Gecko 1.8, Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1 Release Plans

Asa Dotzler has posted a newsgroup message about the plans for the 1.8 release. As official Mozilla Application Suite development has ceased, the forthcoming Mozilla 1.8 Beta 2 release will be delivered as a set of alpha builds of Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1. In preparation for the release of the alphas, the trunk will freeze at the midnight between Tuesday 5th April and Wednesday 6th April Pacific Daylight Time. During the freeze, only checkins approved by drivers@mozilla.org will be allowed to land. After the alphas come out, the tree will remain frozen until the Gecko 1.8 branch is created, which is likely to be in couple of months time. Broadly feature-complete betas of Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 will be released from the trunk in mid-May. A localisation freeze will come in to effect at this point, meaning that changes to strings used in the Firefox and Thunderbird user interfaces will not be allowed (this will let translators get an early start on localising the 1.1 versions). The final Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 releases will come from the 1.8 branch.

[Via mozillaZine]

Gervase Markham: Greasemonkey

It's good to see Greasemonkey getting some press. It's a fantastic idea. I demoed something similar, although not as capable, at EuroFoo in August last year. I called it "refacing" - a way of changing the face of particular sites to suite yourself. My simple example was defacing the SCO website so that all the references read "SCOundrels". (Amusingly, the current Word of The Day on the front of www.sco.com is "Longevity". Presumably they are referring to Linux rather than their own business.) But I never had time to take it forward and it languishes still on my laptop. I'm glad someone is making this happen :-)

You don't actually need an extension to do something like Greasemonkey - you could do it all from a bookmarklet with appropriate server-side support. The bookmarklet injects a script which adds a DHTML popup to the page which gives a menu of available scripts. Of course, an extension gives much better UI, and is probably the correct solution for the long term.

However, the key problem with running scripts written by others in your session context for a website is security. There's no real way to control a malicious user script once it's running. Audit is your only line of defence. Be careful out there, kids.

[Via mozillaZine feedHouse]

CNET News.com Reports on Greasemonkey

CNET News.com has an article about an extension for Mozilla Firefox called Greasemonkey. First released late last year, the Greasemonkey extension lets users install small pieces of JavaScript that change the behaviour or display of Web pages. These pieces of code, called user scripts, can be set to affect every page you visit or just those for a particular site. The extension comes preinstalled with a script that changes all underlined text on Web pages to italics (to avoid confusion with links) and one of the many site-specific Greasemonkey user scripts automatically changes the colours used on Slashdot. More advanced scripts are available too, including one that adds a persistent search feature to Gmail.

Read the full article here:
CNET News.com Reports on Greasemonkey


[Via mozillaZine]

Tabs in JavaScript

Here’s something I hadn’t seen before: Tabtastic uses
JavaScript, CSS, and semantic markup to implement a tabbed navigation interface. Since the tabs are all pulled from the
same page, navigation between them is instantaneous.


The nice thing about this is that it degrades gracefully. If you disable JavaScript, you get a nicely-styled page that
has headings instead of tabs, and links at the top of the page to skip to each section. If you disable both JavaScript
and CSS, you get a usable no-frills HTML page with headings and sections instead of tabs.


You can also bookmark a specific tab, so they’ve eliminated almost all of the disadvantages of using a system like
this.

[Via The JavaScript Weblog]

Firefox Toolbar Tutorial

This tutorial explains how to create a toolbar extension for the Firefox web browser. Before reading this tutorial, please understand the following two points:

1. This tutorial is rather long.


2. Creating a Firefox extension is easy.

Please do not think that because this tutorial is lengthy, creating an extension is a difficult task (it's not). The size of this tutorial is due to the fact that I explain every step in detail. In addition, a great deal of material is covered. My intended audience are those who have never written an extension for Firefox. Hopefully you will find this to be a useful resource. Although it took me a while to write, I have enjoyed every bit of the process.

Rumble in the Firefox Jungle?

Steel Gryphon: "This is bugging me, and its been bugging me for a while. In nearly three years, we haven’t built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think we’re in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn’t do a lot of reviews. And I’m on the verge of just walking away indefinitely, since it feels like I’m the only person who cares enough to make it an issue. Things I’ve raised in relatively private contexts have gone unanswered, and I’m growing increasingly cynical about our ability to ship 1.1 early enough to make 1.5 remotely viable this year. At the glacial pace of development we’re currently running at, I don’t see how the ambitious plans for 2.0 are going to be at all viable before late 2006. Maybe I’m wrong, but no one’s bothered to take five minutes and tell me that."

Zarro Boogs found.

 

eWeek: "Opinion: I think Firefox is the best browser on the planet, but it's not going to stay that way long unless the team behind it gets their act together sooner rather than later."

Firefox Is Heading Towards Trouble

 

[DUTCH] WebWereld: "Het is niet allemaal koek en ei wat Firefox aangaat. Een van de drijvende krachten blijkt boordevol frustratie te zitten en staat op het punt te stoppen."

Donkere wolken boven ontwikkeling Firefox

Getting Started with Apache 2.0, Part 1

In this first article in a three-part series, Harish Kamath helps you download and configure the Apache Web server. If you've wanted to use PHP with Apache, that part of the setup is also covered. The article guides right from how to get off the locks, to compiling apache, discussing various configuration options, a quick overview of the httpd.conf file, and getting PHP 5.0.3 to work with Apache 2.0.51. This article is a good read for anyone looking at getting started with PHP 5 and Apache 2.

[Via international PHP Magazine]

PHP Speed Optimizations

Nathan Wong claims that single quotes are faster than double quotes in PHP.

In the recent blog post, he attempts to prove that PHP is able to parse and execute string constants faster if they use single quotes, than if double quotes are used. Benchmark results and source c...

[Via SitePoint's PHP Blog: Dynamically Typed]

Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Released

MozillaZine - Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Released

Stephen Donner wrote in to tell us about the public release of Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta. Based on Mozilla Firefox 1.0, this beta of Netscape's newest browser offers support for both the Gecko and Internet Explorer rendering engines. A new Site Controls feature lets users enable and disable features like ActiveX, JavaScript and cookies on a site-by-site basis (the browser includes self-updating whitelists and blacklists of safe and dangerous sites). The new Multi-BarLive Content

Netscape released a prototype of a Firefox-based browser last November to a group of registered testers; an updated version was circulated in January. Netscape planned a public beta for February but bugs caused it to be delayed and the build was only made available to the previously registered testers.

Read the Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta Release Notes for a list of what doesn't work right yet and download Netscape Browser 8.0 Beta from the Netscape site. It's only available for Windows 98 Second Edition or above; there's no Mac or Linux versions. Feedback can be left in the Netscape Browser Review forums (requires an AOL/Netscape/CompuServe ScreenName)." functionality lets users have more on-screen widgets than ever before, including like RSS feeds, weather forecasts and map searches.

Hip Hip Hooray

The Apache Project Turns 10

The Apache Web Server Project is now 10 years old, as noted over the weekend by Roy Fielding, a co-founder of the open source development project. "Ten years ago today, the Apache Group decloaked with the creation of the new-httpd archive and initial accounts on hyperreal.org," Fielding noted on the apache-httpd-dev mailing list.

Apache hit another milestone earlier this month when our Web Server Survey found 40 million sites now running on the Apache server, which powers nearly 70 percent of web sites.

Apache was detected on 658 sites in the initial Netcraft survey in August 1995, just six months after the project's launch, when its 3.5 percent market share was dwarfed by software from NCSA (57 percent) and CERN (19.7 percent). The Apache server reached 10 million sites in June 2000, 20 million in November 2001 and 30 million in November 2003.

In an interview with Netcraft last year, Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf assessed the remarkable growth. "I imagine most of the growth continues to be either with the small mom-n-pop companies, or web hosting ISPs, or internationally - all places where price sensitivity is high, where the economic downturn is still causing budgets to be hurt, and there's willingness to consider an Open Source approach to solving a given problem," said Behlendorf. "I imagine the rise of related Apache projects, like the continued rise in use of mod_perl and Tomcat and our friends over at PHP, have only increased the confidence in using the web server for mission-critical situations."

Netcraft - The Apache Project Turns 10