Call Me Al

Having long ago made the switch to Firebird, I'm a bit dismayed that so many people are not thrilled with making it Mozilla Browser. Chris Seawood has put a lot of work into Seamonkey and has expressed that he is not happy with the direction things are going. His posts indicate that he was excluded from the decision and is stepping down as the Build Config owner. Just for the Browser, there are a lot of modules. I'm interested in reading how the Firebird group managed to have this coup.

There are a lot of issues that need to be handled and I do not envy the task. Bugzilla and Tinderbox will have to be re-arranged a bit. I believe that Seamonkey will continue to be developed for a while, independently of the 1.4 branch. I am unsure of the reasons for that. Basically, the "Browser" component is being replaced by Firebird. Hopefully that will mean some fresh blood in fixing the accumulating bugs in the near-term. And of course most of the other components are still going to be shared. There's a lot more that goes on at mozilla.org than meets the eye. But most of it is backend, not the UI. Most of the commentary I've skimmed wasn't as bitter as Chris', and a lot of things have changed since the new roadmap came out.

I think the database ExtensionRoom created has probably been the most significant advance so far and I'm pleased to help move it to database.mozdev.org. We've got Chris Neale on board to help do a similar thing to themes.mozdev.org's data, too. ER and DB won't point only to projects hosted on mozdev. It is intended to be a central repository. A lot of work has also gone into Mozilla Firebird Help and Mozilla Thunderbird Help created and maintained by David Tenser to help guide users through using Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail.

More and more people are flocking to the MozillaZine forums to ask how to write things for Firebird. The O'Reilly Network has recently covered the transition including how to convert a Seamonkey Extension into a Firebird one. There are already more active extensions for Firebird than there are for Seamonkey and I certainly hope the remaining ones are willing to make the move, too.

I have more than 4000 posts on the Firebird Discussion forums and besides the bug-fixing, there are a few things I would like to see. I think a kiosk-mode is needed. That includes a fullscreen browser, purging of cookies and history, and locking down of things like the ability to save data, install extensions, and browse the hard drive. I've seen the first two done via various extensions, but preventing the end-user from corrupting the system is going to be harder. For all I know, that might be better as a build config option. Context menu items can be removed with userChrome.

DOM Inspector and Venkman need to be available as extensions, not build config options. DOMI for Win32 has been made available, but it seems to only work for a few builds at a time. Most of the time I don't need DOMI and don't even have it installed. But when I do want it, I'd like to add it on to my current browser and go from there.

There is only one extension that I really think should be part of the core, and that is Extension Manager. EM will connect to database.mozdev.org and allow people to install extensions without even visiting a web page. There are so many possibilities for it, including highlighting when a newer version of an extension has been released.

If it hasn't already, I think that the Linux script needs to be tweaked to detect an existing process instead of popping up the profile manager. Here is one of the ways to do it:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -x /opt/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird ]; then
   try=$(ps -eo %c | grep MozillaFirebird)
   if [[ "$try" < 1 ]]; then
      /opt/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird -remote "OpenURL($1)"
   else
      /opt/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird -remote "OpenURL($1, new-window)"
   fi
fi 

I would hope that Netscape had some buy-in for the change from Seamonkey to Firebird. I'd prefer to look at this not as the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one. Did that sound cheesy enough?

Edit: July 2, 9:20AM - I forgot to mention that I hope they stop paying strict attention to the MIMEtype when something comes through as text/plain from the server. Rar files, especially, seem to often be incorrectly sent. Users panic when they see gibberish all over their screen. I do not think someone should have to install an extension to fix this situation because so many web servers are misconfigured out there. The same goes for perfectly valid xthml that receives a external style sheet with the wrong MIMEtype. The browser goes into strict mode but produces an unstyled page. Since text/css should be exactly the same as text/plain I don't see any reason to render differently.