Mozilla

2008

Firefox 3 - Web Protocol Handlers Apr 29

Web protocol handlers are a new Firefox 3 feature that gives more power to RIA web applications. Basically, when a user clicks on a link with specific protocol, Firefox can send an HTTP(S) request with the link data to a web application. An easy example is a mailto: link:

Extension Developers - Monitor Those Plugins Apr 29

I’ve mentioned plugin monitoring, a student project from Seneca College, back when the developers sucessfully got their project “marks”. I am quite pleased to see the project actually land in Firefox 3 (Mozilla 1.9) last week (bug 412770).

RIA is Dead! Long Live Web Applications Apr 21

RIA (the acronym) has jumped the shark. I find that I can no longer use RIA to describe anything anymore. The definition has been watered down and twisted to the point that nearly any application can be called RIA.

JS-CTYPES Status Apr 17

Unfortunately, the js-ctypes project got back-burnered for a while. Fortunately, some great contributors swooped in and landed some really nice bits. Fredrik Larsson helped out on some Linux problems (bug 416119), filled in ANSI string support (bug 416229) and setup an xpcshell test framework (bug 427286).

Bubblemark is an RIA Benchmark? Apr 15

The Adobe RIA crowd have been causing some echos in the chamber lately over Bubblemark, an animation benchmark originally released over a year ago. Personally, I have no real skin in the game, but a game it is. Some Flash developers were curious about variations in the results when run on different browsers, platforms and in the AIR runtime. It makes for some interesting reading and I came away with a better understanding the variations, browser limitations and timer mechanisms.

Extension Developers - Chrome URI Changes & You Apr 14

Over the weekend, code landed to restrict the ability of web content to access “chrome://” resources (see bug 292789). This shouldn’t affect many extensions since the restrictions are focused on web content, not chrome content. However, if your extension injects content into the web content, you could be affected. An example can be found in bug 428848. Venkman can’t load venkman-source.css, a stylesheet that is injected into unprivileged, web content.

Soylent Green Is People! Apr 8

And making Firefox 3 ignore extension compatibility checking is wrong!