Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

interview with favbrowser.com

A little while ago, I did an interview with favbrowser.com and then completely forgot about it. Excepting the tired but expected Opera fanboyism in the comments, I'm pleased with how it came out. Maybe give it a read :-)

new 3.2 gigapixel digicam?

The LSST will shoot at 3.2 Gpixels.

WOW!

That's gonna take a mighty big memory card :-)

discussing pr

Read Melissa.

about:robots

nice!

i want

I want this in Firefox.

firefox 3.0.2 security and stability update

Today we shipped the Firefox 3.0.2 update for Firefox users on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Most of you are uses to these regular security and stability updates but there's an all too often uncelebrated minor update tory that really deserves some attention this time around: localizations.

With today's release, we've now got official releases for Sinhala and Slovene as well as beta releases for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telegu, and Thai available for testing. That's 8 new locales coming online for Firefox 3, bringing the total up to 57!!

Mozilla's amazing localization community pushes really hard to get localizations ready for major releases like Firefox 3, but not all of them make it. Our minor updates are a chance to get some that we couldn't squeeze into the major releases and to introduce new "beta" locale versions.

Seth, and everyone involved, have really taken it up a notch with how much they've accomplished and how much progress we're making to ensure that everyone the world over can use Firefox in their preferred language.

apple continues to abuse windows users

Ed Bott documents the atrocities.

what is mozilla

Mozilla's Atul Varma posted a wonderful article today at his blog Toolness, titled What Mozilla Means to Me.

I really enjoyed it and I think it does a wonderful job communicating and celebrating what Mozilla is today. But as you'll note from his final paragraphs, the Mozilla Manifesto, and "today's Mozilla" are not the result of a smart group of people sitting down a couple of years ago and putting together the perfect plan. The great state of things has been over 10 years in the making.

Mozilla has been around a lot longer than most people realize. This is primarily because so many people came to learn about Mozilla after discovering Firefox. If you're one of those people, I strongly encourage you to read Atul's article because it really does an amazing job of explaining how much more we are than the Firefox browser we make.

If you're interested in learning even more about Mozilla and our long and rich history prior to the release of Firefox, I've posted one of my presentations with notes/script to the Mozilla Evangelism Wiki that outlines the decade-long effort that's resulted in the Mozilla that Atul describes and celebrates so well.

If you've got comments, suggestions, or corrections on the content of the presentation "The History of Mozilla" please let me know. Also, I'd love to see the content translated into more languages so if you're a Mozilla translation contributor, or would like to become one, please let me know and I'd be thrilled to help however I can.

single-vendor solutions considered harmful

Apple is not an open platform we can believe in.

If the Web has taught us anything, it's that silos and walled gardens ultimately fall. They may work well in the beginning (see AOL) but they do not last.

the colors

Bholley has a great blog post up on color management in Firefox. More than a great post, though, it's a call to action on testing this new feature and helping us figure out how much of it we can safely enable for the next Firefox release.

If you're interested in making color better on the Web, I strongly encourage you to head over to bholley.work.blog, read up on the issues, and get to testing and providing feedback.

Photo "like a record..." by shoothead and used under a Creative Commons license.

Also, I want to say thanks to Bobby Holley for his amazing work on color management this summer. The Mozilla project never ceases to amaze me on the talent and dedication front. We literally would not be where we are today without crazy-smart people, like bholley, that really care about making Firefox and the Web better.

So, get over to his blog and help us make a color managed web.

inevitabilities

The odds on two of us working in the same organization have got to be microscopic and so the odds of someone getting it wrong were pretty much a lock. Oh well :-)

firefox continues to eat away at i.e.

Gregg Keiser, over at Computerworld, notes that Firefox took another chunk out of IE last week and with a nice assist from the new Chrome browser, IE lost 1.4 percentage points in just one week. It does look like Chrome's early gains are falling back a bit but there are no signs of retreat from Firefox.

interesting week for browser market share

There's been a lot of excitement this week in browsers. No doubt Chrome led the way with its 0.2 beta launch on Tuesday afternoon. Mozilla also launched the second alpha of Firefox 3.1.

There's also been a lot of speculation around the Web about how Google's Chrome has or will impact usage of the other browsers.

While it's pretty much impossible to know what's going to happen over the next few months, we can take a look at the first few days after Chrome's launch thanks to the hourly Market Share reports from Net Applications.

(Click the chart to see a larger version.)

As you can see from all the browsers charted, there's a pretty significant variance in usage throughout the day. What isn't obvious here, but would be if the chart covered a full week or more, is that there's also a pretty strong variance from weekday to weekend.

All that is to say that with such a small sample, there are a lot of things that this chart doesn't say. What it does say, I think, is that Firefox ended the week at about its normal 20% usage share and the new Google Chrome browser ended the week with just over 1% usage share.

From this global measure, from the most often cited Web statistics company, it's pretty clear that Chrome did not take any significant bite out of Firefox in those first 4 days.

It's pretty cool that Chrome was able to take as much as it did as quickly as it did, surpassing Opera and Safari on Windows with room to spare. No doubt those browser vendors have got to be pretty concerned. My congratulations to the Chrome team for a great launch and an exciting new browser. I think they've got the new #3 browser on Windows.

update: Oh, and there was also some speculation that Google might have topped Firefox's Download Day 2008 Guinness World Record. We'll have to wait on Google to tell us how many downloads they got in that first day, but if the usage numbers from Net Application's hourly tracking are to be believed, it's unlikely that Google surpassed Firefox's record. At the end of the first day of Firefox 3 downloads, Firefox 3 had grown to just over 4% of the global usage share, more than twice Chrome's peak usage on its best day after release.

performance testing javascript

John Resig just posted on some of the problems and a proposed solution for the current sets of public JavaScript benchmarks. It's well worth a read and even a mostly non-technical person like me got through it just fine and came away much better informed.

One thing did strike me, though, as I read through John's post. John talks about Apple's SunSpider, Google's V8 Benchmark, and Mozilla's Dromaeo. Where are Microsoft and Opera in this game (besides falling way behind, I mean.) Why haven't they put their JavaScript benchmarks out in the public space so we can all benefit the way Apple, Google, and Mozilla have?

Is this just another case where open source proves superior? You've got three open source projects all developing JavaScript engines with public benchmarks and lots of public discussion and idea sharing. And you've got two closed and proprietary companies developing JavaScript engines completely in secret without public benchmarks or any sign of public conversation.

The open source engines are rockin' the speed game and the closed engines are falling very far behind very quickly. It looks to me like the closed and proprietary guys just can't keep up.

Photo "No longer rocking" by Gary Simmons used under a Creative Commons license.

It's actually a shame that they're falling so far behind. It would be helpful for the Web if the IE team was able to make some serious JS improvements for 8 and whatever comes next because there are still a significant number of users stuck on Microsoft's technology.

Their falling behind won't completely stop the Web from moving forward though. There's enough momentum behind the truly modern browsers, Firefox leading the way with 20% of the market, that the Web will get better without them.

IE market share will continue to deteriorate, probably at a somewhat faster rate, as users flee for a better experience. And MS will no doubt slow things down at least some so I really do hope they improve. The less of a drag they are the better.

javascript ascendent

Yes, Silverlight and Flash, we're coming and at least Microsoft is starting to take notice.

"I think that the next 18 months we're going to see a 100 to 1,000 fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla are going to kick us all in the arse and make our JavaScript jittered," Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman told the audience

super cool web workers

This looks super awesome to me.

I can't wait for Web developers to be able to start using this and the massive performance advantages that will come with TraceMonkey.

With Firefox 3.0 still taking the web by storm, it's thrilling to know that Firefox 3.1 is gonna rock this hard.

(And for those Web devs fretting over further Firefox version fragmentation, we're taking care of you. We've already seen more than half of our Firefox 2 users move to Firefox 3 and the rest are following very quickly. The transitions will be quick and the features almost all additive.)

focus on what matters

Want to feel inspired about Mozilla today? Mitchell just blogged some Firefox Summit Reflections. Go give it a read. The final few paragraphs are totally worth it.

javascript at the speed of light

JavaScript as a performance bottleneck is a thing of the past. Native code speeds, here we come. Be afraid. Be very afraid! :D

what chris blizzard said

Absolutely!

Back to the issue at hand. Silverlight, video, adobe, multimedia, market power. How do we compete? Or, really, how do you compete? Because Mozilla isn’t going to create this change alone. We’re very very small by any standard in the tech marketplace. Our reach is pretty good with Firefox 2 + Firefox 3, and we’re starting to have real market effects, but we’re not going to be able to buy our way onto millions of computers by sponsoring the olympics.

People who have talked to me have heard me talk about two things on this topic. I usually say something like “you need to learn how to build a product” or “you need to find out what you can lead at and go do that.” There’s usually more than that, but that’s the main part of the message. And I think that if we want to make sure that the web isn’t overtaken by the acts of industry giants, that there are real actionable things we can do to make that happen.

I’ll use video on the web as a simple example. Here are the things that I think need to happen to make Theora a player in the real world.

1. Make sure there’s a really great video plugin for Apple Quicktime that delivers the OGG Theora video format to people who use the video tag in Safari. When I tried to play the ogg theora video from my post the other day the ogg plugin jumped around, showed a white screen for long periods, paused for a few seconds at a time - bad!

2. Create a control that brings the video tag to IE like Vlad did for the canvas tag. The world is much bigger than just Firefox. This would make it very easy to deliver and build content and make it easy for consumers to get access to it. Bring ubiquity to content like Adobe was able to do with Flash. (Note: Cortado isn’t good enough - it’s still stuck in the plugin prison!)

3. Make a super-easy, consumer-focused, high-quality encoder for ogg theora that anyone can use to encode their videos for the web. (Here’s a hint: Handbrake is still too hard to use.) Hook it up to the various video camera providers on mac and windows so that it’s super easy to create content, encode it, and with the tools listed above, upload it and make it available to others.

4. Even better, build a business around the tools above. Or even a service for people to upload to. Sustainability is an important component and it should not be left behind.

5. Create awesome demos of what you can do with the video tag, or even better mixed with the recent stuff we’ve been showing off with video + svg filters. Blur effects, video driven by content, content people can create and overlay onto existing videos, etc. Some of this stuff is out there, some of it isn’t. But it’s a start. Try mixing video with other content on the web - mash it up, cover it up, add value and context to otherwise boring videos. Its easier to do with the video tag than it is when it’s hidden inside of Flash or Silverlight.

This has been another edition of What Chris Blizzard Said.

shortcut to launch a specific firefox profile on mac

For as long as I've been working on Mozilla projects, it's always been a breeze to create Windows shortcuts to the Profile Manager or to a specific profile. You simply created a desktop shortcut and added -profilemanager or -P name to the end of the shortcut's path.

Mac doesn't do shortcuts like Windows. While it does have aliases, you can't modify them like you can shortcuts on Windows. So, for years, I and many of my friends and colleagues working on Mozilla projects, especially the less technically savvy of us in the QA and testing community, have resorted to the tedious process of launching the Mac Terminal and typing in something like /Applications/firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager to launch the Profile Manager. Some more savvy of the group would save some of those keystrokes by creating a shell alias for that long-ish command. Still, involving the Terminal meant moving from the mouse to the keyboard and opening and closing a second program.

Thanks to some help and inspiration from my regular Mac Hero, Eric Shepherd, I can share with you all a super-simple way to create a "shortcut" on Mac so that you can just double-click a Desktop or Dock icon to launch the Firefox Profile Manager or even a specific Firefox profile.

I'm going to use some scary (to me, at least) words and phrases but don't be turned off, it's actually really simple. We're going to write a small AppleScript to do the work that we were doing manually in the Terminal. That's it. Don't be like I was and turn away at the first mention of writing script ;-) I promise this is really, really easy.

Step 1: Open the Script Editor

If you're like me you probably haven't ever done this before, or if you did, it was an accident :-) To launch the Script Editor, simply open a Finder window and navigate to Applications -> AppleScript -> Script Editor. Double-click on the Script Editor to launch.

Alternatively, you can just hit Command+Space to active Spotlight and then type "script e" and hit Enter.

Step 2: Write some AppleScript

The good news here is that the AppleScript can actually be very simple. The even better news is that I'm not even going to ask you to write it. You just have select, copy, and paste this text into the Script Editor:

do shell script "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager &> /dev/null &"

That's almost human readable :-) and it's pretty clear that it's simply doing for us what we used to do manually in the Terminal. The odd bits at the end are saying something like "just do what I said and don't tell me about it".

Step 3: Save your new AppleScript

Now that you've written ;-) the AppleScript, you need to save it. Select File -> Save As... and you'll be prompted with the normal options to give it a title (Save As: text field) and a location (Where: selection). I named my AppleScript "Firefox Profile Manager" and selected my Applications folder as the location.

Since we want this script to actually run when we double-click it, rather than opening back up in the Script Editor, before pressing Save we need to change the File Format from Script to Application Bundle. Don't mess with any of the Options check boxes. They're not relevant here.

Step 4: Optional Sexy

You're actually done already. You can double-click your new AppleScript Application and it will launch the Firefox Profile Manager. But there's one more step I like to do and that's to give it a better icon.

If you haven't done this before, it's really simple. Just right-click on your new Firefox Profile Manager's icon and select Get Info. Now go to your Applications folder, locate your actual Firefox, and just drag and drop the Firefox icon right on top of little AppleScript icon in the top left corner of the Get Info window. That's it.

Now you can just double-click on your sexy new Firefox Profile Manager icon and it'll start the Firefox Profile Manager. For quick access, you can drag that icon to your Dock and it'll create a nice launcher there, too.

But what if you want to bypass the Profile Manager all together? No problem!

To launch specific Firefox profiles, you can follow the exact same process as outlined above, except you'll use Firefox's Profile name option rather than the Profile Manager option. You simply paste do shell script "/Applications/firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P name &> /dev/null &" into the Script Editor (replacing name with the actual name of your profile,) and you've got yourself a shortcut that opens Firefox with a specific profile.

I hope this helps some of you Mac Firefox users and testers out there struggling with multiple Firefox profiles.

Oh, and if you've got a better or easier way of accomplishing this, or any corrections to my instructions, please let me know in comments.