02.22.09

Camino Schedule Update

Posted in Camino at 11:50 pm by

It’s been a while since I’ve made a Camino post, mostly because I’ve been sick and incredibly busy (simultaneously) over the past few weeks.

However, I did want to provide a little bit of an update on the Camino 2 schedule and plans. Right now we’re hard at work on the last two major features for Camino 2, one that’s under development and one that’s still being polished to the point where we’ll consider it shippable. On the other hand, Camino 2.0 Beta 1 has been out for a while now, and we have a handful of significant Gecko fixes, new Growl support, and a handful of smaller improvements that have landed since then.

In light of those items, we decided at last Wednesday’s meeting to insert a new beta into the Camino 2 schedule. The localization and feature freeze will still coincide with our final beta (now to be Beta 3), but in the next week or so we’ll release Camino 2.0 Beta 2 with the last several months’ improvements.

As before, everyone using Camino 2.0 Beta 1 or Camino 2.0b2pre nightlies will be automatically updated to Beta 2 when it is released, so just watch for the update prompt!

(For those of you using the stable version, Camino 1.6.6, we’re also planning an update sometime in March, to coincide with the next Gecko 1.8.1.x release.)

02.21.09

A Note to Web Developers

Posted in Camino, Software at 11:08 pm by

If any of your scripts (or any of the external JavaScript files your site may use) contain any of the text

  • http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html
  • Ultimate client-side JavaScript client sniff
  • The Ultimate JavaScript Client Sniffer

here’s a tip1 for you: You’re Doing It Wrong.

Sincerely,
Everyone using the Internet since 2002

        

1 Here’s an additional tip, free of charge: the method you are using is not only wrong, but it’s also overly complex and unmaintainable, and you are misidentifying current, fully-capable browsers and annoying your users.2 ↩

2 A third tip, also offered free of charge: if you don’t know where to find information about properly detecting which features of various web specifications your users’ browsers support, you can start by reading this article about feature detection and rendering engines. ↩

02.10.09

Oh, the places you have gone!

Posted in Life at 1:34 am by

It is interesting to see where people have gone. I don’t write much anymore, but I read what I see out there, and it makes me happy.

It is interesting to see where people have gone.

02.06.09

Gecko Fixes

Posted in Camino at 1:12 am by

In the past couple of days, the Gecko fixes I alluded to earlier in the week have landed. Those of you using nightlies (or even Camino 2.0 Beta 1) will want to move to today’s nightly build.

In particular,

  • One cause of crash-on-quit on Mac OS X 10.5 and leak-on-quit on 10.4 has been fixed.
  • Flash that was activated after being blocked by Flashblock no longer continues playing sound after its tab or window has been closed. The fix for this bug also appears to fix a much older set of problems where Flash would apparently continue running (silently!) and eat CPU until quitting Camino.
  • The hang when trying to book a flight with Lufthansa has also been fixed; special thanks to Boris Zbarsky for the amazing turn-around time on that fix and to the Mozilla 1.9.0 drivers for approving it to land this week!

So go enjoy your Camino, now with more Gecko-related fixes!

02.02.09

Camino 2009 Week 5

Posted in Camino at 11:01 pm by

Last week felt pretty busy again in Camino-land, perhaps because of two major landings (complete with lots of file additions to keep me on my toes during check-in).

  • Stuart Morgan again kept the review queues moving during the week.
  • Sean Murphy posted a patch to fix the tab dragging bug on 10.4 and a patch to work around the double-encoded ampersand in search plug-ins on 10.3.9. He also resurrected his patch implementing the back-end for anti-phishing, and after it was checked in, he spent the rest of the week investigating issues with the static build.
  • Christopher Henderson continued work on a “Allow Flash From This Page” item for easy Flashblock whitelisting. In addition, his patch to auto-close bookmark folders opened while dragging bookmarks landed during the week.
  • Chris Lawson did some more work on his bookmark bugs last week, and he also updated his patch for downloads preferences realignment.
  • As mentioned previously, Ilya Sherman’s patch to enable Growl notifications for completed downloads also landed last week.
  • Philippe Wittenbergh produced another half-dozen variations on the full content zoom icon, and he also continued debugging the tab-switching failure on whitehouse.gov.
  • Samuel Sidler welcomed a brand new tinderbox into the world during the week. Like most newborns, this tinderbox has been fussy and demanding of attention.
  • I continued the debugging theme from the prior week, helping Sean look at the 10.3.9 ampersand bug and providing some debugging data for Boris Zbarsky, who had been looking at the hang on lufthansa.com. I also attempted to help Sean figure out the static build issues with his anti-phishing patch—before realizing I had forgotten the cardinal (and ultimate) rule of adding components. It was not a winning week for my memory, but we survived my lapses. I also managed to check in a few of my own patches and to perform some tinderbox maintenance during the week.

As for the week ahead, a number of the recent Gecko bugs that have been annoying Camino nightly users look like they’re on-track for landing, which should be a welcome relief to many!