Finer-grained Controls for Clearing Private Data
I semi-recently did some work to add a nice new feature for Firefox 3.1. The feature is “Forget About This Site,” and is a nice addition to our Clear Private Data and Private Browsing features. Any time you view a history entry (in the history sidebar or in the Library) you get a handy context menu item:
That’s right! You can now selectively clear data from a domain (and all of it’s sub domains) with two clicks of the mouse! This tries to clear everything we know about a site, with the exception of bookmarks. There are still a number of issues pending with this to make it even more powerful (help wanted!), but as it stands, it’s pretty nice. I am, of course, biased.
All this work made it in for Firefox 3.1 beta 2, but I’ve been lazy and am just now getting to it.
Artistic Blog Representation
I wanted to see what I was writing about looked like after reading KaiRo’s post about his site. So, I jumped on over to Wordle (which sadly uses Java), and generated this:
Clearly, I write a lot about Mozilla, and as of late, performance has dominated that topic. It’s funny, because some time this week I was going to write another blog post about performance too…
Side note: It’d be really cool if someone made a WordPress widget that generated this.
WordPress Upgraded and a New Theme
I just got done upgrading WordPress again. I was a bit out of date, but no longer! I also got tired of iTheme, so I’ve gone and grabbed Whitespace by Brian Gardner. I’m not totally happy with it, so I expect to be making some modifications, but I like it a lot better than iTheme.
Let me know if anything seems broken…
On Freedom
They may take our land, but they can’t take away our freedom!
My Sacrifice
I did something a bit crazy today. Insane might be a good adjective to describe me here as well. First, some background; I had already planned on working Thursday and Friday this week (for those of you not in the US, Thursday is a national holiday). I’m trading time off now for use next month when I’ll be in Michigan. It’s nice to have a manager who is flexible like that.
During today’s platform meeting, a great debate started about when we should branch for Firefox.Next. We had originally planned on branching roughly three weeks ago, but we are a bit behind schedule. It turns out this hurts our mobile efforts since the tree is essentially under lock-down, and has been since when we intended to branch. Folks on the call were arguing when would be a good time to branch, with suggestions ranging from now, to (I believe sarcastically) a month or two from now. Branching now means a lot of people have to land patches to bugs to both branches, and branching later means life is painful for mobile for even longer. It was clear to me that we weren’t getting anywhere with the argument and people were just digging into their positions, which is when I decided to do something a bit crazy. This quote from the backchannel chat sums it up nicely (thanks to whoever submitted it as I now have a record of my insanity). Essentially, I’m landing a bunch of patches to make a lot of other folks’ lives easier over the next few weeks or so. Here’s hoping I don’t keep taking steps to further my madness!
This does mean that I’ll be around online Thursday and Friday this week if you need to get a hold of me.
