Hyatt went to Apple, and now Hixie's off to work for Opera. Congrats!
What next, mpt to Microsoft?
Mozilla 1.4 has been released. Download here. Release notes here. Time to focus on Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird!
WaMCom (a.k.a Web and Mail Communicator) is an open source initiative which has recently released a new build. More details about their goals/intentions found at their site:
Motivation: End users are looking for stable software. But the Mozilla organization makes it clear to say: "We make binary versions of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!"
The intention of WaMCom.org is to produce web browser and mail client software that is more stable and more correct than the test releases produced by the Mozilla.org organization, in the hope it is suitable for end users. In order to achieve that, stable Mozilla releases are extended with additional correctness fixes. In addition it contains some security and cryptography enhancements.
Their project has implemented close to 500 trunk bug fixes on top of the Mozilla 1.3.1 release. Meaning a more stable Mozilla is now available to the public and for everyone anticipating the next milestone.
[link via asa]
The Thunderbird new feature of the week is an address book sidebar panel, available in the June 25th builds.
Every now and again I look/search for a roaming support implementation. One that would allow bookmarks and other user preference files to be stored at a centralized location, capable of being pulled down on another computer (with Firebird, of course).
Today, I found something that seems to offer exactly what I've been looking for: bug 124029. There are patches already available and it seems there is a strong push to have them put onto the Mozilla trunk. I do believe, however, that such a patch shouldn't be implemented directly onto Firebird. This would serve nicely as an extension.
I've been aware of Will Sargent's Bookie, which was mentioned earlier, but decided not to go that route because of the complexity of setup. Other options — that I've most likely missed — are more than welcome to be addressed here.
Some Russian Splashes for Mozilla for you comrades.
Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? eh comrade? Oh, I mean yay capitalism!
Theme support was added to Mozilla Thunderbird last week, and now the latest builds support extensions.
The Extensions page on the Mozilla Thunderbird site lists some ideas for extensions people have submitted and information on how to write an extension. The first official extension adds offline support.
So if there is something you'd really like to see in Thunderbird, write an extension! Or do what I just did and write an entry on your blog asking others to write extension for you (hint: tagzilla for thunderbird!) :)
This MozillaZine thread has more ideas listed for Thunderbird extensions.
Actually, if I ever have the time, I've always wanted to write something that can export Mozilla address book entries directly to vcard so I could sync them on my iPod instead of having to go through Outlook.
It looks like there's a project in Seamonkey called DotNETEmbed for building .NET wrappers for the Gecko engine using Managed C++.
There's only some technical information provided in the Draft summary of the project. Does anyone know any more about this project? Embedding Gecko in .NET projects would be very cool.
Steven Garrity writes in to let us know about the great new OS X icons for Mozilla that have recently been checked in. Very nice indeed.
While you're at it, be sure to read a recent article Steven wrote entitled XUL: How I learned to love non-native GUIs
Bug 104778 - URI written in location bars doesn't persist tab/window switching (incomplete url is forgotten upon tab switching), which is one of the tabbed browsing bugs that has always irritated me, has been fixed on the Mozilla App Suite trunk/branch/tree/thing!
As one of the comments notes, Mozilla Firebird doesn't automatically get any of the Tabbrowser changes. So, hopefully it'll be ported over for Firebird 0.7.
David Tenser has put up two more pages at Mozilla Firebird Help. He filled everyone in at MozillaZine, so I'll let him do the talking:
As a complement to the new Options window reference, I have written a document covering cookies and how to use the cookie manager: http://texturizer.net/firebird/cookies.html
As always, I appreciate feedback. My goal is to make more of these documents explaining various parts of the Mozilla Firebird user interface, such as how to customize toolbars, how to manage bookmaks, etc. This is hopefully just a start.
Phillip M. Stewart writes "MNG/JNG support has been removed from the Mozilla trunk. This upsets many people including myself. Vote for Bug 18574 - restore support for MNG animation format and JNG image format if you want it back. Mozilla has had MNG support since July 2000."
Much like PNGs were created as a patent-free replacement for copyrighted GIF technology, MNG (which stands for Multiple-image Network Graphics) was created to replace animated GIFs. JNG files are JPEG images with PNG alpha-transparency.
According to bug 195280, some of the reasons JNG/MNG support was removed was because of the large size of the decoder library, the fact that it's not w3c recommended, and mostly because the file formats are currently of little use on the web and the fact that animated gifs and flash already cover much of the feature set of MNG.
If you would like to restore MNG support, this MNG XPI for Mozilla might be of interest to you. You'll only needed it if you have a recent nightly, because MNG support was only removed as of June 3rd.
And if you're posting comments on Bugzilla, don't forget about the rules. Other than actually writing code, voting for a bug is probably your best bet.
Mozilla Thunderbird is really shaping up. I really like the May 27th build. Some of the recent changes:
And don't forget to visit the excellent Thunderbird Help site for tips and more info.
