Posts

Firefox 3RC1 is just around the corner. Surprisingly, more than a few of the current Top 100 add-ons on AMO are not updated to work in Firefox 3. I say “current” because when Firefox 3 ships, those old add-ons will no longer be in the Top 100. Alex Polvi has a chart (updated daily) showing the status of Top 95% of AMO add-ons (by usage). You can see that many of the Top 100 have been updated to at least Firefox 3.0b3 or greater.

Prism 0.9 has been out for a little while now. People really like the Firefox extension version. We have been getting some bug reports and feature requests. We are working on them, so keep them coming. Among the Prism related posts, I came across some really interesting news about Prism and Ubuntu (via Tombuntu & Derek Buranen):

One of the new XMLHttpRequest features in Firefox was cross-site requests. It was based on an W3C specification and would have allowed web content to make cross-site XMLHttpRequests. I say “was” and “would” because that feature was removed in Firefox 3.0b5 due to security concerns and some specification changes too close to the Firefox 3 release.

I have always thought that SVG would be great for the Web (more the graphics part and less the sockets part). I also think SMIL would be a good to create nice and smooth animations. Having an animation system built natively into the browser would likely be better than using JavaScript and setTimeout.

I love reporting “unbreaking news” and I have some report. I posted about a security change (bug 418356) to mozIJSSubScriptLoader that broke loading scripts from any non-chrome URI. An alternate fix has landed that allows file: and resource: URIs to be loaded by the subscript loader again.

Global extensions are extensions that are not installed into a profile. Therefore, the extensions is always available, even in a new profile. Yes, I am talking about extensions, not plugins. Plugins can also be global, there are a few ways to achieve this on the various platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).

XMLHttpRequests (XHR) are used for lots of things these days. When running a background XHR, however, you might experience some common issues like authentication or bad SSL certificate dialogs popping up. Another problem was starting an XHR, then closing the window - the XHR is closed. To help get around these inconveniences, Manish Singh (of Flock) adding support for a background mode (bug 383430). The details: