Mozilla

Offline cache support was added to the Firefox trunk last night. Check out bug 367447 for details. This is a major step in Firefox 3’s offline webapp support. There is still some more things to add, however, including an API for web developers. I’d expect the API to “feel” like some of the WHATWG APIs for web applications. I’d also expect drafts of any APIs to be ready for review soon. In fact, bug 371432 does have some API discussion.

The Mountain View Developer Day is approaching (Mar 25th). Looks like we’re getting a nice mix of people and interests. Since Mozilla is such a distributed company, its good to get together and be in the same room. I am looking forward to that.

The question comes up frequently in extension development.

I finally spent some time to make a DMG for XUL Explorer. It doesn’t have fancy background images, but it seems to work. One thing that surprised me was the size, even when compressed - 18MB. Also, I find it hard to believe that the “standard” way of distributing software for the Mac is a disk image that the user needs to “drag-n-drop” on the Applications folder. Anyway.

A few months ago, I posted about a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). I didn’t invent the name or the concept, but I thought it was a great idea. An SSB is an application with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application. It’s doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrement’s of a normal web browser. Some people have called it a “distraction free browser” because none of the typical browser chrome is used.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA)! It’s still a hot topic. Last time, the hype was for Microsoft’s WPF/E platform. This time it’s Adobe’s Apollo platform. Due to be released sometime before mid 2007, Apollo is a neat platform built on Flash, Flex and Webkit. Adobe recently had an invite-only event, Engage, to show off the platform and demo some applications. It created quite a bit of blogbuzz.

How to create a rich text or HTML WYSIWYG type editor in Mozilla has come up a few times so I thought a post was in order. Mozilla has a rich text editing system (called Midas) and an API similar to Internet Explorer’s. Mozilla, like Internet Explorer, supports the ability to make an entire document editable by setting the designMode property of the document object. Once in design mode, the document can be manipulated using various DHTML commands.