Mozilla

What a summit! Danger, drama and lots of Mozillians. The summit was really a full blown conference. I heard there were around 400 attendees. There were 3 days packed with sessions and breakouts. I had a blast talking to people I usually only ever interact with on IRC.

Firefox 3 had some big changes (and little changes) that caused some grief for extension developers wanting to update add-ons to the newest version. There were some deep architectural changes (Places bookmarking API), numerous security changes (same-origin on file:// and restricting chrome:// from content), and large UI/Theme changes (URLbar, XP/Vista/Linux/Mac themes). Needless to say, getting lots of new greatness in Firefox 3 (XULRunner 1.9) came at a high maintenance/refactor cost to extension developers.

Adobe has been creating a buzz lately with the announcement that Google and Yahoo will be using a specialized Flash player to allow indexing Flash content. This is appears to be big news for the Flash world, even though Google was scraping text content previously (and this still only applies to text content). Now, search engines (or at least Google and Yahoo) will have more context for the text.

Fennec 0.4, the M4 milestone, wrapped up last week. There are install packages for those who want to see it running on their Nokia n800/n810 devices. We have some installation instructions and release notes.

Using eval() to decode JavaScript you downloaded from a remote website in your extension is just plain wrong. It’s not safe! Don’t do it!

In HTML you can use a DIV as a container and when the DIV changes size, the contents will wrap or adjust the layout. This does not happen with XUL BOX (or HBOX and VBOX) by default. However, you can easily add this capability with a style change. Make the BOX style="display: block" and the wrapping behavior will occur when the box is resized:

Building things with the Mozilla Platform usually involves dealing with some boilerplate. Extensions have install and chrome manifests and overlays. XULRunner applications have application and chrome manifests and default preferences. XPCOM, even the simpler JavaScript XPCOM, has modules, factories and categories. It’s more than enough to slow developers down, especially new-to-Mozilla developers.