MovableBlog: Archives: Mozilla

May 9th, 2003

Rich Text Editing in Movable Type and Mozilla »

Pinder at Blogzilla has found a hack to the MT template which allows rich-text editing—which means you get buttons for bold, italic, underline and a link just like in IE—while browsing MT in Mozilla. Be sure to check his post, because evidently the hack as originally written didn't work for him.

(I don't intend to use this hack, because upgrading MT always requires re-hacking it, despite there being some really great hacks out there, I don't really want to keep track of them all and then figure out how to utilize them in any upgraded version.)

Update June 27th, 2003, 2:03 PM: Okay, I caved and installed the hack in two of my MT installations and will do so in the other two. That's the cost of using Mozilla full-time I guess.

Posted by Richard at 11:09 PM | TrackBacks (1) | Comments (0)

April 30th, 2003

Suppress New Windows in Mozilla »

I'm now blogging part-time over at Blogzilla. My first post is Suppress New Windows using about:config.

Since Blogzilla has its own comments system, you can comment about any Mozilla-related cross-post there.

Posted by Richard at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)

April 21st, 2003

XUL RSS Aggregator for Mozilla »

Our MSN Messenger conversation, just now:

pinder says: http://www.fuckhedz.com/xulchannels/
Richard says: *falls off of chair*
pinder says: now that's cool

[see also: more info at Blogzilla]

Posted by Richard at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)

April 14th, 2003

Phoenix is now Firebird »

So the browser formerly-known-as Phoenix is now known as Firebird. Fine. I was hoping they'd use a name of a neighbourhood in Phoenix, AZ (any name would have done, and shut up, I didn't think hard about that one) or something Spanish (ditto).

But Firebird will do.

Update 10:44 PM: Minotaur is renamed to Thunderbird, but you knew that already. There are some screenshots available at Slashdot. Not for the humourless.

Posted by Richard at 10:18 PM | Comments (1)

April 4th, 2003

Mozilla Pop-Up Blocking Avoided »

Advertisers can get around Mozilla's pop-up blocking using Flash: "I was tempted not to link to that site or to discuss this hole in Mozilla's armor, because I'm sure all the advertisers out there are going to quickly adopt this technique. Here's hoping the white hats find a way to block these too."

Posted by Richard at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 3rd, 2003

IE Has More Innovative Extensions? »

Joshua @ Better Living Through Software: "All of the nabobs talking about how "closed" IE is had me fooled; in actuality it looks like there are far more innovative extensions available for IE than for Mozilla (or Phoenix or whatever)."

Thems fightin' words!

(He makes a fair enough point, actually, since my news aggregator of choice, Syndirella, uses IE as its browser when clicking on links inside RSS feeds, which I don't find too problematic, since shift-clicking loads a link in one's default browser.)

Posted by Richard at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

Blogger and Mozilla Still Don't Get Along »

Phil Ringnalda: Blogger's Still an Ignorant Slut. I had the same problem working on a Blogger-based weblog design for a friend while in Mozilla. Now I know why.

Update: apparently Blogger works with Phoenix now.

Posted by Richard at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

April 2nd, 2003

New Mozilla Roadmap »

Good gravy! Check out the new Mozilla Roadmap! See the highlights at Blogzilla. I'm definitely using Phoenix near-full-time from now on (see below), now that Minotaur has arrived, and now that the project has some official sanction. There are a few annoyances with the latter, but I'll go into that later.

Also, am I the only one who gets "DNS not found"-type errors (or "document contains no data"-type errors) on Phoenix on sites that are accessible from IE?

Posted by Richard at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 29th, 2003

Minotaur Win32 Build Available »

There's a Minotaur build for Windows systems available at ftp.mozilla.org/pub/minotaur, with an apparent build date of March 20th, yet apparently uploaded on the 28th. So far it works on my Windows XP system, although it didn't import my settings from Mozilla. Maybe I missed that dialog box.

Posted by Richard at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 25th, 2003

Phoenix Profile Location »

Because Phoenix wasn't rendering sites like Yahoo! Mail properly, I needed to delete the profile. It took a little while to find this page which says that, in Windows XP, the location is %AppData%\Phoenix\Profiles\default\xxxxxxxx.slt\ . Evidently this folder was hidden on my system, since a hard drive search for the word 'phoenix' didn't reveal its location. Your mileage may vary, but to get to that directory, I clicked Start | Run... then pasted in the following (not knowing the random string that replaces xxxxxxxx):

Quite literally with the percentage signs too, since it should redirect to the AppData location. Then I just deleted the profile directory. Not the smoothest thing to do, since Phoenix required me to delete the 'default' profile and create a new one. But now that the release of Minotaur is imminent, maybe Phoenix will once regain its exalted position as my default browser.

In other news, the Phoenix project page seems to have been fairly frequently updated lately. Which is good.

Posted by Richard at 11:42 PM | Comments (1)

March 24th, 2003

Minotaur Coming Soon »

Soon we will be able to throw away the shackles of the bloated Mozilla browser and use a standalone browser (like Phoenix) and use Minotaur—officially announced as a project—as our standalone mail and newsgroup client. "We hope to start pushing builds on ftp.mozilla.org within the next day or so." A little birdie tells me that he had difficulty building Minotaur on his Windows machine, and this is a guy who makes his living by programming. But no more. Those of use without C++ compilers will get a shot at it soon. [via MozillaZine]

Posted by Richard at 10:55 PM | Comments (1)

March 21st, 2003

P3P Enabled In Mozilla? »

In a post unrelated to the main Mozilla trunk, a poster says that P3P will be enabled in tomorrow's build of Mozilla. This is confirmed somewhat in a recent netscape.public.mozilla.security newsgroup posting.

Posted by Richard at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

March 19th, 2003

Mozilla Metrics »

The major criticism against Mozilla is that it is "slow", both in the loading up of the browser and the rendering, and it's something I won't deny. Now we have some empirical evidence that Mozilla is slower than IE. The metrics have to do with the DOM, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant.

At least Mozilla still looks nicer.

[via MozillaZine]

Posted by Richard at 03:46 PM | Comments (2)

March 13th, 2003

Mozilla 1.3 Released »

Mozilla 1.3 Released: wow, since Mozilla Mail has spam filtering, I might consider dropping Eudora as my POP mail program, which was just a temporary thing to begin with. Eudora checks the POP account used for a fantasy hockey pool, but not my other account used for work; my third account, while technically a POP account, just forwards to a webmail account (okay, enough about the fact that I have too many email accounts).

Hopefully MT will take advantage of the Midas API for text editing. And although not new to version 1.3, I've been very happy with the Site Navigation Bar (this site has the appropriate <link rel="next" etc. /> tags that the browser uses). I'm not sure how I feel about automatic image resizing: it was a pain in the butt in IE and in Phoenix, and will probably be a pain in the butt in Mozilla.

Be sure to check out the Mozillazine article announcing the release.

Update: Slashdot nerds have weighed in, complete with bad joke (but so bad that it's good).

Posted by Richard at 02:43 PM | Comments (3)

March 12th, 2003

Free Pop-up and Ad Blocking »

Just saw this ad on TV: pay 20 bucks for something (Pop-Up Blocker) you effectively get for free in Mozilla. Pay 40 bucks and get something (Pop-Up Stopper Companion) you can also get for free by using this CSS code in your free copy of Mozilla.

There wasn't any sarcasm in the TV ad. Just here.

Update: Earthlink's similarly snarky press-release (praising Pop-Up Blocker...is that a different product/service then Pop-Up Stopper?). [via Anil]

Posted by Richard at 04:34 PM | Comments (1)

March 6th, 2003

Hyatt on Tabbed Browsing »

Dave Hyatt on tabbed browsing: "I strongly support the default in Phoenix, which is to open links in new tabs in the background by default. This option should be overridable with a modifier key (SHIFT in Phoenix) and also the default should be controllable via a pref." Agreed. This is especially useful for reading weblogs, because if there are multiple interesting links in a post, I can load them all in the background without losing my place in the post itself. Plus I love how you can middle-click a link that you know will otherwise load new window—such as the "View Site" button in MT—forcing it it to load into a tab.

Posted by Richard at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 4th, 2003

Mozilla as Blogging Killer App »

If you haven't already seen it via here, here, or here, then check out Matt Haughey's Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App. The phrase "killer app" has been overused for some time now, but you can safely ignore that. Plus I thought Blogger was the killer app for blogging. Oh well. Haughey's discussion on tabs is useful.

Oh, he doesn't mention this, but it turns out you can Ctrl-Tab to shift through tabs in Phoenix (just as you can Alt-Tab through windows in IE and other apps). I find this out right after telling Pinder how great it would if, y'know, one could Ctrl-Tab to shift through windows in Phoenix. D'oh!

Posted by Richard at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 2nd, 2003

Mozilla and Developers »

There's an article on Kuro5hin evangelizing the benefits web developers can get from using Mozilla.

Posted by Richard at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 17th, 2003

Chimera To Be Camino? »

Due to legal reasons, the Chimera browser for the Mac will be renamed, probably to Camino. It's funny that when I first read the announcement, I totally knew people would ignore the post and suggest names. This thread at the Phoenix forum got entirely out of hand (at time of writing, it contains 1678 posts!), so I don't blame pinkerton for disabling comments.

Posted by Richard at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

February 12th, 2003

Gecko's Bright Future »

Mozilla, Gecko, Netscape, and the future in AOL:

"[Gecko's] robust support of a wide range of standards, it's speed, flexibility, and portability make it an excellent candidate for use in PC based systems, as well as Internet appliances (remember Touchpad?), WAP browsers, game consoles ³, set-top devices, even those wonderful dot-com refrigerators."

[via /.]

Posted by Richard at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)

February 10th, 2003

Mozilla and MeFi »

Keyboard and iconic shortuts in MetaFilter for latest builds of Mozilla: awesome! Now if only MT Bookmarklets could work properly in Phoenix/Mozilla, all would be as one.

[first link via Movable Type Support Board]

Posted by Richard at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)