Blogzilla - a weblog about Mozilla

Icons for your bookmarks

The current versions of Mozilla have the custom bookmark icons disabled. Normally these appear automatically if you bookmark a site that has a favicon.ico file in the correct directory or has set a custom icon. You will also see these icon on the left of the url textbox.

Take a look by going to www.newegg.com.

You will have to edit a couple of compressed files to get this to work.

1.) Extract the files
Locate the comm.jar file. It'll be in <program files>\mozilla.org\Mozilla\chrome. You can either unjar if you are familiar with jar or change the extension to .zip and use winzip. WinRAR will recognize the file as an archive without having to change the extension.

2.) Modify navigator.xul
The first file to change is called navigator.xul, you can find it at content\navigator. Find this section of code:

<rule parent="hbox">
  <toolbarbutton class="bookmark-item" uri="rdf:*" editable="true"
    status="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/WEB-rdf#status"
    rdf:type="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Bookmark"
    statustext="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#URL"
    tooltip="ptTooltip"
    label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"/>
</rule>

change it to this

<rule parent="hbox">
  <toolbarbutton class="bookmark-item" uri="rdf:*" editable="true"
    image="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Icon"
    validate="never"
    status="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/WEB-rdf#status"
    rdf:type="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Bookmark"
    statustext="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#URL"
    tooltip="ptTooltip"
    label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"/>
</rule>


Then find this section:

<rule nc:FolderGroup="true" iscontainer="true">
  <menupopup>
  <menuitem class="menuitem-iconic bookmark-group"
    label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"
    group="true"
    uri="rdf:*"
    xulcontentsgenerated="true"/>
</menupopup>

and change it to this:

<rule nc:FolderGroup="true" iscontainer="true">
  <menupopup>
  <menuitem class="menuitem-iconic bookmark-group"
    src="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Icon"
    validate="never"
    label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"
    group="true"
    uri="rdf:*"
    xulcontentsgenerated="true"/>
</menupopup>


3.) Modify navigatorOverlay.xul
In navigatorOverlay.xul which you'll find in the same directory, change this:

<menupopup>
  <menuitem class="menuitem-iconic bookmark-item" uri="rdf:*"
    label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"
    status="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/WEB-rdf#status"/>
</menupopup>


to this:

<menupopup>
  <menuitem class="menuitem-iconic bookmark-item" uri="rdf:*"
    src="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Icon"
    validate="never"
    label="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#Name"
    status="rdf:http://home.netscape.com/WEB-rdf#status"/>
</menupopup>


4.) Zip the files
Zip up the files again using winzip, making sure that the recreate the exact same directory structure. This means zip up the content directory not the comm directory.

5.) Customize your bookmark icons
If you want to assign your own icons to your bookmarks, you can edit your bookmark.html and add this property to your bookmark links:
ICON="http://www.newegg.com/images/logo1.ico"

This information was gleamed from this newsgroup thread:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5dc300a6.0208150324.37433a8c%40posting.google.com


Thanks go to Nige and Neil.

Alternative Download Manager

LeechGet is a new download manager that is currently in beta. It's free and pretty.

It supports file splitting and pinging of other servers for faster downloads. It doesn't support dynamic file splitting, once a thread has completed it doesn't split another thread to continue downloading. It also doesn't support fetching the original file date.

Flashget has both of these features along with a better comments area. LeechGet has a small textbox on one of the download wizard dialog pages that allows you to specify a comment, but that comment isn't editable later on. Problem is, Flashget isn't free.

You can get LeechGet here: www.leechget.de/
and the addon for Mozilla here: www.leechget.de/html/addons.php

Do you like your daily builds with themes?

I've started to use Mozilla again after a long break and I've been using the Orbit 3+1 smallest theme. Problem is, everytime you reinstall a new build, your theme is gone. Here what I'm doing to reinstall the themes.

1.) Bookmark the installation link
Drag the "File It!" link from the page into your Personal Toolbar Folder like you would a bookmarklet .

2.) Set theme to use the smallest toolbar
Save the UserChrome.css file in your profile\chrome directory. For windows 2000 users this is something like:
C:\Documents and Settings\*USERNAME*\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\*RANDOM STUFF*\chrome

NOTE: You only have to save the UserChrome.css file once, it's not overwritten when you install/re-install a new build.

3.) Set Mozilla to use the theme
Go to Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Themes and select the theme. You'll have to restart Mozilla.

OR

View > Apply Theme > Orbit

Next time you install a new build of Mozilla, click the "File It!" link and do step 3 to get your theme back.

Small Screen Rendering in Mozilla

Daniel Glazman proves that Opera's new Small Screen Rendering feature, which does a client-side transformtion of a website to fit into a 176px Nokia cellphone screen, isn't all that magical by posting a simple DOM compliant implementation of it in Mozilla.

Well, there is one difference between what Opera does and what Mozilla could do. We could do it much better.

Joel on XUL

Joel Splosky still thinks Netscape was stupid, but he really likes XUL.

Resizeable Textareas

Neal Deakin of XulPlanet has written a nice trick that allows you to resize any textareas dynamically by pressing shortcut keys. Neat!

[via Mike's Blog]

Mozilla, getting faster?

Currently Mozilla is pretty damn fast rendering web pages. However, a new check in made to the Mozilla 1.2 branch (and by default into the Phoenix branch) seems like it will make things even faster.

It's called Link Pre-Fetching. Which is:

Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser's cache.

Note about Phoenix 0.3 functionality

Soh Kam Yung writes:

See the release notes.

Changes include the addition of the much missed image blocking and a change in the blocking of pop-ups.

By default, pop-ups are blocked. When a website tries to display a pop-up, a "Info" icon appears on the bottom left of the Phoenix status bar. Clicking on it lets you choose whether to allow the pop-up for this site or not (a 'white-list' approach to pop-ups).

Note: to see this pop-up feature, you cannot copy over your current cookperm.txt file: you need to let phoenix create a new cookperm.txt file (this has been my experience).

You *must* read the release notes before installing: this release is not backwards compatible with previous phoenix releases.

Mozilla on Xbox

I don't know, but there's something really satisfying about seeing these screenshots of Mozilla running on an Xbox, from the Xbox Linux Project.

Standards vs "But IE Does It"

There's a flame war going on in Bug 97284 - [RFE] allow page to make arbitrary elements user-editable in browser. Basically, the bug is about enabling easy in-place editing of any HTML by just setting an attribute or property. Xopus.org has even developed a an implementation of contenteditable for Mozilla

There's three camps when it comes to issues like this. The first camp wants full compliance with W3C standards and don't want items like contenteditable or marquee implemented because it's not in the standards.

The second camp wants to implement these items in order to win over IE users and developers. Regarding why contenteditable is an assigned bug, Tim Powell comments:

The plan is to implement the IE interface and for good reason: Microsoft IE 5-6 have more than 90% of the browser market (That's being generous to non-Microsoft browsers). Microsoft extensions such as contenteditable are de facto standards. This isn't the first time... and doubt it will be the last time that Mozilla implements a Microsoft extension. If Mozilla wants to even be a viable alternative, it needs to support a number of Microsoft features. Otherwise the switching cost is too great, both for web site developers to support Mozilla and for users to use Mozilla (or derivatives).

Then there's the third camp: we don't really care too much one way or the other. We just want to surf the web and check e-mail.

Creating Applications with Mozilla Published

Creating Applications with Mozilla has been released. You can buy it at Amazon or read the full-text online

Phoenix News

A lot has gone on in the world of Phoenix since the last update. Phoenix 0.2 was released, and it looks like 0.3 should be released next week.

The reason I'm not using Phoenix full time is because of Mozilla Mail:

It just doesn't make sense for me to have both Phoenix and Mozilla in memory if Mozilla will be taking up all that memory running just Mail.

The FAQ in the 0.2 release notes say that the stand-alone mail client, now named Thunderbird (formerly Minotaur) should be released around the same time as Phoenix 0.5. Even Blake Ross notes in this mozillazine forum post he's working on Thunderbird "because Thunderbird is preventing people from using Phoenix".

***

Another thing I found distracting in Phoenix were all those banner ads on sites! I forgot how many sites show ads. I had blocked the majority of them a long time ago wish Mozilla. But not to worry, Image Blocking should be in 0.3.

In a related note, it's always fun watching people discuss annoying ads and popups they encounter. Poor clueless IE people.