Screwed By Design

Yes, it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged (sorry) and yes, to many out there it seemed as if I’d dropped of the face of the planet (I’ll blog about that later). But in this moment of insomnia, I’ve decided to revive my blog and what better way to do so than by picking up right where I left off.

Yesterday morning Google pushed some new imagery live, including an update to a small patch inside Amity, OR (containing the famed Firefox crop circle. You can now view some nice hi-res photos of it via Google Earth (click here to zoom to its location) or see a small preview of it on Google Maps using a KML overlay I whipped up.

45.123772
-123.113799

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<gavin_> huh
<gavin_> mconnor: I don’t understand 347402 comment 29
<gavin_> the go button issue was my fault?
* rob_strong can’t imagine gavin ever doing that
<gavin_> hrm, actually, the problem is in http://screwedbydesign.com/mozilla/rc.diff but apparently not in any of the patches on the bug
* gavin_ blames Ryan
<Mossop> haha
<poningru> hehe
* poningru shakes fist at ryan
* rob_strong wants some of what ryan was smoking when he wrote that
<Mossop> As I recall there was an xul error in the original patch which is probably where the mistake crept in
<Ryan> Wait… what!? I’m to blame for the go button?
<Ryan> I did no such thing
<Mossop> Ryan: Yeah its all your fault, we decided
<Ryan>
<Mossop> Ryan: Feel free to try to prove your innocence
<Ryan> I didn’t even touch that part of the patch!
<Ryan> Though it’s worth noting that that patch was against the trunk
<Lucy_> mconnor blames gavin
<Lucy_> but that might have changed since last night
<Ryan> Well gavin did check in my patch
…
<Ryan> Woo. It was totally my fault
<Mossop> lol
<Ryan> I moved the wrong line in the original patch
<Ryan> But in my defense, it wouldn’t have happened if it was a unified diff with context!
<Mossop> Ah here come the excuses
<Ryan> Dude, have you seen the other patch?
<Ryan> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=231885
<Mossop> Ok maybe I’ll let you off
<Ryan> Yay!
* Ryan hides from mconnor
<mconnor> Ryan: smooth
<Ryan> eep
<mconnor> Ryan: typical sysadmin “looks right, must be right”
<Lucy_> lol
<Ryan>
<Ryan> Hey, it worked okay too!
<mconnor> pfft

Oops

With the initial pieces of the new theme now in the hands (or at least seen by) of thousands of users, there’s no shortage of feedback. The task ahead is to separate the noise from the signal and begin assessing the many concerns, suggestions and bugs. Most of the issues users discovered today have already made their way to Bugzilla - these are just a handful of the total bugs already on file for the new theme, but they’re the issues that I’ve seen being most loudly complained about:
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Last night I worked on getting the new theme changes hacked into my trunk build. After about an hour of failed attempts, I ended up having to pull a new tree to get the patch to grudgingly apply - only to run into bug 346214 and a missing close tag introduced by the patch in browser.xul.
Overall the theme itself is nearly complete and only has a few remaining CSS and polish issues to hammer out. Barring anything catastrophic, the new theme should be landing on the 1.8 branch really soon and should be available in nightlies sometime tomorrow or over the weekend. So without further ado, may I introduce to you the latest iteration of the new official theme for Firefox 2!

Update: The theme is now available in the latest nightly builds. See the link below to grab a copy.

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I’m starting to switch over to a new theme I started working on in mid-June. I hadn’t done anything with it in weeks, and I figured if I didn’t make it live soon it’d end up with the rest of my unfinished projects…

So watch out for falling debris, broken links and general areas of ugliness. Hopefully I’ll finish it off one of these days

To quote Mike Beltzner after narrowly dodging a potential Tinderbox config issue:

god, though, if we hit this date … it’ll be like, the first alpha date we’ve *ever* hit

Well, the date was set, and met with 2 hours to spare. Major props to the Mikes, Rob Helmer and the QA team for doing some latenight smoketesting.

So what’re waiting for? Give a3 a try already!

This was taken a few blocks north of Dupont Circle from the roof of my office building sans tripod using a crappy Fujifilm digital camera. Even so, it’s still kind of nifty if you disregard the funky color/perspective changes.

dc_pan.png (1.4MB)

I just setup a microsummary for the main page of this blog. I’ve set it up so you’ll easily be able to see the date of the latest blog entry. If you’re using a recent trunk or branch build, you’ll be able to use the microsummary here by adding the main page of this blog as a bookmark and selecting the summary in the drop down menu.

Once added, the bookmark will end up looking like this:

You can find more information and some microsummary examples here.

With things being prepared for the release of Bon Echo a2 in a day or two, I figured I’d post a little preview of the new features added since a1 that’ll be sure to turn some heads.

1. In-line spell check

Just start typing in any <textarea> and Firefox will automatically underline any words you spell incorrectly. Right click on any mispelled word and you’ll be given a few options from the currently loaded dictionary. You can spellcheck <input> fields by right clicking on them as well.

2. Better search engine management

Tired of having to dig though your searchplugins to delete search plugins? With the new search engine manager, this is a thing of the past. With the ability to delete and reorder plugins and the new backend support for formats such as OpenSearch, that handy search bar just got handier!

3. Search suggestions

The search backend now provides search plugins the abilty to specifiy an autocomplete URL. This allows plugins to provide a feature similar to Google Suggest directly in the browser UI. A2 will ship with this feature enabled for the Google and Yahoo! plugins.

4. Improved feed discovery and presentation

Firefox has now gained the ability to sniff out and display feed previews within the browser. Features such as selecting a default external reader or web reader service (In the options menu under Feed Reader) aren’t fully implemented yet, but with a little work you may be able to get it up and running.

5. Session restore

Currently session restore is currently only enabled for crashes, but soon restarts for extension installs/app updates will be able to use the session restore service.

6. Improved extension/themes manager UI

The extension manager and themes manager have been merged into a new ‘Add-ons’ manager which features improved update notifications, server-side blacklisting of malicious extensions and a streamlined installation process.

Bringing it all together

So far there haven’t been many major UI changes since a1 (and 1.5 for that matter) but as we draw nearer to a finshed product, things should really start to fall into place. The next few weeks should prove to be pretty amazing in terms of finishing up the final feature set and refreshing the look of the browser.

edit: A2 has now been officially released, you can download it via the link on this announcement.