Blogzilla - a weblog about Mozilla

New Orbit Theme

Jeremy writes in to tell us that our favourite theme, Orbit has been updated. The update now includes a button for the new tab button.

Take a look at Orbit 3m as well. It's the same as Orbit, except with smaller buttons, giving you more screen real estate.

Favorites!

I just discovered one more reason why Mozilla is better than IE.

Mozilla has 'bookmarks', IE has 'favorites'

Why is this better? Because who are these people at Microsoft to tell me if some link is my favorite? I just want to keep track of a website about Veterinary requirements for pets traveling to Prague, but by doing so in IE, I'm apparently giving this site my personal stamp of approval that I think this site is great!

To top that off, when I first install IE, it has the gall to tell me what my favorites sites are!

I have folders full of crap that I have never been to and never will go to that apparently are my favorite sites.

Well thank you Microsoft for telling me this! I never knew I liked these sites before you populated my favorites folder with all these links.

Whoa, I've got to cut back on the coffee, or at least switch to decaf.

New Icons

New icons appeared in today's Windows nightly build:

They're not bad. It looks like one of the grayrest icons was used. However, only the one icon is implemented. Mozilla still uses same icon for Browser, Mail, Address Book, etc... Install the grayrest icon pack if you want a full selection of icons in Mozilla.

And unfortunately, here's how the new icon looks in the system tray:

Ew.

Mozilla and Quicktime 6

Steve has encountered some interesting wackyness regarding Mozilla MIME types and the new Quicktime 6 on Mac OSX. Apparently the new QT6 plugin takes over playing of Macromedia Flash 6 content:

what happens in a case such as mine where two plugins are capable of handling the same MIME type? Well, if multiple plug-ins are installed to handle a given content type, the one that "wins" is the one whose plug-in file in /Library/Internet Plugins comes first alphabetically. Users are empowered to take control of which plug-in they use by renaming their plugins.

***

In related news, the new versions of Quicktime and Flash are now fully scriptable, which means a lot of the features that were once IE only are now available in Mozilla.

I haven't tried QT6 yet. It seems to become more and more bloated with each release, just like every other multimedia player.

Error page for inaccessible pages

The latest nightlies now have a fix for bug 28586 - Should use error page and not dialog for inaccessible pages. You can now set Mozilla to use an error page instead of that annoying dialog box for inaccessible sites. The fix is hidden since it's still experimental, and may crash Mozilla. To see it, you have to add the pref:

user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true)

The error page is pretty bare at the moment. I assume the UI team still has to shape it up.

I think this bug fix will now allow you to use the hosts file method of ad blocking without getting a dialog box prompt for each inaccessible (blocked) ad. I haven't tested it since I use Mozilla's Block images from this server feature. See the previous ad blocking post for more information about ad blocking with Mozilla.

Rumor Mongering

Time to start a little unsubstantiated rumor mongering here.

Dave Hyatt, Netscape engineer, creator of XUL, etc, has officially left Netscape to go work for Apple.

Since Dave was also the guy in charge of the Chimera project (an attempt to build a Mac OS specific UI around the Gecko rendering engine to make up for Mozilla's deficiencies on the Mac platform) and Apple is rumored to be building their own browser (based on Chimera), could it be that this is what he'll be working on?

Add this to the fact that the latest release of Mac OS X is starting to integrate more applications into the OS (see iChat), is this the beginning of iBrowser?

update: To add to the rumor, I don't suppose Dave will end up in New York this week at MacWorld as part of Steve Jobs' keynote address?

Incremental search in a webpage

Another cool feature working it's way towards the main trunk of Mozilla is:
30088 - [RFE] Incremental find

A XPI installable test implementation can be downloaded from here

This feature will allow you to just type letters into Mozilla's browser window and highlights any matching word, moving the focus of the browser window to the closest match.

For example, if you have installed the XPI and restarted Mozilla, start typing "incremental" on this page and watch it work. It's pretty cool.

Apparently, this is a well-known feature in a program called "Emacs", some sort of Notepad clone.

Creating Applications with Mozilla

Coming in September from O'Reilly: Creating Applications with Mozilla

Creating Applications with Mozilla explains how applications are created with Mozilla and provides step-by-step information about how you can create your own programs using Mozilla's powerful cross-platform development framework.

You can check out the lizard cover and pre-order it at amazon.com

Looks very interesting. I'll write a review once it hits Safari.

New Status Bar Icons

Old Status Bar

New Status Bar

Sometimes I wonder why they change small things like this while some of the other bigger UI issues with Mozilla have been untouched for months, even years. What was wrong with the old icons? The new address book icon looks like a blob and the new composer icon is colorless. Was it changed because the old address book icon was wider than the others?

The related bug doesn't say much about why.

Toolbar customization

One of the most noticeable differences between IE and Mozilla is the lack of toolbar customization.

The ability to drag toolbars around, add/remove buttons and even just to turn the text of a button off is not available is Mozilla.

Myself, I like these options. They allow me to create a really small UI that dedicated the maximum amount of room to browsing.

These features are being worked on however. You can find all the information you want in these bugs:
15144 - Ability to add/remove toolbar buttons (customize toolbars)
If you dig into this bug, you can find a really cool XUL toolbar customization demo (it doesn't actually change your toolbar) here

48926 - Allow horizontally adjacent toolbars

49543 - Separate Toolbar from Address Bar [urlbar]

DOCTYPE sniffing in Mozilla

evolt.org: New DOCTYPE sniffing in upcoming Mozilla releases

The Mozilla browser, like several other browsers on the market, uses DOCTYPE sniffing to determine how to render a page. In Mozilla's case, it either renders the page strictly, in "standards mode," or more loosely -- otherwise known as "quirks mode." Now Mozilla introduces something more. In the upcoming 1.01 and 1.1 releases, Mozilla will add an "almost standards" mode to its mix.

Minor design update

I made a few minor changes to this site today:

• Entries are no longer sorted by day. The date is now listed below the post.
• Added a search field. It's located on the left side bar and on the archives page. I wrote a simple search script in *shudder* Perl. I feel so dirty.
• Made all pages "printer-friendly". There's no trick to it, it's just a simple trick. We're good friends with XHTML so we can do that.
• Added "e-mail this article" functionality.
• Added "previous" and "next" links on each entry page for easier navigation.
• Removed the alternate stylesheet. It may return however.
• Added RSS 1.0 RDF file. If you know what that means, you must be excited.

If anything looks wrong, let me know.