Month: April 2006

Categories
tech

What are the widgets for?

Since the first news about Opera 9, we all knew that there will be a widget system. Since the first preview build, users can touch them. But until now, Opera community and Opera company, failed to clear the signal about what the widgets are for at all.

I thought that it’s my personal problem, I just couldn’t understand the idea behind widgets. It’s nice, it’s great that it works, but what for? In my opinion, they could also add a small car racing game and/or guitar tuner. But few days ago I found (nota bene on Polish Opera Planet) Szymon Teżewski’s post where he confirms my doubts.
The only result is the praises like “Look, even with the widgets Opera is still the smallest and fastest browser!” – ok, that’s great, but it doesn’t answer the question about the usage of widgets. I can hardly imagine anyone using widgets on a daily routines (of course, there WILL be such people ;)), or that someone will use Opera because of the widgets. It makes no sense to me. Opera needs unique feature set for a longer term. To stay alive they need features that no other browser will want to have or be able to have. I don’t think that Opera will be able to attack IE’s market with them…

But the most crucial review was the C|Net one. I started watching it only because I was hoping that the man will explain the reasons for which he likes the widgets, the bright future of widgets and will show me how can I rise my internet experience with them.

Quote: “One of the exciting new features in Opera 9 beta 1 is widgets. And widgets stay with you, after you close out of your browser. And You can move them around the screen, or disable them completly. And there is a whole page of other widgets that you can download.”

Really, a musthave for any Joe Smith. I’m wondering how it’s possible that I used the web for so long without this great feature.

Update: I did not say that Widgets makes no sense to me. I love Mac OS X widgets, I use Karamba, I can’t wait for KDE 4 plasmoids. Do you follow? It’s a part of desktop, not a part of a software app. I feel strange when someone advertises a feature of some app that works because you can close this app and it still serves you. So why it’s a part of this app???

Categories
main

Fx on google.com!

Oh yea… Each IE user from US visiting google.com will see a link to download Firefox 😀

Kudos to Paul Kim! It’s the first time ever a third party product has been featured on google’s main page!

P.S. By the way, www.ie7.com is NOT connected with any Mozilla Foundation part.

Categories
flockblog

Flock pays for fixing Mozilla bugs!

Yes. It’s official now. See Will’s meeting notes. And now it begins.

Today, we started money rewarding our developers for every bug/patch upstreamed to bugzilla.mozilla.org!

It simply means that beside of supporting Mozilla in their mission (to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet), we also joined the list of companies that are supporting Mozilla development by their employees worktime!!!

We’re very proud to be a part of the Mozilla world, we believe that we can do much more than previously to help in bugfinding and bugfixing of Gecko, Editor and Firefox, but we want to give more.

We see shared goals between Flock 1.0 and Firefox 2.0/3.0 that are not yet implemented in Fx, one of which is a places mechanism that we want to reuse as a backend for Favorites and another is inline spellchecking, and yet another is search service. We’re very busy with Flock 0.7 (Cardinal) right now, but once we’re ready, we want to move to Firefox 2.0 as a base for next Flock release (Danphe) and a big part of the plan is to actually get involved into Firefox 2.0 development with above.

I hope that you can all see this clear signal: Mozilla, we *want* to help you! 🙂

Categories
main

Friends

See, it’s sometimes that you just *think* that the world works in some way, while it appears that you’re wrong.

I had it today. I always thought of Microsoft, as the company, that morphed from the company that got computers to users, into a selfish giant that is too stupid to stop thinking only about money and domination. It seems that I underestimated them. Maybe they don’t speak too much about it, but under the hood, they sponsor many interesting, open source projects…. including Firefox. Nice :>

Categories
flockblog

Mozilla folks at XTech 2006

We’re regrouping before the XTech! Add your name if you’re going to be there 🙂

Categories
main

Meet Mr. Face

Acid2 in Firefox nightly Ok, mister Fanatic, you saw that in Safari, iCab, Konqueror and Opera. Now you can see it in Firefox 🙂

Sooo… Mr. Fanatic, meet Mr. Face.

Mr. Face, meet Mr. Fanatic. He’s been waiting for you for many months, and he’s probably very happy now to see you in such a great shape. I hope you’ll stay friends 🙂
P.S. Kudos and credits goes to Mr. Incredible for his reflow branch!

Categories
main

FlockHQ

I made some short photo set from Flock new office 🙂

Click here

Categories
main

Gecko hits 20%!

According to Gemius.pl, which is the biggest polish statistic system covering near to 100% of the market… After 1,5 year from Firefox 1.0 release, 1.5 year of hard work… We’ve just hit 20%! 😀
With todays, every-week status update biuletin, Gecko has 20% of the marketshare here!!! Congratulations to whole AviaryPL team, MozillaPL community, and of course whole Mozilla project!

Also, in this biuletin, there’s a graph of OS/Web browser usage, and it seems that in Poland, Windows 98/Firefox 1.x has 1.5% of users which is NOT good because Mozilla just dropped support for pre-Windows2k machines.

12.4% of Windows 98 users in Poland use Firefox 1.x. It seems that Mozilla will loose this market (I hope that those people will switch to Opera). The good news is that this will happen for Firefox 3.0 (Q1 2007) release, Fx 2.0 will work there.
Once more. 20% for Gecko in Poland! It’s THE time to celebrate!

Categories
flockblog

Hacking Flock with Venkman Debugger

There’s the awesome tool made by Robert Ginda called Venkman Debugger.

There’s even a great tutorial on how to use Venkman, but it covers only the area of debugging your website scripts.

So, with help from Vera, using Yosh and Ian as a testers, I hacked a small tutorial that covers the hole and presents two trivial examples on how to use Venkman to hack Flock (and also applies to hacking Camino, Seamonkey, K-Meleon, Firefox your extension and your website of course).

I also did a small presentation on today’s meeting, on how the numbers looks for Flock, and how to clean the issues using various hand and automated tools.

We’re starting working on Flock’s performance as we’re slowly getting near to 1.0, and Jesse is full ahead now hunting for redundant code, unused timer calls, bottlenecks etc. Cross your fingers 🙂