inside aebrahim's head

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Of note is that 1.0 Beta has been replaced by RC1, and between RC1 and 1.0, we’ll have an RC2 and RC3 as well.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

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.