Airbag is now Breakpad

It has been a little over six-months since we posted about Airbag (Airbag coming soon to Mozilla Applications) which was suppose to replace Talkback. Airbag wasn’t implemented in Fx 2 and until the Alpha 3 release wasn’t in Gran Paradiso (Fx 3) either. The crash reporting tool formerly known as Airbag is now called breakpad (no, not brakepad) and is still in development. Look for a fully developed version in the final release of Firefox 3 later this summer (or fall).

News Source: Mozilla Links

PodTech:Inside Mozilla Foundation (the folks who bring us Firefox)

Robert Scoble interviews Mozilla CEO, better known as Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker. Note: Interview is about 40 minutes long!

All Pre-Existing Add-ons Public Again

I had mentioned in New AOM & The Sandbox some of the pre-existing add-ons (such as Resizeable Textarea) had been in placed in the sandbox. This was causing users to get an “Add-on not found!” message when they tried to follow a link to an existing add-on that was in the sandbox. Based on user feedback this has changed:

All add-ons that were public in AMO prior to Remora’s launch this weekend should now be publicly available on AMO again.

News Source: Mozilla Webdev

Weekly Update 2007-03-26

Some interesting developments in today’s Weekly Update meeting. As most folks know, Fx 1.5.0.11 and 2.0.0.3 were released last week on Tuesday, March 20th. Now, the next phase is going to be Fx/TB 1.5.0.12 and Fx 2.0.0.4:

Release scheduled to be released tentatively around May 15 (tue), taking into consideration All-Hands, Major Updates release, and Tbird 2 release, and a beta release. Shooting for a 4/20 code freeze.

Now, that tentative release date is very interesting…recall Mozilla had announced (and is still “warning” users) that Fx 1.5 will only be maintained with security and stability updates until April 24, 2007. So looks like Fx 1.5 users will get a little more time before Mozilla drop support.You will also notice that Major Update(s) and TB 2 were mentioned as well. Sadly, that is all the news there is on the Major Update or Major Updates (would this include going from TB 1.5 to 2.0?).

News Source: Mozilla Wiki - WeeklyUpdates

New AOM & The Sandbox

It seems there are still load balancing issues with the new AOM site which is why it here one moment and gone the next. As of this posting, the new AOM site is up and running. They have also pulled a mass amount of add-ons out of the Sandbox.

The Sandbox is where add-ons start their life and where they will remain until they have been tested and found worthy to be placed on the public side. For a more detailed explanation of the Sandbox see Claus Valca comment on the post AOM (was) Launched

So, if you follow a link to an add-on get the message “Add-on not found!” and are redirected to the main add-ons site, chances are it is the sandbox. So, you ask how does one access the Sandbox? Well it is a bit of a tedious process:

1. First, you have to be registered with Mozilla Add-ons.
2. Once you have registered, you need to log-in.
3. Once you are logged in, click on your e-mail address displayed on the upper right portion of the screen.
4. This will open the profile screen. Check the option ‘Show sandbox?’
   
5. When you return to the add-ons site you will still be in the public section as designated by the grey bar. Click the link for Sandbox.
   
6. Once you click the ‘Sandbox’ link the header should look like the one below and you will able to search for add-ons within the Sandbox. To return to the ‘Public’ area just click the public link.
   

In the future the Mozilla developers may allow access to add-ons in the sandbox via a direct link, but will give users a warning. In the meantime users are simply going to get the “Add-on not found!” message and be redirected the main Add-ons page. On a positive note, if the add-on is in the ‘Public’ area, the old links/URLs will still work.

Resizeable Textarea

Ever find the textarea in a forum, online form, or wherever is too small or even too large for your needs. The Resizeable Textarea extension allows you to resize some textareas. Doesn’t seem to work for all textareas (especially with Rich-Text editors) but this is a small enough add-on (4 KB) that you might as well add it to your collection anyway. If a textarea is resizeable the mouse pointer will change to the double-arrows when you hover over the bottom right corner of the textarea.

Resizeable Textarea works with Fx 1.0-2.0.0.* ALL and is about 4 KB (no user interface or options keep the size down).

UPDATE 07/08/07: This add-on is back on the Mozilla Add-ons site: Resizeable Textarea.

Source: Mozilla Links

Firefox 3a3 Released

Earlier this week I had commented that neither the Firefox 3 Status or Gecko 1.9 or even the Weekly Update meetings had any indication as to a release date for the Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 milestone. Well, Mozilla has released the Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 Alpha 3 milestone earlier today. A couple of new features (see complete release notes) for this milestone:

• Animated PNG (APNG) images are now supported.

From what I have read Animated PNG are suppose to be a lot better quality and more superior as the color pallet is not restricted to the 256 colors compared to animated GIF.

• Introduced support for <link rel=”offline-resource”>, which puts resources into the browser’s offline cache. This allows a web application to ensure that its resources are available in the cache when the browser goes into offline mode. See Marking Resources for Offline Use for further details on offline support.

Offline support/applications seems to be the “next big thing” for Fx 3. I am not really sure about the potential uses of this feature.

• Added a new preference, “Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page”, which notifies the user when the page specifies HTTP-EQUIV=refresh.

I am not sure if this is going to be a nice feature or more of an annoyance. Granted it should protect the user against being unknowingly redirected to a malicious site. But yet, redirects are quite commonly used legitimately so it could become a feature that many users will elect to disable. I’ll have to look into this further and see if may be there will be “white list” (approved sites) for this option.

The next Gran Paradiso/Gecko 1.9 milestone is going to be Alpha 4 which is suppose to include the return of Places. No details as of yet for a release date (as if we had any details about the Alpha 3 release).

News Source: Mozilla Developer News (beta)

AOM (was) Launched

Apparently late last night Mozilla launched the new Add-Ons Manager (AOM) site or at least that is what Ryan at CyberNet News is saying. For reasons unknown at this time it seems Mozilla has reverted back to the original AOM. Of course there are several theories as to why this may have happened from missing add-ons, broken links and issues with the sandbox (the place where unapproved extensions are kept). So it looks like we will have to wait a little longer for the new and (some what) improved AOM site.

Source: CyberNet News

Gecko 1.9 & Animated PNGs

Not much of a surprise here, today’s Gecko 1.9 meeting didn’t shed any light on the Alpha 3 release date. For the curious and the Fx Geeks, today’s Meeting Notes. However, I did find something of interest in regards to the future Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 via Mozilla Links. Animated PNGs (or APNG) will be supported in Fx 3! While this has landed on the trunk, it still sounds like it needs some more work.

New Fx Releases Today!

The latest security updates for Firefox have been released today. Fx 1.5.0.11 and 2.0.0.3 are now available for download.

• Firefox 1.5.0.11

  • Release Notes
  • Download

• Firefox 2.0.0.3

  • Release Notes
  • Download