of email addresses. And the Preferences panel has seen a much needed update, with new Chatzilla options, tweaks for 'Type as you find' (formerly known as Type Ahead Find) and a new panel for popup control. IE-esque image resizing has been added too, although I'm keeping it turned off as the resize routine is very basic.

Themes are a little thin on the ground, but Orbit 3+1 has been updated, and it is quite frankly the best theme at the moment.

While I'm not going to be deleting 1.2.1 just yet, I think this release has staying power. The Mozilla developers deserve a pat on the back.

And before I forget, you may like to visit Mozilla.org to download 1.3 beta, which has finally made it out of the door. It'll be nice to have my beloved Junk Mail filtering back again - I really missed it when I went back to 1.2.1...

A couple of mozzie things:

1. The Mozilla tree will be locked down at 8am tomorrow morning UTC, ready for the Mozilla 1.3 beta release. If all goes well, that will be out on Friday. :D
2. If you're using Mozilla or Phoenix, click on this link. Not seen that before? It's a list of elements in your Mozilla preferences file. And, if you have a recent nightly build, then you'll be able to edit those values too. Although the important ones are covered by the Preferences dialog, this allows you to tweak all of the settings. I imagine this will be in the beta too.

Oh, and Mozillazine currently has information about K-Meleon, Chimera and Phoenix development, so check it out.

And the blogrolls are working again :).

edit: Okay, so the 'click here' link doesn't work. Type 'about:config' into your address bar and you'll get the same effect.

The next release from the 1.0.x branch - Mozilla 1.0.2 - is now out, and includes several improvements in security and stability.

Note that this doesn't have the extra features that Mozilla 1.2.1 is only built for people who have trouble running the latest version. And for Netscape to use in NS7.

Take a look at the release notes for more.

MozillaZine reports that Mozilla Calendar is soon to be integrated with the default Mozilla builds as the sixth component (after Navigator, Mail, Composer, Address Book and ChatZilla). I expect this is for three reasons:

1. The XPI is getting to the stage where it is stable enough for regular use
2. Integrating it will allow more people to use it, and so more people will be able to submit bug reports
3. It'll make Mozilla look more attractive - it could well woo a few Outlook users over

I installed it a few days ago, but to be honest I don't need it - I prefer a wall calendar, personally.

MozillaZine's current poll has a rather interesting topic at the moment: "Which Mozilla developer would you most like to have round for Christmas dinner?". The poll has 1244 responses so far, after being opened on Monday, with David Hyatt as the current leader.

MozillaZine apparently takes no responsibility if any of the named developers actually turn up on Christmas Day. Me? I voted for Asa Dotzler. Why? Because.

Actually, his site has some very funky CSS - it looks like it's using frames but in fact it isn't. Very interesting.

Yep, 1.3a is out, and I've decided to give it a shot to see what it's like. Obviously I'll be keeping 1.2 - I'll be installing in a separate folder. But the enhancements to Mozilla Mail make this too much to miss. After all, since when did Outlook Express get any major updates? It's hardly changed in nearly 4 years.

The Release Notes give full information about possible issues and what's new, and if you're convinced, get yourself a build.

In a moment of minor boredom, I thought I'd check out an interview on the American TV channel TechTV, which involves Mozilla. It's actually quite interesting - it gives you the background to Netscape's downfall and how it hopes to fight back with Mozilla (and Chimera which is also featured).

Two points in the clip intrigued me. Firstly, I've been pronouncing XUL, the language used to create the user interface (and any add-ons) in Mozilla, as 'ex-yoo-ell'. Apparently, its true pronounciation is 'zool', which I seem to remember was a platform game from the early 90s. I still have it in fact, though I dread to think what the speed will be like on a 900Mhz processor - it was already too fast on my parents' old 486...

The other point was the interviewer saying that Mozilla is slow. I personally find it marginally faster than IE (Phoenix in particular is waaaaay faster), but maybe my computer is set up differently.

I'm giving Phoenix 0.5 a second 'review' because despite a lot of opening and closing browser windows today, it has yet to crash. I now believe the cause of the troubles was actually Diggler, or rather its Phoenix counterpart Digger - after disabling this yesterday the problem seems to have gone away, which is a relief.

(you can read the first review of 0.5 here)

You may have noticed that I've now started a Gecko Browsers category - this because I talk about Mozilla, Netscape, Phoenix and the others quite a lot, and it makes the posts easier to find.

And finally, Kim has moved her Revolving Duck weblog to a brand spanking new URL (and one that is easier to remember, too), so if you link to it, update your bookmarks!

Been using Phoenix for most of today, and while I'm generally impressed, it has crashed twice; not something I was hoping for. These crashes occurred when clicking on links which opened new windows - the window would open, then the application would stop responding and Windows would then declare that the program has caused an illegal operation.

I haven't noticed any real speed increase, but its smaller system footprint is nice. It's just a shame that you have to reset all of your settings before installing it as a precaution.

In other Gecko news, Netscape have released Netscape 7.01. This finally includes a popup stopper (something Mozilla/Phoenix users have had for a while), and I hope that this will be a 'killer feature' that will encourage people to switch to it. Go on, ditch IE. You know you want to.

Actually, one last thing (well, two...) before I hit the stack. Phoenix 0.5 made it out of the door late on Saturday (darn me for not reading MozillaZine often enough), so I'll be installing that tomorrow, no doubt, along with testing the allegedly improved mouse scrolling I reported about earlier. This build is supposed to be the smallest and fastest to date, so hopefully the hype will match with the results.

Additionally, Mozilla 1.3 Alpha is due out sometime this week - a little later than the Friday date that I first reported, but not too far behind. MozillaZine has the juicy bits.

Okay, that's 6 posts today - a record? Anyway, I really am off to bed now. Bye,

These guys impress me. Mozilla 1.3 alpha, with its junk mail filter, is due for release on Friday, only 4 days (!) after 1.2.1 final was released. Talk about keeping us on our feet. More info à la MozillaZine.

Okay, Mozilla 1.2.1 is now installed, complete with the DHTML bug fix. I opted for a clean-ish install - in the past I've just installed over whatever version was there previously. Since this included alphas and betas, with hindsight this probably was not a good idea, so I uninstalled 1.2 before installing 1.2.1. I'm now downloading my favourite Orbit 3+1 theme, along with the Orbit Retro theme, which I haven't used yet. Some would argue these are the only good Mozilla themes - I'm afraid I'd probably agree too.

Other than the bug fix not much is different. The installer still isn't very friendly with ZoneAlarm, and I eventually had to reboot; the installer had stopped responding and absoultely refused to be removed from memory, even when using End Process Tree in Task Manager. Bleh.

Since Kim enquired in the previous post's comments, I'll tell her now that Phoenix doesn't have as many options to play with (they haven't been added to the UI) and you don't get as many add-ons from MozDev.org as Mozilla users do. And you don't have a mail client, chat client, address book or web page composer either. But you do get an improved popup blocker and the extra speed.

Mozilla 1.2 has been pulled from release already. Turns out there's a large DHTML bug which can prevent many pages from rendering properly. SlashDot does the reporting, and you can read the message on Mozilla.org.

1.2.1 should be here on Monday with a fix.

I'm impressed by the improvements in Mozilla 1.2. It's much more responsive - there used to be a considerable lag time when restoring a window from the taskbar but this has all but disappeared - that was something that really annoyed me about it before. Phoenix is still faster, I think, but Mozilla is catching up, and that can only be a good thing.

The better handling of image selection is also an improvement - you can select images the same way as you select text, like in IE. And the XML pretty-printing is nice. Not sure if I'll ever use the new Type Ahead Find feature, but it's nice to have.

Worth upgrading? Definitely. Do it now :).

Isn't that typical? Mozilla 1.2 is released only a couple of days after I get home (and away from my parents' broadband connection.

Anyway, read the release notes and then download a build. I'll let you know what I think once I've installed it and had a chance to play with it.

Another Neil, Neil Deakin, has published a list of 101 things that you can do in Mozilla, but cannot do in IE. It makes an interesting read.

Despite my generally negative comments against emacs last week, after Monday's lab session I decided that maybe it'd be a good idea to have it on my Windows partition. So, I downloaded it (all 12.7MB of it!), unzipped it (all 40+MB of it!!!) and ran it. And whaddya know? It's only version 20.

You see, in the labs, we have version X21 for Linux, which is much better. You get a toolbar and syntax highlighting. And it integrates with JRE, so you can compile and execute Java applications and applets from within emacs. The Windows version, at least on my machine, does none of this. It has now since been removed, and the space assigned to...

...Phoenix. This new browser has been getting a lot of buzz lately, and having used it, I can see why. Firstly the interface is very clean; it uses a derivation of Mozilla's Orbit theme by default, but also supports XP's visual styles, so visually it looks nicer. The toolbar can be customised to add more or fewer buttons too.

Speed-wise it is noticably faster than Mozilla, but unlike Opera it still has the very capable Gecko browser core. In fact, if you're used to Mozilla or Netscape 6.x or 7.x you'll have no trouble adjusting to Phoenix.

Overall? I like it. A lot. In fact, it's already my default browser. As for stability, it appears very stable, even for 0.4 release. Get it now.

It seems that ezBoard is now playing the web standards tune, having updated many of its pages to XHTML/CSS and done away with tables. It's great to see such a high profile site take such a move towards the standards (with the home page validating without any errors), but judging by the number of people still using Netscape 4.x, it's maybe a little premature. The furoure surrounding NS6.x really knocked Netscape's image, despite the fact that NS7.x is a very capable browser. I personally prefer Mozilla, but that's only because I don't need the extras that NS7.x comes with.

Talking of which, Mozilla 1.2 Beta is now out, adding better support for Windows XP's visual styles - one of the features I miss from IE. Also expect a spellchecker and Type Ahead Find, a better implementation of the standard 'Find on this page' feature. Phoenix, Mozilla's cut-down, speeded-up counterpart is about to hit version 0.4 too, with the emphasis on bug fixing. I've yet to install it, mainly because I'm unsure if it will coexist with Mozilla - a quick visit to the Phoenix forums is therefore in order.

I'll have a 'life' update later today, since I'm about to set off home. See you soon.

I really do like Mozilla. I've been using it all morning and it's felt much the same as IE6. The tabbing feature is particularly good - I can monitor how a page is loading while browsing another one (and some of the dynamically generated pages at the ODP can take ages to load).

Disadvantages? Blogger looks messed up, no Google toolbar, no smooth scrolling and the cookie management isn't quite how I'd like it. But other than that I'm very impressed.

The webcam has now returned due to popular demand - I finally figured out what I was doing wrong with Argus so it now works without having Pakkasharra running too (missing / when specifying the upload path - serves me right for not reading the help file properly). And, as long as the webcam is connected, it'll update every 30 seconds or so.

It seemed like it may never happen, but Mozilla 1.0 has been released. I've yet to test it out, but with a bit of luck, it'll be a bit of alright :).

Remind me never to use Windows XP's built-in CD burning again. After burning a CD full of files for my laptop, I found that some files hadn't written properly. This was coupled with its insistance of at least 600MB free space on my HD. I think I'll be sticking with good old Nero for now.

Today I tested out Mozilla RC1. Being an ODP editor, which is a Netscape-run open source project, I thought I might as well see what my companions were running.

Am I impressed? Sort of. The interface is good, and I liked the tabbed interface. But it was let down by speed. Load-up and re-drawing times are considerably slower than IE6 (I'm on Windows XP here, remember), and after about 10 minutes I kind-of gave up. Though that was partly down to the fact that I didn't have the Google toolbar installed, which I can hardly do without.

Will I use it more in future? Of course! You've got to remember that this program is still in beta, and still has a load of debugging code in it. I'm sure once that is out it'll be as sweet as a nut, and I may even considering using it more. As it is, it was the most memory-hogging application that I was running at the time.

One consolation though; this site renders perfectly in Mozilla. Perhaps sticking to the standards has paid off after all :)