From my six year old son Jeremy’s diary…
Category Archives: Mozilla
Firefox tweaks
about:config … layout.frames.force_resizability … yes, yes, yes!
(via Patrick)
Can we spell legacy code?
Got this in Firefox 1.0:
I thought for a moment I’d been transported back to 1996…
Snippets
Hax0r gameshow contestant wagers $1337 on Jeopardy. (via Rick)
Gary Schare, Director of Windows Product Management at Microsoft, talks about the future of IE, its features and security. (Via Cameron Reilly)
Speaking of ADO (which I was yesterday), trying to figure out the black magic that is an OLEDB connection string? Try here.
Feel like writing a little C++ or Java applet for your phone? Here’s tech specs for Nokia phones. For me that’s the kind of project I’d love to do, but it will have to happen after I invent a time machine so I’ve got the time to do it in.
Imp hates Firefox… or is it the other way around?
The webmail my ISP uses (a horde IMP, or somesuch opensource thingy) doesn’t play nicely with Firefox. It was broken in 0.9.2 and it’s broken in 1.0PR. Why does it stop in the middle, or miss the start, or something, of the HTML transfer?
The only things I keep IE around for now are Flash amusements and webmail.
I demand that someone who isn’t me fix this. It’s my right as a freeloader.
Firefox 1.0 imminent
According to those who should know, Firefox 1.0 (not the preview version, not the beta, not the 0.8, but the real actual version One Point Zero) will be out on November 9th.
PS. I hope they’ve fixed the thing where multiple links on the links toolbar pick up the same icon…
Browser wars 2
Who’s winning this time round? Is Firefox having any impact?
Here’s the stats for my most heavily trafficked site, top 15 agents:
| Hits | Percent | User Agent |
|---|---|---|
| 30815 | 11.88% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) |
| 23816 | 9.18% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) |
| 14375 | 5.54% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1 |
| 10701 | 4.12% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) |
| 8880 | 3.42% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET |
| 8330 | 3.21% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) |
| 8092 | 3.12% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) |
| 6784 | 2.61% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/ |
| 5190 | 2.00% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/2004 |
| 5144 | 1.98% | Program Shareware 1.0.0 |
| 4832 | 1.86% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1 |
| 3825 | 1.47% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko |
| 3314 | 1.28% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko |
| 2982 | 1.15% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd |
| 2362 | 0.91% | Atomz/1.0 |
Interesting that after all these years, IE5.5 is still the top hitting browser.
Gecko is Firefox and Mozilla and their derivatives. Probably a few copies of Netscape 7 floating around as well.
Atomz and Yahoo are spiders, obviously, though I’m not sure why Yahoo decided it would be good to tell us their spider is Mozilla compatible, ‘cos I bet it isn’t. Google comes through every so often, but doesn’t appear in the top 15 provided by my web site’s default report.
I have no idea what “Program Shareware 1.0.0” is. Any ideas, anybody?
No sign at all of Mac users, or indeed any OS other than Windows. Maybe if the list showed the top 50…
Getting these into some basic groups, we have:
| Hits | Percent | User Agent |
|---|---|---|
| 82008 | 31.60% | MSIE 6 |
| 30815 | 11.87% | MSIE 5.5 |
| 12329 | 4.75% | Gecko |
I could show you the two party preferred figures, but I scarcely need to: IE still rules the roost, though I’d bet Gecko/Firefox is slowly gaining momentum.
(Obviously I’m going to have to look beyond the top 15, because there must be an awful lot of minority combinations of OS/browser out there.)
It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months.
Firefox point and counterpoint
I like Firefox a lot. I use it almost exclusively at home. At work it’s not so easy, as something in its password caching plays havoc with the corporate proxy, hitting it with an old password continually, and constantly locking my account. So IE6 rules the roost there.
But I do have one big problem with Firefox, and the way its development goes. My series of annotated photos on my blog uses little popups to describe things in the pictures. I wanted something easy* to implement, completely standards-based, don’t rely on any hyper-funky overkill technology like Java or Flash, nor on an external service provider like Flickr (which looks really good, but these things have a habit of going west after a few years, and I intend my blog to be online virtually forever, or at least until they prise my credit cards from my cold dead hands).
So I used the <title> tag in the hotspots of the pictures. But Firefox abbreviates long tooltips, rather than wrapping.
This is a known bug in Firefox. It’s been a known bug in Firefox for four damn years. Jeez. Is that a failing of the open source community, that sometimes it can take them so long to agree something needs to be fixed, write a fix, and then get it released? I call that pretty piss-poor. At least with monolithic corporations like Microsoft, some jackbooted Program Manager would have clicked their fingers and had it done by now.
By the way, if you’re playing about in Firefox, but some obscure option you’re looking for isn’t on the dialogs (like when I turned off the closing all tabs warning and couldn’t turn it on again)… then check try about:config in the address field. Very groovy.
*Easy as long as doing HTML hotspots is your idea of fun, or you have a tool that can do them for you.
Update 10/11/2004: This bug is still not fixed in Firefox 1.0. It can be cured using the PopupAlt extension, but that’s not the point. Firefox should work. It shouldn’t be up to individual users to go out hunting for a solution they have to download to get around a known Firefox problem.