Call Me Al

I've reached post number 5000. In turn, I have changed my avatar and location. All this goes well with that title change.

I spent some time this weekend updating the themes page at Firebird Help. There are now 96 themes listed, but that includes overlap between skinVer 1.2 and 1.5. Of course djst beat me to the punch. For the past week or so, people kept trying to install old themes on Firebird 0.6.1. And it let them. I've read somewhere that they patched FB to prevent that. In the mean time, Firebird Help will do a little browser sniffing and try to not present all 96 at the same time. David Tenser is also working on splitting them into multiple pages of theme. We'll still benefit from a database backend and php frontend. Perhaps I'll start on that conversion next. Right now we really need screenshot contributions.

I'm still dissappointed that Firebird handles MIMEtypes correctly. I certainly support having standards, but so far no one has been able to make a viable extension to correct text/plain when it doesn't apply. There are lots of great ideas, but trying to hook into the code seems to be a bit preventative.

ExtensionRoom is getting to be a bit unweildy itself. There are more than 100 extensions listed now. As always, it's not easy to maintain that list. Nor can I seem to keep up with the large amount of themes. If you have an update or addition, please send an email to database@mozdev.org. Do NOT send an email to djst. His website uses the database, and since he doesn't make changes to the database, he winds up sending an email to database@mozdev.org, anyways.

Firebird 0.7 is coming up. I wonder if it will go into freeze mode the same way Seamonkey does. Asa still works for AOL, as far as I know, while he helps coordinate the Netscape shutdown. I'd like to see some download numbers for the official 0.5, 0.6, and 0.6.1 releases of Firebird. Other than the recurring problems with Flash and Java, most situations posted on MozillaZine don't seem to impede it from being mainstream. I guess getting plugins working right is more of a priority than MIMEtypes. Maybe I'm not downloading enough stuff, but I rarely encounter the text/plain issue. I don't have Java or Flash installed into Firebird. Sun's JRE was unweildy (is there a smaller plugin available?) and there is no checkbox in Options for disabling Flash. Acrobat Reader 6 insists on being a plugin, even when I told it not to be. Not only that, but trying to navigate away on that tab usually sends my browser to la-la land for a while. If you have a gripe, be sure to visit the MozillaZine forums and see if someone else can solve your problem.