andrewlucking.com

I recently installed Bon Echo Alpha 1 to test RMD compatability with what will eventually become Firefox 2. First impression? I’m impressed with this alpha release.

There are no killer new features but I’m enjoying discovering the “nuance improvements”. Okay, scratch that. I’m typing this entry in the web based WordPress “editor” and Bon Echo pointed out that I’d misspelled “nuance”. When I right-clicked on the typo, suggested alternatives were offered.

Performance seems much improved too.

Oh and it looks like RMD is working fine. Here’s a version that will install in Bon Echo.

update 2006-08-04:
This one should install in Thunderbird 2 alpha 1 too. There is one ‘known issue’ - detailed in this post.

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) ;-)

Brendan Eich seems to be saying that Firefox 1.1 will support ECMAScript for XML (atleast to some degree).

This follows Macromedia’s slip last week regarding E4X in Flash Player 8.

Here is a link to a mozillazine.org knowledge base article detailing the various about: links supported by FireFox (and Mozilla):
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About_Protocol_Links

Those cache links are good to know about - they’ll come in handy when debugging. The award for kookiest goes to about:kitchensink. And you know what? The length of that bugzilla thread discussing it does not surprise me one bit.

I tend to use the secure web interface that my webhost provides for checking my email rather than go through the effort of configuring an email client on my computer. (It must be some sort of commitment thing).

Anyhow, while the interface is on an encrypted URL within my domain the security certificate belongs to dreamhost.com. This triggers a domain name mismatch warning in Firefox each time I check my mail. I did some poking (and googling) around to see if there was a way to store that I have accepted the mismatched cert but it doesn’t seem to be possible. I did come across this thread in a readlist.com archive but responses seemed to come more from the “I don’t think you need to do this” point of view. Perhaps I’m missing something but to me it makes sense to add a “don’t ask me again for this domain” checkbox (or the like) on the dialog. There’s a freakin’ “ok” button that accepts the certificate on a per session basis so obviously the message is a warning.

Any ideas or is this just another nudge for me to get on with it and install Thunderbird?

update: Solved. The Remember Mismatched Domains extension is over here:
http://www.andrewlucking.com/archives/2005/08/remember-mismatched-domains/

Brandon over at devnulled.com blogged about a simple way to improve firefox page loads in this post. I just made the suggested tweaks and had to join the clamour. A definite improvment! It would appear that the suggestion originated here.

update: To shed some more light on how this tweak works John Dowdell points to a mozilla.org FAQ item on pipelining: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/pipelining-faq.html

Wow, that was easy. I had installed 1.0 when it was released last week but rolled it back to the PR (preview release) when I found some of the extensions I consider essential were not yet updated. I took the 5 minutes to do it again this morning and we are back in business. Wish I could write software that was as pleasant.

peace.