Weekly Update 2007-08-27

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

• Fx 2.0.0.7 - Bug Triage
• TBird 2.0.0.7 – Triage on-going
• TBird 1.5.0.13 – Released on Thursday (8/23)
• TBird Major Update (TBird 1.5.0.12 > 2.0.0.6) – No more major update until next cycle
• TBird 3 – No Report
• Fx3 – Ongoing daily smoke testing. Focus testing of new features such as Places, Download Manager, Search bugs. See new test plan for plug-ins manager.
• Gecko 1.9 – M8 Code Freeze on September 5th. Here what’s being worked

  • 1.9 Blockers Only
  • Prioritizing those blockers which are high complexity and may have unknowns causing longer time to implement.
  • Security Bugs
  • Crashers
  • Memory Leaks and Performance
  • Hangs, Regressions, and other broken features.

• Mozilla Community – Firefox Campus Edition released August 24th.

Reminder: There will not be a weekly Update Meeting next Monday, September 3rd due to US/Canada Labor Day Holiday

Complete meeting notes.

Firefox Campus Edition

Mozilla has come out with another custom distribution of Firefox, this one is targeted to College students.  The Firefox Campus Edition is Fx 2.0.0.6 bundled with FoxyTunes, Stumbled Upon and Zotero extensions.

 

For those who are not familiar with these extensions, FoxyTunes allows users to control most software media players (Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Amarok, etc) right from the Fx browser; StumbleUpon is a social is a social networking site where people can share web sites they stumble upon and Zotero is a tool for both online and paper references collection that aids students and academics on researches.

News Source: Mozilla Links

Sneak Peak: zunePhone

Here’s a sneak peak of Microsoft’s zunePhone (a work in progress)…

 

Weekly Update 2007-08-20

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

• Fx 2.0.0.7 - No report
• TBird 2.0.0.7 – No report
• TBird 1.5.0.13 – Going thru QA at this time and could be released this week
• TBird Major Update (TBird 1.5.0.12 > 2.0.0.6) – Released last week
• TBird 3 –
• Fx3 – New features released and soon-to-be released
  • Released Items:
    • Plugin management (mwu, carryover from last week)
    • Plugin blocklisting (mwu)
    • New Downloads Manager UI (sdwilsh, carryover from last week, number of bugfixes)
    • New Bookmarking UI with starring and tagging (mano)
  • Soon-To-Be Released
    • Vista Parental controls
    • Post-submit pwmgr prompt (infobar, not modal)
    • Unified history/bookmarks search for location bar autocomplete
    • Web apps as protocol handlers
• Gecko 1.9 – Continuing to resolve regressions from items that landed on the M7 (Alpha 7) feature complete release.
• Mozilla Community – Fx3/Gecko 1.9 Projects with help of the MoCo Summer Interns (Christine Yen, Steve Won, Michael Wu and Shawn Wilsher):
  • Plugin Management
    • Longstanding request/need
    • Support disabling/uninstalling all plugins
    • Blocklisting of vulnerable plugin versions (top vector of attack against Firefox users)
  • Windows/Linux shutdown handling
    • Better shutdown handling/experience (single save session/quit dialog)
    • Avoids dataloss and/or confusing dialogs on next startup
  • Places
    • UI prototyping/implementation help
    • Fixing core front end bugs
  • Protocol handling front end
    • Still in progress, but major step forward
  • Download manager rewrite
    • Backend rewrite to move to SQLite, improve API for extension authors
    • Frontend redesign to support ease of use, searching
  • SQLite improvements
    • Move to current SQLite, performance improvements and bugfixes
    • Use our i18n support in place of ICU

Complete meeting notes.

Update: ThunderBrowser

ThunderBrowser has a new site:  http://thunderbrowse.com/  also check out the ThunderBlog.

Speed Up OpenOffice Launch

One thing that bothers me about OpenOffice is it seems to take a long time to launch (not as bad Adobe Acrobat). Try these simple tweaks from an article (How to make OpenOffice run faster) I found on the CybertNet Forum. You should see a significant reduction in the start time. A couple notes:

1. These directions were written for the Ubuntu version but work just as well with Win XP and Vista (some default settings may differ in Win32 versions).
2. Most of us on the forum did not bother enabling the pre-loader but still saw a nice increase in the launch speed.

Tip: Change Default Text Editor in Fx

By default Firefox uses Notepad its own viewer when viewing the source of a page (CTRL+U or View, Page Source or selecting View Page Source from the Context Menu). You can select which text editor (such as Notepad++) Firefox uses by default with this simple tweak:

1. In a new tab type about:config in the address bar
2. In the filter field type view_source.editor.external
3. Double-click on the entry to set it to true
4. In the filter field type view_source.editor.path
5. Double-click on the entry and in the pop-up box enter the path for your text editor
6. Click OK and close the tab

Source: CyberNet Forum

Weekly Update 2007-08-13

Here are the details of today’s (very short) Weekly Update meeting:

• Fx 2.0.0.7 – No Report
• TBird 2.0.0.7 – Triage on-going no release date yet.
• TBird Major Update (TBird 1.5.0.13 > 2.0.0.6) – Beta set for 8/13 with Major Update later this week
• TBird 3 – No Report
• Fx3 – No Report
• Gecko 1.9 – More blockers
• Mozilla Community - Spread Fx2:
  

If we get infrastructure up today or tomorrow, we can have the staging site up for a first review at the end of the week, we hope to release a version for widespread testing on 8/27.

Complete meeting notes.

Tip: Removing Added Words From Fx Dictionary

The built-in Spellcheck with Firefox 2 is great, but it is very easy to accidentally add a word to the dictionary that you didn’t want to. However, it is not so easy to remove the word or words added in error. Actually it is easy to do just not really documented anywhere. After looking around on Google to help a Go Firefox! forum member with this issue, I found the process:

1. Close Firefox (Firefox saves the dictionary file upon closing)
2. Navigate to your profile folder (Locate your profile folder)
3. Look for the file persdict.dat
4. Open with a text-editor
   • Notepad is NOT recommended as it removes all the line breaks between words. OpenOffice Writer works well.
5. Find the misspelled word or words and remove.
6. Save the file and restart Firefox

This tip also works with Fx 3, Flock, Netscape 9 Navigator and Thunderbird*. Likely works with any browser/mail client that is Gecko based.

*Not sure if this going to change though when Mozilla moves over to Hunspell with TBird 3

Fx 3: Plugins added to Add-Ons UI

The latest nightly builds of Fx 3 have now added Plugins to the add-ons UI (which previously only contained Extensions and Themes). This allows users to enable and disable the installed plug-ins much easier than before. However as Percy points out on his article, there are a couple issue:

An option not currently implemented is a way to check for updates for the installed plugins. A periodic check for new, more stable and safer versions and automated updates would be a big step forward security-wise.

Then there’s the problem with plugins that involve more than one file. For example, QuickTime is split into five library files, each of them to handle a different file types subset. The Plugins page lists the plugin as many times as there are files and there’s currently no way to tell which one is related to what. Java is another popular plugin in the same situation but Mozilla is already evaluating options to address these cases.

An update feature is a must as there is really no easy way to know if you are running the most current version of a plugin. Currently users will need to do an about:plugins (which does not list the plugins in a user friendly way) check the version numbers of the currently installed plugins, then compare that to the current versions listed in the plugins section on addons.mozilla.org site. I have to think the main problem with trying to implement an update process is all the plugins are third party and outside the control of Mozilla.

Click For Full Size Image

The screenshot shows what Percy was describing with plugins that have more than one file associated with them. There is no way to tell which of the QuickTime dll files are associated with that particular entry. Of course this is just pulling the info from about:plugins, so it is a matter of the plugins developers to make changes to the plugin description. Again, this is something outside the control of Mozilla.

News Source: Mozilla Links