Category: Mozilla

I made the switch from Eudora 6.1.2 to Thunderbird 0.7.1 today.

I’ve been somewhat loathe to ditch Eudora, since I’ve been using it for 10 years now, and was happily using it until version 5.2. But at that point, Eudora didn’t have spam filtering, which was a real problem because the level of spam I was getting was steadily rising.

So when Eudora released version 6.0 with SpamWatch, I was excited that I’d finally have a solution to my problems. Unforutunately this wasn’t the case. 6.0 was essentially a beta quality release, with buggy spam filtering. 6.1.x was even worse, with Eudora now popping up the new mail alert when you receive mail that it already detected as junk. I was unhappy, but I lived with it.

Last night, I wanted to switch SMTP servers to mail.messagingengine.com, which is provided by fastmail.fm. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Eudora to authenticate with the server, no matter which boxes I checked, and how hard I coaxed it. I’d had enough. So I began the process of coverting to Thunderbird.

Continue reading “hello thunderbird, goodbye eudora”

No, I’m not talking about W. & Co, I’m talking a different coalition, comprised of the following companies and organisations:

a) Adobe
b) Apple
c) Macromedia
d) The Mozilla Foundation
e) Opera
f) Sun Microsystems

These six entities have embarked on a project to create more open, scriptable plugins. This is a huge win for end users everywhere, who will finally get open, supported plugins compatible with their favourite browser, whatever that happens to be.

Conspicuously missing from this coalition of the willing are Microsoft and Real (think “axis of evil” 😉 ), which should come as no surprise to anyone. They’re not about to embark upon the path of creating open software, released under so-called ‘viral’ licenses.

Benjamin Smedberg has posted on netscape.public.mozilla.l10n regarding how localisation is going to work for Firefox 1.0. Hopefully this should allay a lot of the concerns that people have been having about the current state of localisation in Firefox. Rest assured, localisation is a priority and is not something that the Firefox development team intends to overlook.

Feel free to discuss things here, but if you want Benjamin to read your responses, you should reply to him in the newsgroup itself. There is already a lot of discussion taking place in the newsgroup, and if you’re at all interested in the localisation process, I strongly suggest that you check it out.

Blake Ross is planning on running Firefox-specifc Bugdays in the near future. If you’ve been triaging Firefox bugs for some time now, and feel confident that you can do a good job of triaging without much hand-holding, please get in touch with him so that he knows that you’re on board. Hopefully we can get Firefox Bugdays started up soon.

It looks like Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 has been released. I’m sure that a lot of MozillaZine readers who create optimised builds would be interested to know this, and possibly experiement with the new compiler and see what new creations they can make. 🙂

New in this version are Express editions of the product, one for each programming language that Visual Studio covers.

Firefox 0.9.1 and Thunderbird 0.7.1 have been released! Both releases contain bugfixes for some of the biggest bugs in their 0.9 and 0.7 releases. You really should check them out.

Unfortunately, the fix for what I think is a conversion blocker (bug 246078) didn’t make it into 0.9.1. I’m confident it’ll get fixed by Firefox 1.0 Beta, though.

I’m looking for a good book which will help me learn C++. I’d appreciate it if people could make recommendations (and preferably back them up), so I can make a well informed choice. I’m looking for something that’s aimed at a beginner, but that will teach me both C++ as well as more general programming concepts. Please leave comments if you have any good suggestions. Thanks!

Firefox 0.9 is out! Go forth and download. Yours truly has also been slightly bumped up the credits list, which is always nice. 🙂

Hopefully blog updates will become more frequent and insightful once I’m settled into my new place this weekend.

…you right click somewhere in your MS Word document, and the mouse action triggers the page to scroll in an unexpected manner, and your first reflex is to think: “I should probably file a bug on this.”

Over the last few days I’ve been focusing my efforts of triaging open bugs in Firefox Downloading. So far, I’m quite happy with my progress, but have kind of hit a plateau now in terms of what I can do. The remaining bugs are all stuff that I have insufficient data to either confirm or invalidate, or bugs that I have no way to test for because I don’t have a MacOS X system. Help is always appreciated :).