03.24.08
Camino 2008 Week 12
With two holidays this week, everyone was a little busy, but we continued working on the final pieces for Camino 1.6 Beta 3 and a couple of other non-✈ projects.
- Despite the best efforts of the week’s nasty Mozilla infrastructure failure to foil us, Stuart Morgan posted our existing 2008 Summer of Code project ideas. If you have any other ideas, be sure to let us know post-haste. The student application period begins Monday and lasts throughout the week, and we hope to receive another good crop of applicants again this year.
- Stuart and I continued working on getting the last minor annoyances worked out of the new software update appcast script, and it handles everything we’ve thrown at it so far. 1.6b3 will be the first real-world exercise of the script, and I don’t expect any problems.
- Stuart, Sean Murphy, Markus Magnuson, and I have all been working on patches or reviews for bugs.
- Stuart in particular has been attacking what’s left of the 1.6 bug-list, bringing old patches up to speed and writing new ones. He fixed the long-standing bug where a
<select>would get focus after being clicked on (instead of when being clicked on), finished Nick Kreeger’s patch to getwindow.blurworking properly, fixed the odd-looking “loading” site icon, and, much to my relief, wrote the patch that makes our new web-based feed handler support active on first launch of Camino. - Sean continued his work on preventing dataloss with corrupt
WebSearchEngines.plistfiles, on sorting out the localized vs. canonical font name “mess” on the trunk, and on investigating a new feature we’re tentatively planning for Camino 2.0. - This week I landed both Markus’s patch to eliminate the last strings that were duplicated between the preference panes and the main application and also my patch to fix the display of ftp directory listings on the trunk. I also worked on patches for a few Core bugs, including more work on default font preferences and on the problem of the Mozilla Corp-centric nature of the shared
toolkit/content/license.htmlfile (aka about:license) and the lack of “one license to rule them all.” (I also filed two Firefox bugs about brokenness that had annoyed me over the past week every time I had to test something in Firefox. That served as a good reminder that if you see something broken, don’t assume that someone else has filed the bug already; if you can reproduce a bug cleanly and reliably, you should always file it yourself—after searching, of course.)
- Stuart in particular has been attacking what’s left of the 1.6 bug-list, bringing old patches up to speed and writing new ones. He fixed the long-standing bug where a
I think that’s all for this week. Hopefully next week’s update will include “Camino 1.6 Beta 3 released.” 
March 24, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Not sure if these project ideas are quite SoC-sized, but adding native PDF and maybe also Growl support would be nice.
March 25, 2008 at 7:12 am
Yes, native Growl support (e.g. for download, update and other notifications) would be very nice.
As for native PDF support, you can print to them directly and the OS opens them nicely in Preview. Not sure what more you’d need? Perhaps save-as-PDF (without using the print mechanism, so you get all the screen/background styles)? I guess it might be nice to open PDFs directly inside a tab?
Did Tabspose ever get finished?
March 25, 2008 at 11:02 am
By PDF support people mean “view, fill out forms, print, etc., in the browser.” If you just need to look at something, particularly if you only need to look at a small part of it, not having to download, open, and trash the PDF is a useful optimization. However, PDF support is very difficult; I know of at least three attempts in the last year to write plug-ins that have failed or run out of steam. Hooking up to PDFKit is simple; it’s the handling of events and other things that are necessary for the plug-in to be a good citizen that are very difficult.
As for Tabsposé, there’s a fully functional (but not fully polished) implementation of it on the trunk; you can invoke it with Cmd-Ctrl-T. After Jeff finished that milestone, we pulled him off of Tabsposé and made him work on bugs for 1.6, but now that 1.6 is winding down, he’s starting to look at the remaining issues again.
March 26, 2008 at 7:42 am
Ah yes, despite the fact I work with PDFs all the time, none of the “advanced stuff” (forms, scripting and so on) even occurred to me. Yeah, could we have all of that natively by the end of the summer please?
Another thing I’d like to see is slightly more advanced/configurable ad-blocking. The ability to easily edit the black/white-lists (either within Camino or by launching the appropriate editor) would be nice, as would subscriptions to blacklists (Adblock-pro style) to keep the thing up-to-date.
April 6, 2008 at 11:41 pm
[...] small patches to Gecko’s Mac font defaults. I also spent some time this weekend working on the “one license to rule them all” problem and made Thunderbird generate its license.html file from the shared Toolkit file, reducing the [...]