andrewlucking.com

To mark yesterdays announcement of Firefox 1.5 I thought I’d release a 1.0 of the Remember Mismatch Domains extension. This version of rmd has no major changes but I did tidy a few things up.

I think this also provides me a good opportunity to suggest that the Mozilla folks include something similar to the functionality that the rmd extension provides in future versions of their tools. As happy as I am to continue supporting rmd it seems obvious to me that not having to continuously accept the domain mismatch warning (expired certificates too) is something users want by default. I haven’t been keeping track of downloads of the extension but Googles for it are consistently at the top of the search referals to this site. I also noticed earlier this week that the bug has been open for nearly two years and the issue has been debated ad nauseam. To me that means the current (default) functionality is broken and should be addressed.

In the meantime, here’s a quick recap of the extension along with install directions:

What is Remember Mismatched Domains?
The Remember Mismatched Domains extension for Firefox and Thunderbird adds a “Don’t warn me again about this certificate for this domain’ checkbox to the Domain Mismatch and Expired Certificate warning windows. When selected the domain name and security certificate domain pair (or certificate and expiration date pair) is stored in a Firefox / Thunderbird preference and the security error dialogue will be bypassed on subsequent visits.

How do I install the extension?
If you want to install the extension in Thunderbird, you have to follow these steps:
1. In your default browser, right-click on the download link. Choose the “Save link to disk…” option and download the XPI install file into a directory of your choosing.
2. Open Mozilla Thunderbird and open the ‘Extensions’ dialog by going to the ‘Tools’ -> ‘Extensions’ menu.
3. On the Extension dialog, there’s a button named ‘Install’ in the lower left corner. Click on it and browse to the directory where you saved the remember-mismatch.xpi.
4. Choose the file you downloaded earlier on and click ‘OK’.

Firefox users left click on the link.

Aww would ya look at that, my little extension has it’s first new feature. Version 0.9 adds the ability to remember expired certificates.

Install / download from here and you can use the comments for bugs or any other feedback.

Yesterday Google released Analytics, a free web traffic analysis service. (Well, it’s completely free to AdWords users and capped at 5 million monthly pageviews for those who aren’t).

Based on the amount of moderated comments I wade through here every day I’m convinced that the majority of the traffic is from blog spam. With that in mind I just couldn’t pass up a chance to check out the spammer’s handywork in those fancy Flash based graphs Analytics offers. Unfortunately, it seems I’m not the only one to think I have a site that would look good in a pie chart. While the service mentions it should take 12 hours or so to start getting report results most folks are still sitting at a “waiting for data” status.

Ben Goodger (the lead engineer on Firefox) has some interesting explanatations for a few experimental refinements they’ve made to Firefox’s tabbed browsing features. Reading his post kind of sold me on the changes and using ‘em for the past day or so has me hoping that they’ll make it into the 1.5 final release. He explains that the usability study which partly inspired the changes was provided by Google, which I suppose means I should be thanking them as well.

On a somewhat related note (and to explain why I tagged this with a ‘flash’ category), as Mozilla ramps up for a public release of Firefox 1.5 they’ve been sharing intentions in regards to future plans for the Mozilla platform. Specifically, Chris Beard has put together a draft roadmap and Brendan Eich has been discussing Mozilla’s future in general as well as sharing design notes for JavaScript 2. This is a really helpful way of succinctly summarizing plans and is something that I would also find useful seeing from Macromedia in regards to the Flash Platform.

(While I kind of like this post’s current title, perhaps ‘all over the map’ would’ve been just as appropriate) ;-)