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Thee rather important news for my readers.

1) Axel Hecht became a voice of l10n world in Mozilla Corp. – kudoz to him for his awesome contribution to the project.
I had a pleasure to met him personally and I really see the future much brighter for l10n now! 🙂

2) Two months ago, at 12.07.2005, Mozilla Europe General Ordinary Assembly took the place. I wanted to wait for official announcement, but it seems that holiday time made it forgotten so I’m announcing it now. On the assembly, my humble person was elected as a new member of Mozilla Europe’s Board of Directors.

3) I finally bought a notebook. It’s pretty and sweet Acer Aspire 5024 (version with 80GB HDD) for 1,179 €. Hoah! 🙂

That’s all for now. I’m going to some studio to help preparing some merketing stuff for Firefox 1.5… No more about it for now… It’s a secret 😉

I’m glad to announce that I’ll have a talk at “Free Software in public administration” conference on 17th September 2005 in Radisson Hotel in Warsaw.
My talk has a topic “Firefox – desire of freedom” and I’ll be discussing the role of Free Software and Open Standards in critical user applications like web browser, mail client, IM client etc.

The conference is for free!

According to Pike, we will have localized Firefox 1.5 beta1 releases!

For Polish testers, please report any bug on our bugs.aviary.pl site. Here you have the list of bugs that are already in the process of fixing for Firefox 1.5/Thunderbird 1.5.

Zack Rusin’s demo from aKademy 2005 at Malaga is here.
The link is about “xgl”, but I’m almost sure that Zack presented Exa, not xgl there. And if so than this is what we will have in X.org 7.0/6.9 – quite soon! And yes, that’s what will be used in KDE 4. Finally we have our response for Gnome’s demo from last year 🙂

Beside of that… Guess what browser Zack uses there… humm… is this… Firefox? 🙂

Another nice marketing idea from Opera.
After the last rumours about Opera going freeware there were two possibilites. The rumours were right or wrong (Oh! So wise!). If the rumours were right, preparing such campaign is a very clever move. You get free news/press, you get blog news etc. People keeps talking about Opera. They might do some more “promotions” like this before really switching to freeware. Bravo!
If the rumours were wrong, then they must do actions like this not to gather bad press (imagine article “Everyone was sure that Opera will be freeware, but they only gave their users new forums… Such a disappointment”).
I think that the former one is truth, and Opera is just playing with the last days of occasional promotions for product that will be free in a short time.
For example, imagine the amount of people who promoted Opera with buttons for weeks, months, to get those 250 clicks… And I got Opera with one small email. But the amount of noise in press about both actions is the same, so Opera wins.

I’m still saying that Mozilla should learn from Opera that sometimes you can do small step to gather big marketing advantage (as my favourite example – we really could’ve SVG first).

If you love python, hate javascript, and want to work in Gecko… head to bug 255942 in b.m.o.
Gecko 1.9 will be scripting language neutral and will support Python.
What next? Perl? Tcl? VBScript? (sic!)

Guys from KDE are writing status updates from aKademy. TSDGeos TSDgeos and Ervin wrote about day second.

The most important part for Mozilla world is that Gecko can be embedded into Konqueror(hopefully this will work in KDE 3.5) and that Dirk Mueller was payed to port Firefox to QT.

Devmo is extremly vibrant project. It’s not in beta version yet, but thanks to awesome work made by Dria and her followers, we were able to create in very short time very big knowledge database. It’s easy to use, easy to extend and now we’re a few steps from being ready for 1.0 release.
Early next week we will move from MediaWiki 1.4 to MediaWiki 1.5. MW 1.5 is much faster, has better database schema, improved user management and many others. For localizers it’s most important new feature is ability to get email when any change to the selected document happens.
Also, Devmo will use two of my patches – first one for Multiwiki user storage. That’s the one allowing you to switch language without need to log in once more. Second one allows us to create external redirects. If the value of #redirect [[value]] starts with http:// or https:// it will redirect to external domain.

The last but not least change is that we’ll have a new skin. It’s really awesome! Take a look:
English Devmo
Polish Devmo
Test Devmo with MW1.5 version

If you find any bugs or if you have any suggestion, write it here.

Open your favorite browser. Type

javascript:for(var i in null) {}


and check if this will throw an error.
In fact, it should, but I tested Konqueror, Opera, Firefox, Shimono tested IE6 and Shaver tested Safari – all of them passed this.

To prove that this behavior is not proper, head to ECMA standard 262, and take a look at:
Point 12.6.3, step 3:

12.6.4 The for-in Statement
The production IterationStatement : for ( LeftHandSideExpression in Expression ) Statement is
evaluated as follows:
1. Evaluate the Expression.
2. Call GetValue(Result(1)).
3. Call ToObject(Result(2)).
4. Let V = empty.

Point 9.9:

9.9 ToObject

The operator ToObject converts its argument to a value of type Object according to the following table:

Input Type	Result
Undefined	Throw a TypeError exception.
Null	Throw a TypeError exception.
Boolean	Create a new Boolean object whose [[value]] property is set to the value of the boolean. See 15.6 for a description of Boolean objects.
Number	Create a new Number object whose [[value]] property is set to the value of the number. See 15.7 for a description of Number objects.
String	Create a new String object whose [[value]] property is set to the value of the string. See 15.5 for a description of String objects.
Object	The result is the input argument (no conversion).

So we should throw an error. The question is. What sites will we break? Shaver asked me to find some sites that will be broken, but it’s not that easy. So if you know about any site that might do for in loop on undefined element, please, let me know.

That’s a great news! Opera Watch claims that Opera S.A. will announce alternative buisness model for Opera browser soon. And, as for me, there is only one alternative – freeware.

There are two ways for Opera. It can either became “exclusive” browser as I mentioned in some previous post, or go freeware and compete Firefox, IE and (soon) Konqueror. It seems that Opera will be free. No, not free as in Opera’s current marketing rubbish “free, but…” – a really, 100% free browser.

Is this good? It’s a motivator for Mozilla team for sure. It’s also a fall of a next myth. Once Opera is free and identifies as Opera, there wont be any more excuses for much lower market share. If they will not be able to gather more market share (remember their “awesome” 8.0 long awaited marketing campaign?) – they will have to start looking for issues inside their software, not outside.

Also, what about moving to open source? Humm? Temptating? 😉