Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

A reader on Todd Bishops Microsoft Blog sent in this photo taken back in October at A&D Computer in Milford, NH. This photo was in response to Bishop’s article Vista at one year: Progress and pain.

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David Ascher head of the newly formed MailCo has posted plans for Thunderbird 3. The main plan is to increase the already sizable user base (millions) by including with Thunderbird 3 built-in calendar integration (based off of Lighting) much like Microsoft Outlook.  Also to introduce a better search function such as those found in Gmail or Mail.app. In addition to these plans is the goal is to have a final release of Thunderbird 3 by the end of 2008. Here is an overview of David’s plans for Thunderbird 3 in 2008:

• Goal:

  • To have at public milestone build of Thunderbird 3 in 2008.

    • Thunderbird 3’s overall aim is to significantly grow its user base worldwide, as well as build a strong foundation for later Thunderbird releases.

• Release-defining features:

  • an integrated calendaring feature, based on Lightning
  • a better search experience, especially for message content searches
  • a better overall user experience

• Less user-visible but important goals include:

  • Significant headway on getting rid of Mork and RDF
  • A concerted effort to improving the extensions ecosystem for Thunderbird, including refactorings, FUEL, developer documentation, and user experience
  • Better test coverage and performance metrics in place to support refactoring goals

• Schedule

  • Figuring out the schedule at this stage is hard, as it will depend on who shows up with energy and talent. I would like to set some placeholder milestones for discussion, however:

    • Alpha builds in Q1
    • Beta builds without calendaring starting in Q2
    • Widely useful builds by Q4 (although whether they’re branded “release” will depend on quality, as always.
    • We’re revise the schedule as we gain knowledge.

It is important to understand Thunderbird 3 will not be the end of Thunderbird. Planning for Thunderbird 4 will be beginning soon and will included features that were not possible to be part of Thunderbird 3 due to the aggressive build schedule. But with that said, tabbed browsing/navigation is a planned feature for Thunderbird 3 (however, t was for Thunderbird 2 as well).

There is quite a bit of information on the Thunderbird 3 Mozilla Wiki Page.

News Source: Mozilla Links

Reminder: Due to the scheduled meeting time and my work schedule, I am not be able to get the meeting notes posted until the following Tuesday.

• Fx 2.0.0.12

  • Release Schedule Updated:

    • Code Freeze: Friday, January 25
    • QA Testing: Tuesday, January29
    • Beta Channel Release: Tuesday, February 5
    • Scheduled to Release: Tuesday, February 12

• Gecko 1.9 Beta 3

  • Status of Beta 3:
  • 55 P1s
  • 168 P2s
  • 186 P3s

• Firefox 3 Beta 3

• < 20 P1s, getting close to b3-ready, freeze is tomorrow.
• Global frecency landed, even-more-awesomebar
• Proto for OS X landed last night, for Macaliciousness

• Lightning/Sunbird (Calendar Project) - No Report
• TBird 1.5.0.14 - No Report
• TBird 2.0.0.12 - No Report
• TBird 3 - No Report

Complete meeting notes.

Press Release from Netscape Communications Corp:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (January 22, 1998 ) — Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: NSCP) today announced bold plans to make the source code for the next generation of its highly popular Netscape Communicator client software available for free licensing on the Internet. The company plans to post the source code beginning with the first Netscape Communicator 5.0 developer release, expected by the end of the first quarter of 1998. This aggressive move will enable Netscape to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by incorporating their best enhancements into future versions of Netscape’s software. This strategy is designed to accelerate development and free distribution by Netscape of future high-quality versions of Netscape Communicator to business customers and individuals, further seeding the market for Netscape’s enterprise solutions and Netcenter business.

This was during a time when Netscape was the browser of choice, especially within the educational segment.  However that would start coming to an end thanks to Microsoft (and later AOL):

Netscape was still the dominant web browser: 65 million users and 90% market share in the educational segment according to Netscape’s own accounts. But Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was grabbing share at a furious pace thanks to it being free (at a time Netscape was about$30) and specially the fact that it came bundled with Windows 95 and upcoming Windows 98 (released on June 1998).

Keep in mind the name ‘Mozilla’ at that time was nothing more than the name of Netscape’s user agent, the name a browser uses to contact the web server. Later on Mozilla would become the name of this open source project.  See History of Firefox & Mozilla (PDF - 4.93 MB) for a very rich and detailed time line. Ten years later IE now dominates the market, but has been losing ground to Firefox, SeaMonkey (Mozilla) and Opera.  Netscape thanks to AOL is for intents and purposes a dying (if not already dead) browser. But in the end, this bold move lead up to the creation of the Mozilla Suite now SeaMonkey and Phoenix now Firefox.

New Sources: Mozilla Links & Mitchell’s Blog

When I first saw this extension over at Learn Firefox, I was thinking it was just a scaled down version of Linky. But I decided I would go ahead and give it go anyway, especially since I discovered I don’t have Linky on this machine. Further I also discovered Linky hasn’t been updated since March 2006 and maxes out on the Firefox 3.0 builds at Alpha 3 (Beta 2 is the current build).

So I installed it in both Firefox and Thunderbird and restarted the applications. First thing that happened when I restarted I was presented with dialog box telling me to check the Options and I would not see this box again. It is when I looked the options (more on these in a bit) that I discovered this extensions does more than just open plain text URLs. When you right-click on a plain text URL (http://ffextensionguru.com) you are presented with these options in your context menu:

If you highlight a partial link (no http:// or www) or text you are presented with these options in your context menu:

• Unaltered - Opens the highlighted text as-is
• With ‘www.*’ - adds www in front of the highlighted text/partial URL (*). Example highlighting ffextensionguru.com and selecting this option would open the link as www.ffextensionguru.com
• With ‘www.*.com’ or ‘www.*.net’ or ‘www.*.org’ - adds www in front of the highlighted text/partial URL (*) then .com, .net, or .org at the end. Example highlighting ffextensionguru and selecting the With ‘www.*.com’ option would also open the link as www.ffextensionguru.com
• With ‘ftp.*’ - adds ftp in front of the highlighted text/partial URL (*). Example highlighting ffextensionguru.com and selecting the option would open the link as ftp.ffextensionguru.com

The last options (under the –) are what makes this extension so much better than Linky. You can highlight some text and select to perform a search in Google (though this a default context menu item) or (even better) in Wikipedia. Now I mentioned earlier about options…you can customize the context menu by adding/removing/changing and even re-order the options:

To add a New entry is fairly simple once you understand the formating. The things to remember for any type of entry are ‘*’ is the highlighted text ‘&’ will be the hot-key (underlined) letter for that item. For specialty links (Google, Wikipedia, etc). You will start with the text for the menu item followed by ‘|’ (note this is SHIFT + \) then the URL. I added one for YouTube. So in the New entry box I typed:

In &YouTube|http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=*

Now I have an ‘In YouTube’ option in the context menu:

There appears to be a minor formating bug that will resolve itself once you add a New entry. Hard to explain but this earlier screen shot shows what the context menu looked like prior to adding the New entry for YouTube:

Click For Larger Image
URL Link works with Firefox 2 & 3 and is 96 KB.

Tip Source: Learn Firefox

Reminder: Due to the scheduled meeting time and my work schedule, I am not be able to get the meeting notes posted until the following Tuesday.

• Fx 2.0.0.12

• Code Freeze: Friday, January 18
• Scheduled to release on February 5, 2008
• This is in bug triage and bug fix verification right now.
• Updated the release checklist

• Fx 3.0/Gecko 1.9 Beta 3-

  • Status of Beta 3:
  • 24 P1s
  • 142 P2s
  • 185 P3s
  • Reminder: Next proposed freeze is on Jan 22.
  • Testing new features: Places [abillings], added litmus test cases for privacy/security (page info cookie handling) [tomcat]
  • Found regression in Places (bug 411989) [marcia, tomcat]
  • Filed topcrash report based on Socorro topcrash list [ss]
  • Verified fixed assertion bugs with debug Builds [tomcat]
  • Continuing to test for memory leaks. Created a test plan. Filed 29! new Leak Bugs since last week! Tracking Bug bug 402335. Created Leak Testing How-To for extension devs and others [tomcat]
  • Investigated qawanted bugs [marcia]
  • Investigated a11y bug 411920, having to do with the fact that two new constants Mozilla offers for getting Text at a given offset, would not work on Linux. Turns out to be a problem in the Gnome Accessibility Toolkit (ATK).

• Lightning/Sunbird (Calendar Project) -No Report
• TBird 1.5.0.14 - Major Update planned for late February. Once this occurs, all work on TB 1.5.x will be concluded.
• TBird 2.0.0.12 - Release is unscheduled but will occur after Firefox 2.0.0.12, possibly in late February.
• TBird 3 -

  • With the fix for A11y bug 408997, Thunderbird is now an alternative e-mail and news client on Linux for those needing accessibility aids. This was the last known blocker that made Thunderbird unusable previously.

Complete meeting notes.

To better find the Get a Mac posts a ‘Get a Mac’ category has been created. Also two new Get a Mac posts for Sunday, January 13th.

A football themed Get a Mac ad…

May be they are trying to get these new commercials out fast or trying too hard.  Not one of the better Get a Mac commercials…