Mozilla

I had a great time at FOSDEM. Simply an amazing gathering of people who love working on Open Source projects. I could not believe the energy these people have. I, on the other hand, am exhausted! It seems like a blur, but here are some of the bits I remember:

Matt Asay has a post about Zimbra’s newest desktop client. It’s a great, full featured email/calendar client and it’s using Prism to give it a standalone, desktop application feel.

Firefox 3 is not even out the door, but work has started on the next refactoring of the Mozilla platform. Dubbed Mozilla 2 (FF3 is built on Mozilla 1.9), it is a chance to make lots of interesting, even scary, changes to the platform. For some background on Mozilla 2 go back and read Brendan’s post. Also, read the Mozilla 2 wiki pages.

Firefox 3 is using JSON to store data in several places - such as bookmark backups, session restore, and offline manifests. Originally, JSON parsing was scattered through the code. Then it was consolidated to JSON.jsm, a JavaScript code module. Eventually, it was converted into nsIJSON.idl, a C++ XPCOM Component. What does this mean to extension and application developers? Well, you now have access to JSON encoding and decoding routines that can be a lot faster (more in a bit) than the JavaScript counterparts.

The extension breaking changes made to the Firefox 3 toolbar IDs has been reverted and patched to get the same result in a different way. Any extensions that broke in a nightly version of Firefox 3 should be working correctly now. We also made sure to get the fix into Firefox 3 beta 3. Big “thank you” goes out to Dave, Dão and Gavin for helping me get the patch right and to Connor and Beltzner for making this a critical enough to get into Beta 3.

Just an update on the breaking changes I mentioned. We are working on a different fix for the original bug, so hopefully, we won’t need to change the XUL element ID’s. You can follow the progress of this alternate fix here.

Some extension developers using nightly versions of Firefox 3 may have noticed (as Doron Rosenberg did) that a recent change caused some extensions to break. Bug 414836 changed the ID of the used in browser.xul, the main Firefox window (“navigator-toolbox” was changed to “browser-toolbox”). Doron filed bug 415099 to try to get the initial problem fixed another way. I don’t think that will happen as the other ways which were tried caused Ts regressions.