1. You need to implement the whole SVG 1.1 Fonts chapter to pass Acid3
2. SVG Fonts and foreignObject support are both required to pass Acid3

Let’s be clear here: these two statements were never made by limi, or by bz, whose quote is used in both posts. Erik used only parts of bz’s quote that helped his argument, and conveniently left out this bit:

We don’t particularly want to do that small subset in Gecko, since it gives no benefits to authors or users over the existing downloadable font support (beyond the brownie points on Acid3).

On the other hand, support for the full specification in a UA that also supports HTML is… very difficult. SVG fonts are just not designed with integration with HTML in mind. Once you put an <iframe> in a glyph, all sorts of issues arise — both in terms of the spec being underdefined and in terms of the behavior being very difficult to implement, no matter what the spec said.

The astute reader might notice that Erik used a straw man argument to disprove limi’s post. Luckily, it looks like not everybody on the Internet has fallen for this logical fallacy.

For those of your who use GMail (and if you don’t, why not?!), I’m going to strongly suggest you protect yourself from man-in-the-middle attacks by setting the https only mode in Gmail. A MITM attack can steal your login credentials, as well as anything else you transmit in the clear over the Internet (which is pretty much everything) and is easier than you might think.

To do this, open your gmail settings (found at the top right of the page).

Ensure that you have the general tab selected (it’s the leftmost tab).

Scroll down to the bottom to the browser connections section, and make sure you select “always use https”. Feel free to click on the link as well to learn more.

Firefox 3 will always let you know that a page is being transmitted over https by turning the area to the left of the location bar (called the identity button) blue like so:

This is a serious issue. If you have any questions about this, or this type of attack, feel free to ask and I’ll be happy to answer (or find out the answer if I don’t know). Security is serious business, and I want you to be as safe as you can be.

This may not seem like a big deal, but there is a big benefit to using this API over the existing synchronous API. SQLite performs a file system operation called fsync which pushes the data in the file system’s cache to the disk. This operation is inherently synchronous, and on some file systems (like ext3), can take substantial amount of time given the right circumstances. If this is ran on the main thread, the UI is locked up the whole time. By using this new asynchronous API, you won’t have to worry about that fsync holding up the main thread at all!

Perhaps the best part about this new API is that it doesn’t require many code changes. You still create SQL statements the same way, but instead of calling execute or executeStep on the prepared statement, you just have to call executeAsync. The method takes one parameter – a callback that notifies on completion, error, and results. The callback is optional on the off chance that consumers don’t care if something finishes successfully or not.

Iterating through results is not much different from before either. The only difference is that results may be chunked, so the callback may get notified about results several times (with only the new data). Some good example code can be found in the tests that landed with this new API.

I’d really like people to try it out and see if they have any issues with the API. There are already a few refinements with bugs filed, and a few more up in my head that we might want if the need arises.

Firefox 3 brings a brand new download manager to the scene. There were lots of issues that existed with the old download manager both in terms of the UI and in the code that made it work. So for Firefox 3, we redid the whole thing to provide a better experience all around. It’s one of my favorite features in Firefox 3, but then I’m a bit biased. This post discusses the new features of the UI.

Old Meets New – a UI Comparison

The Firefox 2 download manager (above) would display the download’s icon (but not on Linux), its name, its status, and two text links to open and remove the download. In contrast, the Firefox 3 download manager (below) displays the download’s icon (even on Linux now), it’s name, the time of the download, the download size, and where it was downloaded from. For an active download, the size of the download changes to the amount downloaded so far. The main goal was to provide more useful information to the user.

You might notice, however, that there is now primary UI to open or remove the download. The idea here was to provide a less cluttered UI. However, just like before with Firefox 2, you can open your download by selecting it and pressing enter, double clicking it, or selecting open from the context menu. In fact, the context menu has grown a lot too!

The middle two options provide functionality that was once available from the old properties dialog. That dialog was removed because it was out of place. One of the new features of the new download manager is the ability to select more than one download (as hinted to by the “Select All” entry in the context menu). You can select multiple downloads (below) to perform an action on them such as remove, pause, or resume.

Searching

The new download manager also adds the ability to search through your download history. Let’s say that you recently downloaded a bunch of pdf documentation from threadingbuildingblocks.org and want to open it. The folder where all your downloads go is hopelessly cluttered, so you open up the download manager, and search for “pdf threading”. In a matter of moments, you are presented with the documents you wanted so you can now open them, or if they were deleted, you can re-download them.

Status Bar Indication

Perhaps the most useful feature that has been added in Firefox 3 is a little status indicator that can be found at the bottom right of your browser window:

Firefox will now let you know how much time is left for your active downloads. When you click on the indicator, it will open up so you can see more detailed information about your active downloads.

That wraps up the changes to the UI. Stay tuned for a post about what new features have been added to the download manager in Firefox 3!

Enter Edward. He’s a member of the community and a former intern for the Mozilla Corporation, and he’s gonna make the Awesomebar adaptively learn how to sort the results. He’s got a really cool post about his work here that you should go read right now. It has pictures even! Pictures!

Firefox 3 is gonna rock with these features, and many more. I can’t even use Firefox 2 anymore without feeling like I’m using some ancient, dumb, and slow piece of software. :(

As of now, the only thing it does is enable the download complete notification to work. You might say “but we’ve already got that!“, but I assure you that my approach is much better. First of all, it doesn’t require that you have growlnotify installed anywhere. It uses the same code that I’m using for Bug 362685, with a few changes for it to work on the 1.8.0 and 1.8 branches (Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 respectively).

I’m starting off small, but it can get much more advanced as things go on. This will, of course, be more useful for extension authors (as consumers) as opposed to browser functionality (the only thing nsIAlertsService is used for is the download complete notification). I can add more notifications down the line though, and I also plan to support at least Thunderbird, and maybe even Sunbird too! I’ll try to keep anyone interested in this updated here.

Well, my initial plans were to use XBL to implement a large portion of the code as per conversations with my co-conspirator Alex. Well, bz brought up an intersting point – XBL isn’t applied to elements that have a CSS property of display:none. Well, seeing as how repetition templates are supposed to be hidden with that CSS property, I couldn’t use XBL.

As a result, I get to test my knowledge of C++. Yey! I’d like to state right now that my skills in C++ are not great. In fact, I have very little expereice with it. I mean, I only have had two classes in C++, and one was a very basic course. I feel it goes without saying that I really have my work cut out for myself.

All is not lost, however. There are some really useful tools that are making this so much easier. For example, lxr lets me easily look at existing code and see how things are done the “right” way. Then, there is always a ton of documentation available on Devmo, XUL Planet, and occasionally Google comes into play. Then of course I always have the wonderful folks on irc in #developers. Folks like biesi, bz, and timeless have helped me countless times, and I am really greatful.

This is going to be a long and and winding road, but it will be very beneficial for me. I’ve already learned a lot, and I’ve got a lot more to learn.

The nicest thing about it is that there is now an options button associated with the extension, instead of down below. People always seemed to miss it before, so now it’s a bit more obvious.

The bug has to deal with a security error that isn’t an error in the current version of Firefox, but is an error in Bon Echo, the alpha release of Firefox 2.0. It’s a good thing that I test these things, as that would have been a big monkey wrench once 2.0 came out. I’ve found a workaround for it, but I fear that the workaround leaves the same security hole open that was patched in Bon Echo.

Regrettably, it also happens to be bug that kills the main feature of my most popular extension, RTSE. It will also kill the main feature in an extension I’ve been planning to make. Can we say ‘Curses’ anyone? Of course, this won’t affect Firefox 1.5.0.*, so those of you who uses the stable builds of Firefox will have nothing to worry about for some time.

I’ll keep updating this in the comments for anyone that is interested.

For background information, this attribute is spec’d out by WHATWG, who, as stated on their website, are “a loose unofficial collaboration of Web browser manufacturers and interested parties who wish to develop new technologies designed to allow authors to write and deploy Applications over the World Wide Web.”

The ping attribute is supposed to allow tracking of what links a user clicks on. Now, many might say “Woah, I don’t want my clicking to be tracked!” However, I can assure you that many websites already do this. The catch is that they don’t exactly inform you that they are doing it. The idea of this spec is to make this easier for developers to do, but at the same to have User Agents (i.e. browsers) give the user options. The whole spec can be found here, but in summary, the benefits of this attribute to the user are numerous.

• It will allow the user to see the final target location plainly
• It will allow the user to disable the notifications without losing the underlying link functionality (many methods that currently accomplish the same goal will break if the user disables javascript)
• It will allow the browser to send the ping when the user isn’t actively loading a page so that the target page loads faster

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that this is a good thing. By making things easier for developers, they’ll probably use it (especially once a few other browsers pick it up), and by doing so give the users more control over their privacy. It seems as though most people just pick out the fact that it is now easier for websites to track where you are going, and are completely overlooking the fact that it gives the user a lot more control. Even with this though, I think most people probably won’t care, but will get the added security of easily knowing when they are being tracked. For me, that is significantly better than the current situation on the web.