Mozilla · Grey Nicholson

How To Make Thunderbird Well Sexy

2007-08-03T07:12:00+00:00

For Thunderbird to properly succeed in providing real choice and freedom, it needs to become the successor to Firefox, in the way that Flock is currently trying to be. (You can think of Firefox as “The Internet 1.0”; Flock as “The Internet 1.1” and Thunderbird as “The Internet 2.0” if you like.)

There are lots of people who use Firefox for day-to-day web browsing—great for HTML, CSS and JavaScript interoperability and ostensibly a win. But a large portion of that browsing consists of using “social networking websites” such as Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, even Blogger; or “instant messaging services” such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL's instant messengers.

Each of these is closed and isolated from each other, particularly its direct competitors. Any interconnection is done at the whim of one of these companies, one service provider at a time. I can phone a BT line in Glasgow from a Virgin Media line in York; I can send an email from RandomMail to Mom's Friendly Email Service, even if neither has heard of the other. But if I write a blog post at Acmeblog, my friends using Myface won't see it.

For there to be true freedom, there needs to be an open, standards-based, social network through which people can freely conduct communication. (This is what the Internet is supposed to be in the first place.) And I don't mean “social network” in the limited sense of “a website where you log in and can talk to your friends lol”.

I mean a set of standard protocols by which anyone can communicate with anyone in any conceivable way. I'm thinking of open, federated standards such as email, Atom (including the publishing bit), Jabber, OpenID and OpenSearch (and avoiding saying “semantic web” even though that's pretty close to what I'm on about).

Flock takes a standard web browser and surrounds that with structured social network stuff. Thunderbird should invert that. It should start from a set of high-level concepts such as contacts, presence, subscriptions and messages. Then it should bring in bits of web browseriness as appropriate to display the content.

(By the way, I shouldn't have written this on Asa's website; I should have written it in Thunderbird, to: the web; cc: Asa.)

Imagine Thunderbird and Lightning, Pidgin, Skype (but Free), Miro, AllPeers and the Chandler project, all combined into the only communication program you'll ever need. Thunderbird should be that.

Magically Disappearing Extensions

2005-09-08T10:28:00+00:00

Bug 275529 was fixed between Aviary 1.0.x and the imminent 1.5b1. It's going to cause lots of fun.

To summarise, Aviary 1.0.x and prior would accept any string as an addon's id, but Aviary 1.5.x requires the id to be in one of two specific formats. Novelly, there is clear documentation, on Devmo; note that letters other than A, B, C, D, E and F (upper- or lowercase) are invalid in GUIDs.

Users were able to install addons with malformed ids into Aviary 1.0.x. But when upgrading to 1.5.x, the new version will not recognise these addons; they will completely disappear from the extension or theme manager and the application will not attempt to find a compatible version.

An addon's id is defined in the <em:id/> element in the addon's install manifest (install.rdf). You can check it's valid by looking at it, or by trying to install the addon. If the id is invalid, Aviary 1.5b1 will display an invalid id error message and refuse to install it. Note that any other installation errors, such as an incompatible version of the application, will take precedence over the invalid id error.

Addon authors should update their addons immediately to include a valid id, instruct existing users to uninstall and reinstall the addon, and (optionally) apologise to them for not following the specification properly in the first place.

Your Computer May Be Commandeered By Randomers

2005-08-31T21:18:00+00:00

I'm often amazed by how many screenshots of Firefox include a critical update icon. A red disc in the top-right of the browser window means there is a critical update to Firefox available and that you should upgrade immediately.

Yes, it's crap UI, which is why it's gone in Deer Park - there's a nice, big “You need to update Firefox now” dialogue instead. But I'm still surprised by how many people completely dismiss it. I assume they can see it's there; is nobody interested in finding out what it means? It only requires pointing at it.

Maybe the icon should have had a large label reading “Your computer may be commandeered by randomers. Click here if you'd prefer it not to be.”

Tabbed Thunderbird

2005-04-03T01:53:00+00:00

I've been thinking (albeit briefly) about a tabbed interface for Thunderbird, or rather a one-pane interface. It looks pretty simple.

(Disclaimer: it's 02:17 BST so thoughts may appear partially-formed, deformed, misinformed and/or Nazi-uniformed; I'll proof-read this at an undetermined future time.)

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| @ Mooquackwooftweetmeow Thunderbird                                                         - + X |
| File  Edit  View  Go  Message  Tools  Help                                                        |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|   @@@     @@@  |   @@@    @@@                                                                     |
|   @@@     @@@  |   @@@    @@@                                                                     |
| Get Mail  Stop | Compose  Etc.                                                                    |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  _______   _______   ___________   _______________________                                        |
|_|*Gmail*|_|Airmail|_|aRSSe Feeds|_|Newsgroups of the World|_______________________________________|
|  ____   _____   ______   ____   _____   _____________________   ________________________________  |
|_|Home|_|Inbox|_|Drafts|_|Sent|_|Trash|_|Re: Taking over world|_|*Compose: Re: Taking over world*|_|
|                                                                                                   |
| Subject: Re: Taking over world                                                                    |
| From: rb@virgin.co.uk                                                                             |
| Date: 2005-04-01 08:32                                                                            |
| To: billyg@mozilla.org                                                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Friday sounds good                                                                                |
| --                                                                                                |
| Richard                                                                                           |
|                                                                                                   |
|                                                                                                   |
|                                                                                                   |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ~ |                                                                     | Unread: 0 | Total: 4781 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The basic idea is that the current 3-pane system is condensed into a set of nested tabs. Each account's Home tab shows pretty options like Thunderbird's current server pages. Inbox, Sent and friends look much like the current messages pane. Messages' previews would appear beneath the messages' list item, in the style of webpage-bound, JavaScript-driven expandable FAQ lists. All of these tabs would be immutable.

When a message is double-clicked (or middle-clicked) or a Compose-like action is chosen, a new tab would be opened under the appropriate account. These tabs can be closed and perhaps rearranged, imitating Firefox's tabs. When sending a message, progress would be indicated in the status bar, not in a pop-up dialogue.

It's a Weblog Entry!

2005-01-08T02:48:00+00:00

OK, so the normal service has been a bit thin on the ground. Aaanyway... I'm back off to university tomorrow (Sunday); any new text and/or other whatnot will appear at Mooquackwooftweetmeow B, my university webspace.

Meanwhile

It took them four years, but this Christmas the people in charge finally cottoned on to the idea of putting two and two together, where the first “two” is a lot of homeless people in London and the second “two” is an empty Millennium Dome.

Over in Mozillaland...

Some guys decided to call Firefox “1.0” for a change. It seems to have worked. Then some other guys did the same with Thunderbird; that also worked reasonably well. And then roughly 20 million people downloaded them and they saw that they were good. And they divided the Firefox and the Thunderbird from the other applications; the Firefox and the Thunderbird they called “cool!” and the other applications they called “less so”. And lo Internet Explorer became without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of its developers. And Bill said “let there be users” but there were no users, for they saw that it was bad. And the grace of web standards be with us all. Amen.

Or something like that.

And in Operaworld...

They made a browser that can talk like an American, but it still insists on trying to sell me things I don't want, and I can't stop the browser or webpages from doing it. I guess they're firmly targetting users who can't see.

Oh! And...

It's 2005, you know - happy new year to everyone.

Firefox-related miscellanea

2004-09-22T03:06:00+00:00

I was going to entitle this entry “Mozillanea” but realised that was intensely naff.

Modified Rewind/Fastforward extension for Firefox

I've cooked up a modified version of Piro's Rewind/Fastforward extension for Firefox, based on version 1.2.2004092001. The changes are as follows:

Changed three-arrow Previous and Next buttons (for the default Firefox theme only) to yellow versions of the equivalent two-arrow buttons
Changed toolbar button captions “Prev.” and “Fastforward” to “Previous” and “F.Fwd” respectively
Changed Previous and Next tooltips from “Previous page ([text from page])” and “Next page ([text from page])” to “[text from page]”
Added my name as a contributor

I made the changes mainly for my own use and packaged them into an XPI so I can reinstall the modified version more easily; it should install nicely over the official version.

2004-10-06

Additional changes, to improve Previous and Next link-guessing:

Removed “after”, “ahead”, “back” and “before” from the link-detection list

Get Drunk

Inspired by the slew of spoof “Get Firefox” buttons, I GIMPed up the following in knee-jerk fashion:

Jukefox

2004-09-13T16:43:00+00:00

It'd be nice if more extension authors read the documentation all extension authors must read and learned about the Firefox Version Format. A lot of extension authors seem to think 1.5 > 1.45. This would be true if Firefox version numbers were decimal numbers... but they're not - they're a string of integers, each separated by “.”. So 1.5 is indeed “one point five”, but 1.45 is “one point forty-five”, forty-five is greater than five (no, really), so 1.45 > 1.5. Of course, 1.5 > 1.4.5...

I suppose it was smart to market Firefox 0.10 (whose release is imminent) as “Firefox 1.0 Preview Release”, even though some folk seem to think it's not a milestone... which it is.

Meanwhile, with crazy autohiding controls and drag-'n'-drop placement - FoxyTunes 0.61 turns out to be a highly polished extension.

Still, they should've called it “Jukefox”.

Firefox extension wackiness

2004-08-24T22:29:00+00:00

BlockXXX is a new extension for Firefox that blocks pornographic content (the anti-Pornzilla, if you will). According to its release notes: This seems to work pretty well, although there are definitely some holes (large and gaping). Definitely not working well then.

Until about a month ago, all Firefoxen contained the legend Cookies are delicious delicacies. to describe cookies. Then Mike Connor decided that Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data.. Distraught, I incited the creation of an extension to restore the legend.

A month passed and the world had all but forgotten about our delicious delicacies... until Jesse Ruderman published the Delicious Delicacies extension, dramatically subtitled Restore the legend. The world rested in peace once more.

InterCraps

2004-07-23T16:11:00+00:00

My name is not GrEy NicholSon. I don't live in HartlePool, nor in EngLand, nor in the UniTed KingDom.

Firefox is not called FireFox; Thunderbird is not called ThunderBird; Sunbird is not called SunBird.

Bye Bye, Gormozilla

2004-07-17T02:55:00+00:00

Hurrah! The Gormozilla has gone!

I bet the ugly git was scaring off customers.

According to the document history, Gormoz has been out of action for two weeks. Also in the last two weeks, Firefox has been getting many more downloads. Coincidence?

The official line is that security problems in IE are persuading users to switch. Yeah, right!

The Gmail Web Interface and How To Avoid It

2004-06-19T20:21:00+00:00

I have one fairly major complaint about Gmail's web interface - you can't open multiple emails in tabs by middle-clicking. (Pot+kettle sidenote: one can't middle-click links in this weblog either, but that's an XSLT fault in Gecko.) In fact, it seems the “links” one clicks to open emails aren't really links at all (right-clicking offers no “Open Link in New Tab/Window” options). This would put me right off using Gmail permanently.

Other, minor complaints are: the clock is in 12-hour format; I prefer 24-hour format. Also, the ad-frame isn't Adblockable (but I don't expect Google to want to fix that :) ). The clock problem could be fixed easily, and neither of these are at all important (just nits).

But I no longer have to use the web interface. Although it is much, much, much, much, much quicker, easier and better than Hotmail's, Yahoo's and mail.com's put together, I just don't like web interfaces. Not when I've got an excellent email client.

For Hotmail I've been using MrPostman as a web-interface-to-POP3 proxy. For the most part, it works well, although not flawlessly - if and when your account gets clogged up with emails, MrPostman is seemingly incapable of ignoring the “Buy More Space!” adverts added to the page, insists you have no new mail, and refuses to fetch the non-existant mail. But it's workable.

MrPostman is aimed at Hotmail, Yahoo.com (not .co.uk) and mail.com - not Gmail. Bobbins.

However, it's a good thing that I read an inordinate amount of Mozilla-related weblogs, and have the middle-click-every-link-in-the-text affliction (“tabbed-browsing syndrome”). For cheeaun led me to djst, whose comments led to PGtGM - a web-to-POP3 proxy for Gmail! Incidentally, the blurb mentions Thunderbird by name - extra marks. (It should also be mentioned that PGtGM is only for Windows.)

How to set up Thunderbird (or even Lookout Express) to use PGtGM isn't made obvious, but it's there - in the PGtGM interface, click Help/About PGtGM, then click the E-mail Client Setup tab to the left of the dialogue. If you're using MrPostman alongside (as I am), you may have to change the POP3 port setting in both PGtGM and Tb's Account Settings for the appropriate account, to something other than MrPostman's. Et voila - Gmail via Thunderbird!

Very curious...

2004-05-12T15:50:00+00:00

Mozilla browsers have long had an “easter egg” whereby if you enter about:mozilla into the location bar, you're presented with a nice quote from the Book of Mozilla.

What's queer, is that entering about:mozilla into Internet Explorer gives a blue page. No other about: address (that I've tried) does this.

Surely Microsoft aren't nicking source code?

Incidentally, why haven't Mozilla's copyright/trademark folks taken Microsoft to court over their use of “Mozilla” in IE's user agent string?

Take Back the Web

2004-02-17T19:23:00+00:00

Mozilla Firebird has reached version 0.8 and has been renamed Firefox; Mozilla has an FAQ explaining why. That gets the obligatory announcement out of the way; now on to the original content.

Still To Do

Ben Goodger's Firefox roadmap outlines what will actually be included in the 1.0 release; this is a collection of other noteworthy shortcomings (a.k.a. “pet bugs”).

Don't Steal Image Associations

Currently, when you set Firefox as the default browser (in Windows, at least), it automatically assigns itself as the default application for PNG, JPEG and GIF images. In the days when Microsoft Paint only handled BMP bitmaps, this sort of thing was OK; but now the ability to not only view, but also edit these types of images is built in to Windows, Firefox has no business associating itself with them.

Uninstall Extensions

Firefox won't be widely adopted by businesses and workplaces until one can easily remove any extensions that are installed. Bosses don't like their minions making any changes to their standardised computing environment, let alone irrevocable ones.

Single Window Mode

This one's a bit chewy. When its developers say Firefox is a “tabbed browser”, they mean it has the capacity to open multiple pages in one window. However, some folk interpret “tabbed browsing” as where all documents are opened in the same window - always; there have even been complaints that tabbed browsing is broken because this isn't the case.

Until Firefox does have the option for single window mode - which won't be until after version 1.0 - the developers should go easy on describing Firefox as a “tabbed browser”, to avoid disappointment.

Miscellanea

There are various other minor improvements that would easily and quickly make Firefox friendlier, and just plain better. The Windows installer should ask before creating Start Menu, Quick Launch and desktop shortcuts - it's only polite. The link toolbar present in Mozilla should be there in Firefox, too; perhaps then more people would start using <link>. And finally, MNG support. There's really no excuse for its absence - there's a patch waiting which only needs the thumbs up.

The Location Bar

The location bar is, in my opinion, Firefox's best feature, and the one thing that stops me from liking other browsers too much.

Any phrase typed into the location bar gets I'm-Feeling-Luckied, courtesy of Google UK, except for phrases which include dots. These are interpreted as URLs and invalid URLs generate an error page... but I can get around this using smart keywords.

Keywords

Firefox's bookmarks can be assigned keywords, which you then type into the location bar and - Hey, Presto! - the bookmark loads. This is great, but smart keywords are even greater.

If the URL of a bookmark contains %s, and the bookmark is assigned a keyword, anything you type into the location bar after the keyword (and a space), will replace the %s in the URL.

So, if I want to I'm Feeling Lucky some search terms (including ones with dots in them), I type goto followed by a space, and then the terms - simple. To enable this, all I had to do was create a bookmark whose URL is http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%s&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky and assign it the keyword goto. When I type, for example, goto hell into the location bar, Firefox converts this to http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hell&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky, which results in Google sending me to its first match for “hell”. The whole process takes less than a second.

I've also got other smart keywords set up for Google Image Search, Mozilla's Bugzilla database, Dictionary.com and IMDb.

All of this means I've practially done away with URLs. If I want the BBC's website, I just type BBC, and Firefox and Google do the rest. This ludicrous ease of use is, for me, Firefox's killer feature.

Google UK

By default, Firefox uses Google USA, but you can change this in about:config; it's pretty easy to do.

First, type about:config into Firefox's location bar and press Enter. You'll be presented with a plethora (or two) of settings. Into the box next to Filter:, toward the top of the window, type keyword and press Enter; this filters out the other settings we won't be using.

Double-click the line containing keyword.URL and enter http://www.google.co.uk/search?btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&q= into the dialogue box that pops up. (I'd copy and paste it.) Finally, make sure keyword.enabled is set to true, and Bob's your uncle.

Brand New

As mentioned above, along with the new version came a new name and brand, Firefox. The previous plan was that “Mozilla Firebird” would be the project's code-name, and it would eventually be known simply as “Mozilla Browser”. Gladly, that's now changed, and we have a browser whose logo looks like this:

The new identity lays to rest previous dissent over the icon/logo Firebird was using - an image of red and orange flames, whose form was also reminiscent of a bird's feathers (this logo is still visible in Firefox 0.8's Help > About > Credits screen). While I always liked it, some felt it stood out too much from other Windows icons (which in my opinion is good), or that it became an amorphous red blob when shrunk to 16×16 pixels.

This name will stick - it's been thoroughly researched, and no-one else is using it for anything resembling a web browser. This means you can start posting your favourite Firefox propaganda about the web (and anywhere else), in good conscience that it'll still make sense in a few years' time. All of which is lovely, as the logo looks bloody brilliant!

Doing the Job

The purpose of a web browser is to display web pages. Mozilla Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which displays pages more properly than, say, Internet Explorer. By “more properly”, I mean Gecko better conforms to web standards, as described by the World Wide Web Consortium. Firefox displays web pages better than many other browsers - it does the job better.

Incidentally, Mooquackwooftweetmeow conforms to these web standards (as should all websites), with no regard for how Internet Explorer mangles its pages, so Mooquackwooftweetmeow looks better (i.e. decent) in Firefox.