While ordering a gift for my girlfriend through Amazon, I included a music symbol (♫) and a heart symbol (♥) in the gift note. The printed gift note that Amazon shipped with the gift showed "♫" and "♥" where the symbols were supposed to be. Amazon's confirmation page had showed the symbols correctly.
The MozillaZine article discussing the draft branch plan for Gecko 1.8.1/1.9 and Firefox 2/3 contained an interesting thread about the Acid 2 test.
The draft plan discourages changes affecting web content on the branch for Gecko 1.8.1 / Firefox 2, preferring to leave those changes in the trunk, which will become Gecko 1.9 / Firefox 3 and future versions.
MillenniumX started the thread by asking:
"Does this mean that Firefox users will be waiting until 2007 for Acid2?".
Gecko developer Boris Zbarsky explained why Acid 2 fixes seem to be coming slowly:
Acid2 got released at the worst possible time for Gecko development -- right in the middle of a beta cycle. Since fixing all the Acid2 bugs requires fundamental architecture work, that meant that to fix them Gecko had to finish the beta cycle, ship a 1.8 final, then start taking the fixes for Acid2 stuff.
And such fixes are happening. The <object> loading rewrite fixed most of the issues; the painting rewrite fixes more, and the reflow rewrite will fix the rest once it's done. But given how testing happens and how fragile most web content is, the first of these three changes probably needs 2-3 months of testing before it could possibly be shippable in stable form; the other two need more; I'd estimate 4-5 months of testing (and the reflow rewrite is not close to being finished yet). All of which means that targeting 2007 Q1 is about as well as could be done; figure another 2-3 months from now to finish the work, then 4-5 months to test, that puts us at end of 2006 for actually shipping. And that assumes that nothing else gets worked on but Acid2 issues.
My favorite comment came from jilles:
Nobody is really waiting for it. Really, there are easier ways to display smileys.
See also:
Microsoft has finally fixed some UI race condition holes in Internet Explorer. I think the holes they just fixed include some of the holes I first reported to them in March 2004 and posted to Full Disclosure in July 2004, and which were known the whole time to allow e.g. spyware installation.
Microsoft's fix involves disabling the "Run" button for about a second. One interesting difference between Microsoft's fix and Mozilla's fix is that Internet Explorer doesn't make the button visibly disabled; instead, it makes the button ignore clicks and keypresses for a short period of time. This works well given Microsoft's short timeout of 1 second (compared to Firefox's 2-3 seconds, which might be overkill).
Fox News may have a point with its "War on Christmas" meme. It's hard to explain a paragraph I saw while ordering a gift for my girlfriend through Amazon:
Jesse Ruderman, some of your items will arrive after December 24, 2005. If you haven't already selected faster shipping options, doing so might help get your items there in time for the holidays.
Fox is missing the big picture, though. The use of the phrase "the holidays" instead of the word "Christmas" is the least of the threats against Christmas. Some of the larger threats:
We're still seeing reports of typing ' bringing up the Find bar when it shouldn't, mostly when users are trying to type email messages. Aaron Leventhal, Blake Kaplan, and Johnny Stenback fixed a bunch of bugs like that in the betas leading up to Firefox 1.5, but apparently there's at least one bug like that left.
None of those bug reports have steps to reproduce that work for me in Firefox 1.5, but there are enough reports that I think it's a real problem. Steps to reproduce that I can use to reproduce the(?) bug would be great, and so would a minimal testcase.
I made Firefox crash a few times while investigating reports of crashes in Bugzilla. One of those times, I sent the Windows XP crash report to Microsoft in addition to sending the Talkback report to the Mozilla Foundation. To my surprise, I got a dialog after submitting the Windows XP crash report. The dialog contained a link to a Microsoft web page, which said:
Contact Mozilla Firefox for support or product updates
Thank you for submitting an error report.
Problem description
An analyst at Microsoft has investigated this problem and determined that an unknown error occurred in Firefox. This software was created by Mozilla Firefox.
Solution
Microsoft has researched this problem with Mozilla Firefox, and they do not currently have a solution for the problem that you reported. Below is a list of recommendations to take that may help prevent the problem from recurring.
- Contact Mozilla Firefox for Firefox support.
Additional information
If this problem continues to occur with the latest product updates for Firefox, we recommend you obtain assistance and troubleshooting information directly from Mozilla Firefox.
According to Talkback, the crash I hit is obscure: only 2 other reports in the last two weeks had the same function at the top of the stack, out of the tens of thousands of Firefox 1.5 crash reports during that period.
Did Microsoft happen to investigate an obscure crash that I hit? Since the page gets our name wrong and doesn't say anything helpful, I'm inclined to believe that they haven't investigated this crash, and that the page is incorrect in stating that Microsoft has contacted Mozilla about the crash. The page almost makes it sound like the crash I hit is frequent enough for Microsoft to care and that Mozilla has refused to fix it.
The new "make img tag" bookmarklet creates XHTML code to include an image, including the correct width and height attributes. Use it when Firefox is just showing the image, e.g. after dragging the image to a Firefox window or after using the View Image context menu item. I wrote it to save me time when I include images in my blog posts.
I added 5 extensions to Pornzilla. The new extensions are:
I also moved extensions that don't work in Firefox 1.5 yet onto a separate page. (I wrote a Greasemonkey script to help me determine which extensions had been updated for Firefox 1.5.)
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