Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

Mozilla Messaging has just released the first Alpha of Thunderbird 3.0 aka Shredder. This developmental release of Thunderbird can be downloaded here.

News Source: David Ascher

New Get a Mac Commerical debuted tongiht on Fox during American Idol. PC writes a contry song about Vista…

A meeting of PC’s Living With Vista Group.

Brand new Get A Mac ad debuted this week. Once again, things just don’t work out the way PC had hoped for…

I am going to clarify this ahead of time as in the future you are going to be seeing the names “Minefield” and “Shredder” used quite a bit for this point on. Minefield refers to the trunk/developmental builds for Firefox 3. This is not to be confused with Gran Paradiso, which is the code name for Firefox 3. On Sunday I switched my update channel from Beta to Nightly so I could start getting and testing the latest nightly releases of Minefield instead of just using the Beta 5 release of Gran Paradiso.

Now that I have y’all thoroughly confused, let me explain Shredder.  The developmental builds of Thunderbird 3 are going to be under the code name Shredder. So when Thunderbird 3.0a1 comes out soon it will (or may) be released under the name Shredder 3.0a1. David Ascher is currently seeking help for creating a Shredder Icon and artwork.

Edit: Percy gives a very good explanation of Minefield and Shredder in his article Shredder: in-development Thunderbird.

Back in December, it was announced Firefox 3 would be moving away from the traditional four-part numbering (ex Fx 2.0.0.*) to a three-part numbering (Fx 3.0.*). However at that time the numbering scheme was not yet supported on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). With RC of Firefox 3.0 (3.0Pre) coming available (on Minefield Trunk) AMO has made modifications to accept the new production version numbering.

• Firefox 2: 2.0 - 2.0.0.*
• Firefox 3: 3.0 - 3.0.* (Note: that with Firefox 3, it’s a three part version number)

News Source: Basil’s Bodacious Blog

Here’s an overview of this week’s Update Meeting:

• Fx 2.0.0.15 - Status: In Progress

  • Code freeze: June 6
  • Builds start: June 9
  • QA starts: June 10
  • Release to beta channel: June 17
  • Final Release: June 24

• Firefox 3 RC 1

• QA starts: May 12
• Release to beta channel:
• Final Release: Late May

• Gecko 1.9 RC 1 - No Report
  

• Lightning/Sunbird (Calendar Project) - No Report
• TBird 2.0.0.14 - Status: RELEASED
  • Major Bug: Bug 431819 – IMAP/POP/SMTP with SSL client auth, Thunderbird repeatedly prompts for client certificate
    • Reported: May 2
    • Confirmed: May 5
    • Assigned: May 10

• TBird 2.0.0.15 - Currently working on bug triage
• TBird 3.0a1
  • Thunderbird bug day: Every Thursday
  • Code Freeze: April 22
  • Release: Coming Soon
    

Complete Meeting Notes

You will notice in several places I have this disclaimer/warning:

WARNING! The Firefox Extension Guru is an independent beta-tester and is not affiliated with Mozilla Corporation. While most of these tips, tricks, suggestions, etc. are relatively simple to do, there is still a risk of damaging your profile.  Therefore these are recommended for advanced Firefox users and should be attempted at your own risk! Please! Consider backing-up your profile or creating a new profile before doing any testing or experimenting.

There is good reason for this as I am about to explain with my Adventure in Safe Mode today. I have spent most of this morning testing various add-ons in Firefox 3 upon the requests of some forum members at Go Firefox. I had run into a couple (such as FireFTP) that even after a forced install would not work correctly. Most incompatible extensions forced to install will either exhibit odd behaviour, not function correctly or at all. In cases such as those, it is just a matter of going into the add-ons manager and simply uninstalling the problematic extension.

Up until today this has worked 100% of the time when I run into problematic extensions. Someone asked about the Google Toolbar because they have a bit of a discontentment for the current Firefox built-in spellchecker. I found the Firefox Toolbar Version 3 and proceeded to install the add-on and was presented with the usual incompatible add-on warning window:

Figuring if there was a problem I could simply go back and uninstall the add-on, so I clicked Force Install and then choose to restart Firefox. Big mistake! As soon as Firefox 3 tried to start I got a dialog box telling me Firefox had crashed. Wow, never had that happen before! I clicked the button to try to restore Firefox. Much to my relief Firefox restarted…but wait why is it saying I have all of these incompatible add-ons? Oh crap, Firefox 3 restarted with my Firefox 2 (default) profile! So I closed Firefox 3 and clicked the short-cut which uses my Firefox 3 profile…Firefox has crashed…

Hmm, never been in this situation before, but I did know that Firefox (along with Thunderbird) have a safe mode feature. Normally, to access this you would go into your Firefox folder and select Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode). However when I installed Firefox 3, I choose not to have it create a program group.  However safe mode can also be activated by opening a command line and typing firefox.exe -safe-mode. So I hit WindowsKey + R and typed firefox.exe -safe-mode clicked OK and Firefox starts up in safe mode…sort of. Firefox 2 with my Firefox 2 profile started up in safe mode. Okay simple enough, I’ll just find where I have Firefox 3 installed and choose to run from that location. So this time I did WindowsKey + R and typed K:\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5\firefox.exe -safe-mode and clicked OK. This time around Firefox 3 did start, but it was with my Firefox 2 profile (I kept forgetting it is set as my default).

Okay, now what? I wouldn’t be all that upset if I had to nuke my Firefox 2 profile. But I am still switching between Firefox 2 and 3 quite a bit for testing. So if I could, I rather not delete that profile. To complicate matters though, I could not find a way to make my Firefox 3 profile the default. I got to thinking, normally when I start Firefox my shortcuts have a ‘-p’ switch on them to indicate which profile I want to use. The Safe Mode directions didn’t say I could use the ‘-p’ switch, but then again it didn’t say I could not. I’ll give it one more last chance to work before I nuked my Firefox 2 profile. This time with WindowsKey + R, I typed K:\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5\firefox.exe -safe-mode -p “Firefox3″ (I call my Firefox 3 profile Firefox3) and clicked OK.

Success, Firefox 3 with my Firefox 3 profile launched in Safe Mode. So now I was presented with the Firefox Safe Mode options window:

I went ahead and selected ‘Disable all add-ons’ even though that really wasn’t needed, but I didn’t want to take any chances. After selecting Continue in Safe Mode, I opened the add-ons manager and went to work. First task was to uninstall the broken Google Toolbar and then go through and re-enable the other 17 (I’ve added a couple more this morning) add-ons before restarting. This time around Firefox 3 started with no issues and I had my 17 add-ons enabled.

While what happened today is extremely rare it is the reason I have that Disclaimer/Warning. After a lot of trial and error (plus time) I was able to get Firefox working again. Even better I was able to keep both my profiles intact..for the most part. I have a feeling my Fireox 2 profile is a little messed up as a result of it being launched in Firefox 3. But that should be easy to fix.

Two months ago on March 11th I announced I would be Making the Switch to Fx 3.0. I did download and install Firefox 3 a couple weeks ago. However, I had not done much with it up until this weekend. Part of this was because I was having issues trying to get my bookmarks over from Firefox 2. The issue had nothing to do with the inability of Firefox 3 to import my Firefox 2 bookmarks. Rather it was I could not locate my Firefox 2 bookmarks within my profile folder. Turns out the profile folder path is a little different in Windows Vista than it is in Windows XP. I was not looking in the roaming profiles folder:

Once I was able to locate my bookmarks and get them imported, the next step was to get my extensions installed. This is when I noticed the add-ons user-interface (UI) is a little different in Firefox 3:

The Get Add-ons option allows you to search and install add-ons right from the add-ons UI instead of clicking a link to be taken to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). On my Firefox 2 profile I had 28 extensions installed with 1 (Talkback) disabled. I have weeded that number down to 15 extensions on my Firefox 3 profile:

• Abduction! 2.019
• Adblock Plus 0.7.5.4
• Brief 1.2b2 (available from developer’s site only)
• ChromEdit Plus 2.7.2
• CoLT 2.4.0
• Download Statusbar 0.9.6.1
• Flashblock 1.5.5
• FoxyTunes 3.0.1 (available from developer’s site only)
• Greasemonkey 0.7.20080121.0
• Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2
• PDF Download 1.0.1.1
• SearchLoad Options 0.5
• Toolbar Buttons 0.5.0.4
• Update Channel Selector 1.0.3
• WeatherBug 2.0.0.3

Both FoxyTunes and Brief I was able to do a ‘force install’ via the Nightly Tester Tools, but they would not function. While FoxyTunes was not too big of deal, Brief was the ‘make it or break it’ for me to switch over to Firefox 3.0b5 as my default browser. FoxyTunes notified me as soon as I restarted that there was a ‘newer version’ available and it gave a link to follow to the developer’s site. With Brief I ended up going to the developer’s site and found they had just put out a new version for the Firefox 3.0b5 release.

I have noticed an increase in performance, but some of that may be attributed to running a fresh and slim profile. Haven’t really explored much of the new features other than the AMO integration into the add-ons UI. Also noticed the green address bar on sites with high level SSL Certificates.  I will post more as I discover more features, annoyances (the new auto-complete address bar is starting to become one) and anything else with Firefox 3.

It has only been a few days since I announced Tweaks Section Redesign Coming Soon (on ffextensionguru.com). I am please to announce the new Tweaks section is now live.  I also have created a direct link (http://tweaks.ffextensionguru.com) to the Tweaks section. The redesign went a lot better than making the transition to Firefox 3.0b5 as my default browser (more on that later).