Category: Mozilla

It’s about two weeks too late for me, but the most important bug blocking Eudora to Thunderbird migration (bug 3157) has been fixed! This is excellent news for anyone out there using Eudora who’s ready to ditch it. I believe that the University of Chicago may be considering deploying Thunderbird (and Firefox) in the future, and their current userbase is primarily using Eudora. The fact that this bug is now fixed removes a big blocker for them. Attachment names are also now converted properly, which is also a very positive development (bug 242953).

They’re planning on shipping preview versions of Thunderbird and Firefox to students this September as optional unsupported software. They’re likely to be shipping Thunderbird 0.7.2/0.7.1 and Firefox 0.9.2/0.9.1 on their connectivity package CD. Unfortunately they won’t have the fix I mentioned, but when they redeploy in September 2005, the fix will be in, and I’m hopeful that Thunderbird/Firefox will replace Eudora/Mozilla as their officially supported applications. They’re certainly evaluating this possibility.

Thunderbird is an excellent email client, but before it’s really ready for primetime adoption, it also needs to be excellent at importing mail/addresses from other email clients. I’m glad to see that it’s getting there.

Blogger has revamped their post editor, which now has a WYSIWYG mode as well as a raw HTML editing mode. Of note is that they’re testing their product on Mozilla and Firefox. It’s great to see large service providers starting to test their products on Gecko based browsers. Even as little as a year ago, Gecko based browsers weren’t even on most web developers’ radars. We’ve come a long way in the last year, and things are only going to get better! That Google is explicitly supporting Firefox on all their products (including Gmail as well) just shows that we have a product that developers can no longer ignore.

As Firefox gets more and more press attention, we’ll gain more users and mindshare, and it’ll be even more difficult for web developers to ignore us. I encourage you all to support the latest marketing initiative, which calls for users to talk back to the press. It’s important not only that we get press, but that the press we get is accurate and objective. I think it’s an excellent idea to develop a team of people who watch the press, and support writers who give us good press, and work with authors who write sensationalist or inaccurate stories about us and educate them so they can objectively write about us in the future.

Infoworld, a magazine that has a decidedly more upscale readership (CIOs and the like) than most PC magazines has posted a very favourable review of Firefox (thanks to yusufg for the heads up). One of their writers downloaded Firefox after reading about it in an MSN Slate article (of all places!) and is hooked on Firefox! That’s great news, especially since hopefully some PHBs will be reading it. 🙂

But it’s not all good news. They’ve also published an article titled Microsoft products also vulnerable to Mozilla flaw, which is probably just about the most misleading headline that anyone could have conceived. While the article itself is not bad, anyone reading just the headline is certainly going to walk away with the wrong impression.

I’ve been following with some trepidation the efforts (see here and here) to get 1000 reviews of Firefox on C|Net’s download.com. Why do I say trepidation rather than excitement? There are various reasons…

First of all, I don’t think that review-spamming is a legitimate method of promoting Firefox. The idea that “we don’t provide boilierplate text, and want people to give fair reviews” looks good on paper, but there is an inherent bias. People reading Asa and Blake’s blogs are unlikely to give Firefox bad reviews, no matter what.

It just strikes me that mozilla.org is encouraging astroturfing, which I tend to think is dishonest. It’s sort of like going to the Democratic National Convention and asking Kerry who Americans should vote for. No matter how much you insist that you want his honest opinion, you already know what its going to be beforehand, because of the person to whom you’ve intentionally directed the question.

I think there are various other legitimate ways to increase mindshare. Some of them we’ve been pursuing for some time, others we haven’t yet started, and others we haven’t even yet conceived. But asking people to increase mindshare this way I think is a step backwards from the kind of organisation I’d like to see mozilla.org become. So far I’ve been happy and supportive of all of mozilla.org’s marketing initiatives for Firefox. I can’t say I’m going to get behind this one, though.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Firefox, and sincerely think it’s the best browser out there. I have no plans to stop devoting time to what I think is an amazing project. I’m just a little saddened to see mozilla.org encouraging this kind of behaviour.

The XChat script below catches instances of “bug 20000” (for example) and replaces them with “http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20000”.

__module_name__ = "bugzilla"
__module_version__ = "0.1"
__module_description__ = "Bugzilla Url Converter"
__module_author__ = "Marc Liddell"

BUGZILLA_URL = lambda num: "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=" + num.group(1)

import xchat, re

def echoBug(word, word_eol, userdata):
  subs = re.sub( '[Bb][Uu][Gg]\s*([0-9]+)', BUGZILLA_URL, word[1] )

  if subs != word[1]:
    xchat.emit_print(userdata[0], word[0], subs )
    return xchat.EAT_XCHAT

  else:
    return xchat.EAT_NONE

EVENTS = [
  ("Channel Action", 1),
  ("Channel Action Hilight", 1),
  ("Channel Message", 1),
  ("Channel Msg Hilight", 1)
]

for event in EVENTS:
  xchat.hook_print( event[0], echoBug, event)

I’d really like it to display “bug 20000 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20000)” instead. Can anyone help me out here? I’ve tried to change the BUGZILLA_URL line to

BUGZILLA_URL = lambda num: "bug " + num.group(1) + " (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=" + num.group(1) + ")"

and many, many other variations, but all are a no-go. Can someone help me make this script do what I want? 🙂 I’ve tried Googling for answers with no success. I’m sure its a minor detail I’m missing, but I’ve spent a long time on it now and can’t figure it out.

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

UPDATE: I’ve posted a fixed, updated script here (see also the comments section). Note that it requires a working Python plugin for XChat.

I haven’t seen this flag documented publically anywhere, so I’m going to document it here:

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry (based on Asa’s blog entry), Firefox 1.0 Beta will be replaced by Firefox 1.0 RC1, and there will be an RC2 and RC3 as well before Firefox 1.0 ships.

The blocking-aviary1.0RC1 flag is used to nominate bugs that block the RC1 release (of Firefox and/or Thunderbird). Bugs that meet any of these criteria are candidates for blocking-aviary1.0RC1:

– Bugs with complex fixes.
– Bugs with high risk fixes.
– Anything that has a localisation (l10n) impact.
These bugs are usually already marked as blocking-aviary1.0+.

The blocking-aviary* flags are available for bugs in the Browser, MailNews and Thunderbird products as well as Firefox, which is indicative of the fact that some backend bugs could potentially block the 1.0 releases of Aviary products. The flags are also shared between Firefox and Thunderbird, which means that bugs which are blocking-aviary1.0RC1+ or blocking-aviary1.0+ may block either Firefox or Thunderbird, but not necessarily both (though some may indeed block both).

As a friendly reminder, when setting blocking flags, please only set ‘?’ flags and not ‘+’ or ‘-‘ flags. This applies to almost everyone. If you have to ask if it applies to you then it does.

Asa has posted a draft update for the Firefox release cycle leading up to 1.0.

Of note is that 1.0 Beta has been replaced by RC1, and between RC1 and 1.0, we’ll have an RC2 and RC3 as well.

Target dates have already been set for the RC1/RC2/RC3/1.0 releases, but they’re not yet public, so I won’t list them here before they’re announced (which should happen real soon now).

I’ll blog more on this later, once the details of the new roadmap become public.

For those of you who are curious, this was said on IRC in #firefox at 20:31 CDT July 2nd:

<benaway> we may or may not hit 9/14 but we need to target it because if we target a later date we’ll slip off that

Read into that what you will. 😉

My migration to Thunderbird is now complete. I mentioned earlier I was having an issue with importing HTML messages into Thunderbird, which turned out to be bug 3157. Matt Baerbock posted a solution for post-processing the imported mailboxes to correct the errors and display HTML mails correctly. It’s an excellent script (though rather slow), and now all my emails are displaying properly.

There was just one (very minor) snag with the script. It didn’t pick up messages with Eudora’s <x-rich></x-rich> schema. However, there was only one message in my entire set of mailboxes that used this, so it was a small problem that will hardly affect anyone.

All in all, I’m happy with Thunderbird. I just hope that bug 3157 will get fixed before 1.0 is released, hopefully sooner.