Indistinguishable from Jesse

Stylish, a Firefox extension by Jason Barnabe, lets you manage CSS rules to change the appearance of web sites.

Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript. Stylish allows you to easily manage user styles for the application UI, all websites, or only certain websites. Stylish is better than using userChrome.css/userContent.css because styles are applied immediately instead of requiring a restart.

Some Greasemonkey scripts only add stylesheets. These scripts would work better as user stylesheet additions, because user style rules are applied immediately rather than only after the page finishes loading. Stylish makes it as easy to add a user stylesheet as it is to install Greasemonkey scripts.

You can use it with pre-written user style rules such as my examples or you can write your own as you use the extension. The test styles bookmarklet, which lets you experiment with added CSS rules, complements Stylish well.

Update 2005-02-11: Updated link to point to userstyles.org/stylish instead of the extension's forum thread.

<morgamic> holy crap
<morgamic> you guys have been busy
<morgamic> nice work!
<Lupine1647> Now we just need a Mac to get some of those themes reviewed, heh.
<gavin> If you buy me a MacBook Pro I'll do it.

"If you buy me a Mac" is somewhat of a running joke in the Mozilla community, but I hadn't heard it for a while. Apple must have done something right with the MacBook Pro.

David Baron recently wrote a tool that testers can use to help reduce memory leaks in Firefox. With this tool, you can find out what leaks you encounter during your normal browsing patterns and report useful bugs when you encounter leaks.

It detects many large leaks even though it only tracks three types of objects (documents, docshells, and domwindows) because many large leaks entrain at least one of those objects. It tries to report the URLs associated with the leaks it detects, allowing you to go back and figure out the steps needed to reproduce the bug.

I have found three leaks so far with this tool. David Baron has already fixed one of them on the trunk.

To use leak-gauge.pl, you need a version of Firefox with the logging code, such as a recent trunk nightly build. If you're using Windows, you'll also need to download Perl. leak-gauge.pl contains instructions for making Firefox log the required information and for running leak-gauge.pl to analyze the log.

Update 2006-01-14: There's also a JavaScript version, which might be easier to use if you use Windows and don't have Perl.

Further reading:

• David Baron: How to file useful leak bugs
• David Baron: How to debug leaks
• David Baron: Using XPCOM in JavaScript without leaking
• Bug 320192, where leak-gauge.pl was introduced and where the associated patches lived.
• Bug 323075, which lists David Baron's ideas for an extension that would monitor JavaScript memory use.

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:

• roc on the order in which big changes in Gecko 1.9 will happen
• Opera 9 to be one bug fix away from passing Acid2
• Safari wins the Acid2 race (2005-11-02)
• roc on Acid2 (2005-04-22)
• WaSP releases Acid2 test (2005-04-13)

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).

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.

I added 5 extensions to Pornzilla. The new extensions are:

• Browse Images - Use the Forward button or Alt+Shift+Right to go to the next image.
• Location Navigator - Select a portion of a URL that varies, then navigate up or down.
• Launchy - Open links to video files in an external player, streaming, so you can watch a video without waiting to download it. (Note that not all video players support streaming video; for example, WinAmp 5.111 hangs. VLC works well. Here's my launchy.xml for VLC.)
• MediaPlayerConnectivity - Open embedded video in an external player, so you can use features like Full Screen.
• Image Zoom - Convenient shortcuts for zooming images.

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.)