Posts

Samer Ziadeh will be working on a Summer of Code project to enhance FUEL. He is looking at some feature requests found in bugzilla, bug 406974 and bug 409279 specifically. Samer has already done some work with FUEL. The past semester, he ported much of the code to work in Firefox 2. It wasn’t a perfect fit as Firefox 2 is missing some integral new functionality supported in Firefox 3. Without it, backporting to Firefox 2 became difficult.

Extension Developers! Yeah, You!

Oh yeah, it’s this crappy post from ReadWriteWeb on the new Google Maps Flash API. I have no problem with a Flash API for Google Maps. Power to the people! But I did have a massive gag reaction to the following fairy tale:

Last year (wow, that long ago?) I made a simple demo to show Firefox 3 offline capabilities. A lot has changed between then and now. Firefox 3 offline capabilities changed significantly to align better with WHATWG offline specification. The biggest changes involve dropping support for our own mechanism and supporting WHATWG manifests and application cache. The specification gives some details on how it works. There is an MDC article on using offline resources in Firefox 3.

XPCOM is, currently, a core Mozilla technology. Developers use XPCOM for a variety of reasons, many of which result in XPCOM components being accessed from JavaScript. XPCOM uses IDL to describe interfaces. This can make XPCOM components a bit rigid and not feel right in JavaScript. Recent support for optional parameters in IDL has helped a little. Another helpful concept is using JavaScript functions in place of an IDL callback interface. For example:

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:

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).