Easy Firefox

Archive for February, 2010

Want to be able to create a much more dynamic signature for your webmail accounts and more, the will show off your instant messenger names, social network links and more details about yourself?  WiseStamp is a pretty awesome addition to Firefox, that will let you do that and so much more, in a very stylish way.

Once installed, you get your own WYSIWYG editor to create and edit your own signature collection.  You can add links via RSS, instant messenger service or social profiles from around the Web too.

Still need more information?  Check out this awesome video tutorial demonstrating what all you can do with this amazing add-on for Firefox.

WiseStamp has gotten praise from all around the Web, from Lifehacker to Mashable – so it is well worth checking out if you need to micro-manage a lot of e-mail signatures, or rotate the one you use around a ‘bit depending on your mood.

It has built in support for these webmail services:

• Gmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• AOL Mail
• Hotmail

As far as social profiles and services you can plug with it, there are almost 50 to choose from, including:  Netflicks, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Friendfeed, Digg, Google, Blogger, Tumbler, Twitter and many more.

You can pick up the WiseStamp extension for Firefox on the Firefox Add-ons site, and learn more about the amazing tool on their official web site, WiseStamp.com.

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© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

 
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The second Labs Night of 2010 is fast approaching. The Wikimedia Foundation has graciously offered to let us hold the event at their headquarters in San Francisco. It will be Thursday, February 25th, from 6 pm onward.

Space is limited, so if you would like to attend, be sure to sign up on our Meetup page as soon as possible to ensure your place. That page also has the address and information about finding parking or taking mass transit.

Our main featured speaker will be Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation Defender. We’ll also have a presentation from the Wikimedia foundation, and a round of updates on various Mozilla projects from Labs, Addons and more.

There may also be a chance for you to give a short (5-minute) presentation on your own project. We’ll squeeze in as many of these presentations as we have time for. It’s a great way to get the word out about new projects related to the Web or to open-source, to get feedback on your idea from like-minded individuals, and to network. If you would like to give a presentation, please add it to this wiki page.

Dinner will be provided. We hope you’ll join us for food, fun, cool demos, and inspiring conversations!

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In early December we invited the wider community to design a major new feature of Firefox 4 together with us – The Home Tab Design Challenge. Many conversations and iterations later, 47 of you submitted a video, showing and explaining your ideas & concepts.

Now it is time for you to vote for the People’s Choice Award! [more...]

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As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.5.8 and Firefox 3.0.18 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as free downloads:

• Firefox 3.5.8 is available at http://firefox.com/
• Firefox 3.0.18 is available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3.5 or Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 3.5.8 Release Notes and the Firefox 3.0.17 Release Notes.

Note: All Firefox 3 users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 by downloading it from http://firefox.com/ or by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu in Firefox 3.0.18.

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Filed under, “not sure if I need it – but thanks, just in case” we have Texto.  This add-on for Firefox will allow you to launch an external text editor to edit text forms in Firefox. 

Here is a little more about the add-on from the Texto developer:

This add-on strips out much of the Mozex functionality to focus on launching external text editors. Features the ability to customize editor behavior for different websites, and uses the asynchronous process support in Firefox 3.6 to update textareas automatically when the external editor is finished, without polling.

Troubleshooting Tips for Windows Users

Seems as if version 3.0.1 of this add-on has some problems with Windows 7 and Windows Vista (possibly) so there is your official word of warning.  If you have any trouble, try the beta release of the newest version here (scroll down for the “Install beta version” link).

Overall though, I have to say this is a pretty neat function for those who might need it.  You can pick up the Texto add-on for Firefox on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!

© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

 
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The final release of the Jetpack prototype (0.8) has landed! Jetpack is a Mozilla Labs project which makes it possible for anyone who knows standard web skills (HTML, Javascript, CSS) to make Firefox add-ons.

New APIs in Jetpack 0.8

Toolbar

You can now include simple toolbar buttons in the Firefox UI! The Toolbar API makes it easy to tie browser functionality to these buttons, have a look:

var myButton = {
  id: "fooButton",
  label: "FOO!",
  tooltip: "Click on my to do something.",
  image: "http://www.mozilla.org/favicon.ico",
  click: function(event) { console.log("FOO! has been clicked") }
}

// Append the button to the toolbar
jetpack.toolbar.navigation.append(myButton);

For further info on this API, see JEP 21.

Places

The other significant API available in this release is Places. Places is the name for history and bookmarking methods contained in Firefox. You can access Places functionality in the following ways:

function titleParse(doc) {
  let title = doc.title.split();
  for (let idx in title) {
    if (title[idx] === 'foo'){
      jetpack.places.bookmark.create({url: document.location, title: document.title, tags:['foo', 'jetpack-auto-tag']});
      break;
    }
  }

  // lets alert the user - tell them how many bookmarks we have with 'foo':
  function callback(results) {
    alert("You have " + results.count + " bookmarks where the title contains 'foo'! Very Nice!");
  }

  jetpack.places.find({where: 'bookmarks', phrase: 'foo'}, callback);
}

jetpack.tabs.onReady( titleParse );

For further info on this API, see JEP 22.

Jetpack, the next phase…

With the release of Jetpack 0.8, the prototyping of Jetpack has come to a close and our efforts are shifting toward the goal of developing a mature, production-level version of the platform. This production version of Jetpack will phase in a new security model and a more extensible architecture with code reuse and true Mozilla-style code collaboration as core tenets. Look for a technology preview in the coming weeks! To view more detailed information on this next phase of Jetpack development, please visit the Jetpack wiki section found here.

- Daniel Buchner, on behalf of the Jetpack team

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When you load up a dozen or more tabs all at once, Firefox can slow down to a crawl.  Now, you can either choose to stop overwhelming Firefox with too many tabs or you can grab this helpful add-on for Firefox that will only load up the tab you need at the time, with multiple tabs still available. 

Just put it on your Bar Tab.

Here is how the magic happens.  When you click on a link that is going to be opened in a new tab, Firefox would normally go ahead and load up that content in the background.  What BarTab changes is the fact that it prevents Firefox from loading any content until you actually click over to the tab, saving yourself some resources and wait time.  You only pull up the data from the web page when you need it. 

If you restart Firefox a lot with multiple tabs open, you get one more bonus.  It will work on a browser restart too, which means Firefox will be coming back a lot quicker. 

You can pick up the Bar Tab extension from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @mitchkeeler on Twitter!

© Mitch Keeler 2010 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

 
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A Mozilla Developer Preview of improvements in the Gecko layout engine is now available for download.  This is a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform, which forms the core of rich Internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only. As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have and encourage users to help us by filing bugs.

This developer preview introduces several new features, including:

• Support for CSS Transitions. This support is not quite complete: support for animation of transforms and gradients has not yet been implemented.
• Support for SMIL Animation in SVG. Support for animating some SVG attributes is still under development and the animateMotion element isn’t supported yet.
• Support for WebGL, which is disabled by default but can be enabled by changing a preference. See this blog post and this blog post for more details.
• Support for the getClientRects and getBoundingClientRect methods on Range objects. See bug 396392 for details.
• Support for the setCapture and releaseCapture methods on DOM elements. See bug 503943 for details.
• Support for the HTML5 History.pushState() and History.replaceState() methods and the popstate event. See bug 500328 for details.
• Support for the -moz-image-rect() value for background-image. See bug 113577 for more details.

and several other significant changes, including:

• On Mac OS X, we render text using Core Text rather than ATSUI.
• We rewrote major parts of the code for handling scrolling. See bug 526394 for details.
• We rewrote the way a snapshot of a document is taken in order to print or print preview. See bug 487667 for details.
• We made significant changes to table border handling. See bug 452319 and bug 43178 for details.
• We made various architectural changes to improve Web page performance.

More information on these changes is in the release notes, as well as the “Upcoming Firefox features for developers” article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Please use the following links when downloading this Mozilla Developer Preview:

• Installer for Windows
• DMG for Mac OS X (10.5 or better required)
• Archive for Linux

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2010 will be a big year for Thunderbird. Last year, we launched Thunderbird 3, which is a huge milestone for us. In this post, I’d like to give people a heads-up as to what the coming year will look like. I’ll focus on three topics: our plans for innovation through add-ons, Thunderbird 3.1, and our first steps towards making Thunderbird self-sustaining.

Innovation through Add-ons

We believe that Thunderbird is a much better development platform than ever. This means that building innovative experiences on top of Thunderbird is easier than ever. We’ll be building on that platform ourselves and helping others innovate as well. In particular, we’re going to be using add-ons in a few ways:

• If we have an idea for a change to an existing Thunderbird feature, we’d like to roll it out first as an add-on, so that we can get feedback on early versions of the idea without having to incur all of the up-front costs of landing that change into the “trunk” builds. This should allow us to validate (or reject) ideas much faster. A great example of how this can work is the Personas feature, which matured as an add-on, and is now a standard (and awesome) feature of Firefox 3.6.
• We sometimes think of features that “would be cool” (see e.g. conversation arcs, tagsoup), but don’t necessarily make sense to integrate into the core product. Making an add-on here makes sense because it lets us share those ideas with others who think they’re worthwhile. Sometimes “cool ideas” become “big ideas” over time (google calendar add-on.

Having core engineers develop add-ons is also one of the best ways to ensure that the add-on platform is as good as possible.

Thunderbird 3.1

In parallel with some exciting innovations in add-ons, we’ll be pursuing more gradual change strategies within Thunderbird 3 itself.

Thunderbird 3.0 is getting security & bugfix releases (3.0.1 is out, 3.0.2 is coming soon).

Thunderbird 3.1 is also underway. We’ve already released the first alpha, and a first beta is getting defined. It will be focused on a couple of areas:

• Making the upgrade from Thunderbird 2 as painless as possible: Some of the features that we introduced in 3.0 were confusing to Thunderbird 2 users, and some of the defaults which we think made sense to new users were quite surprising to long-term Thunderbird users. We’re reviewing the upgrade process and making sure that users get to opt-in to the more radical changes. We realize it can be quite unpleasant to have your software change unexpectedly.
• Improving some of the new features in Thunderbird 3: The feedback for the new features has been both positive and constructive — look for refinements on the concepts introduced in Thunderbird 3.

Ensuring Economic Sustainability

Thunderbird deserves to be self-sustaining. Paying one’s way is a great validation of any effort, and it’s in the interest of Thunderbird users everywhere that we figure out a way to get there. As promised when we formed Mozilla Messaging, we’re starting to explore ways to make Thunderbird self-sustaining while at the same time promoting the Mozilla mission (as articulated by the Mozilla Manifesto). We’re specifically looking to identify business models that create economic value by improving the user experience of Thunderbird users. This is nothing new for Mozilla. The foundations of an open source codebase, the ability for users to opt-out of commercial relationships, and an architecture that allows plugging in alternative providers for whatever service or product we end up partnering with are non-negotiable requirements. With that as a foundation, we’re looking for ways to make the online life of our users better, and within those ways, identifying those which can help ensure Thunderbird’s long life.

This will happen through a set of public opt-in experiments. For each business model that we try, we’ll build a prototype, announce it, get data to evaluate it, solicit feedback from users, and evaluate whether it’s worth continuing. Anecdotal data suggests that plenty of Thunderbird users are happy to be offered commercial services which provide them value and help Mozilla too.

In addition, I’ll be actively soliciting input and help from what I’d like to call “business contributors”. Just like we encourage programmers and others to contributing to Mozilla through patches and other internet-mediated activities, I’m going to setup ways to “open source” the business model and business development activities. I’ve found in conversations with my peers that almost every business leader who’s aware of what we do would like to contribute, but we haven’t made it easy. Identifying and facilitating such contributions is one of my personal goals for the year.

To start, here are two possible ways for business folks to contribute:

• I’ll be in the Bay Area next week for a panel at MAAWG in San Francisco and other meetings, and will be organizing a dinner/drinks event for people who want to chat about Mozilla Messaging business models. Contact me by email if you’re interested (dascher at mozillamessaging.com).
• We’re hiring a business development lead to help drive this effort. If you know someone who you think understands business development and would be a great fit for Mozilla, point them to the job description.

I’m looking forward to the conversations!

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A few months ago, we needed more desks for our office, so I figured I’d order them from the Ikea website. Easy to do, except that the Ikea.ca store doesn’t work with US credit cards, and our corporate card is a US card. So I bite my tongue about the craziness of e-commerce in Canada, knowing it’s not just an Ikea problem, and I use my personal card, and will deal with expensing it internally. Annoying, but oh well.

Then I’m blown away because delivery takes eons, because the desks have to come from the “online distribution center” in Quebec (”it’s Canada, so it’s got to be close, right?”), and not from either of the two warehouses within 20 miles of the delivery address (who do have the items in stock!). But I’m busy, so I live w/ the delay. Environmentally criminal, but oh well.

This month, we need more desks, and I’ve learned my lesson, so I know to take time out of my weekend to go to Ikea, order the desks and chairs. After about 45 minutes in the store, it looks like we’ll have delivery on Tuesday morning. A few high-end desks and what seems like their most expensive chairs, but I have a soft spot for Ikea, and their furniture is working out fine for us.

Turns out the chairs aren’t in stock, so they have to be scheduled for delivery a few weeks out and delivery has to be charged separately. Annoying, and a bit more expensive, but oh well.

Monday, they call and say that we hadn’t talked about delivery times (we had), and we reschedule it for the same day/time. Seems disorganized, but oh well.

Tuesday, they come and call my cell to let us know they’re downstairs, but I’m on the phone on an important call, and I thought it was someone else, so I figure I’ll get the message when I’m done with my call. By the time I get off the phone, I’m told they went on with their route, and I need to reschedule another delivery, which will cost me $75. Frustrating, but I blame it on the olympics and how it’s messing with deliveries everywhere, and blame myself for not taking the call, but oh well.

I call back to reschedule, and I’m told that I need to go back to the store to reschedule, because I need to pay for another delivery. WTF? After a bit of back and forth with the CSR, I ask to talk to a manager, and I’m told to do that I need to go to the store. WTF? I then ask about canceling the order, and I’m told that, you guessed it, I need to go back to the store.

Oh, if I want to lodge a complaint, I can do it on their website. I’ll definitely be sending them a link to this page.

I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend. What I’m not sure of is where I’ll get the next batch of furniture from. What a totally horrible customer experience, just because they don’t have a system for paying over the phone (or, hey, the internet?!?!) for silly delivery fees.

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