Blogzilla - a weblog about Mozilla

AOL Cuts Impact Netscape

Reuters is reporting that AOL has cut 300 jobs at various offices, including Mountain View, California, where the offices of Netscape are located. It is expected that this is only the first wave of layoffs, targeting "areas that are no longer core to the company's new strategy".

Daniel Glazman has confirmed this FuckedCompany report and notes that "Netscape is badly impacted". Netscape developer Andrew Wooldridge also notes that "today has been a really bad day" but doesn't elaborate.

Even though Mozilla is a seperate company, the majority of its developers work at Netscape. It's still a developing story, but If Netscape is impacted, one would expect Mozilla to be impacted as well. It's too early to say how though.

Nuke Image

Nuke Image is a nice and tiny addon for Phoenix:

Right click on an image, and have an option to "Remove this image". Sets the image's "display" style to "none", making it effectively disappear. Will not remove the whitespace if the image is inside an iframe or div with a fixed size.

Useful for hiding those epilepsy-inducing banner ads, or huge ads that make articles hard to read, or page-widening images

Works great for the ads that Mozilla's built-in ad blocker can't block yet. And also very useful if you want to print a page, but do not want to print the large ink-reducing header images some not-so-printer-friendly pages some sites have.

IE and Mozilla side by side

Scope is a multi-tabbed browser which displays web pages using either the IE or Mozilla engine - or both if you want to compare pages side by side. In addition to being extremely fast, Scope is very, very lightweight - only about 250k for the whole program!

Kind of annoying to use as a default browser, but it could be a very handy testing tool to compare IE and Mozilla side by side.

Show Home Page in New Tab

Reader Svend Tofte asked if it was possible to set new tabs to open to the homepage instead of the default blank page.

I think Multizilla addon has this as a UI preference. But Multizilla has a lot of other stuff and it takes a little getting used to. If you just want to make the simple change, the following are directions I found from digging around Bug 109551 - prefs to show home/current/blank page in new tab. I modified the instructions in this comment in case you're not familiar with jar files.

1. Close mozilla. Don't forget quicklaunch.
2. Backup \Mozilla\chrome\comm.jar
3. Rename comm.jar to comm.jar.zip. Remember, a .jar file is just a zip file.
4. Unzip this file to a new directory
5. Open the file content/navigator/navigator.js
6. In the function BrowserOpenTab() (approx. line 1000), add the following line after the setTimeout line:

   BrowserHome();

7. Zip up entire content dir, and name zip back to comm.jar, and place it back in the \Mozilla\chrome\ dir.
8. Restart Mozilla and try opening a new tab. It should now show your homepage.

AOL Communicator == Minotaur

Well, maybe not exactly. But it is in spirit.

So, to follow up on Pinder's post from yesterday, I downloaded the beta and installed it. Lo and behold! It's Mozilla mail!

Basically, this is the mail/news branch of Mozilla (around version 1.2 + spam filtering it seems).

Ok, so for the part people should be intested in:

• Speed! Damn this is fast. I often wait for many seconds for the Mozilla Mail window to restore and display, AOL Communicator is quick as Phoenix in that regard.
• You CANNOT import settings from Mozilla Mail / Netscape / etc
• No newsgroup support
• I cannot seem to subscribe to IMAP folders, but that's probably not implemented yet
• There is no quick launch icon (I think this is bad, but I'm sure I am a minority on this)
• The UI is pretty clean, in some aspects, they go back to the way Netscape 4.x worked (mail header column organization) and in other ways the interface is a lot cleaner from the Mozilla branch
• A spell checker is included! Thank you closed-source!
• There is no preferences UI beyond the account settings. So I cannot, for example, turn on "Compose only in text" for new message. Of course, I could just find where the prefs.js file is...
• Spam filtering is built right in and seems a little further along than the Mozilla builds

Over all, it's ALMOST a usable alterternative until Minotaur / Thunderbird come out, if the subscribe and import features were there, I would definitely use it.