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Damn lots of news today, check out my two previous posts today for more goodies.

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Checkin of the week! A lot of people are gonna be exited about a checkin that just happend.

A patch in Bug 291033 - Enable support for profile temp directory on local filesystem has just been checked in. This means that Mozilla Firefox is now able to store it's cache on the local filesystem. This will have a big effect on installations where the profile is stored on a network drive. Fx in organizations where Mozilla Firefox is rolled out. This will limit the amount of network trafic and make Mozilla Firefox behave faster.

The original bug 74085 - Disk cache should use local directory is one of the most commented and voted for bugs with more than 115 comments and 42 votes. The bug was opened in march 2001.

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The Client Customization Kit (CCK) has now been revived. The CCK project aims to make it easy for organisations to customise Mozilla products to meet their needs. This includes setting certain default options, locking some preferences so they can't be changed and configuring the user interface.

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This is also about to land,

#291910 [Core]-Provide utility for incremental download [All]

This will help will cross session resumeable downloads and is a key part for patches instead of full releases to update Firefox.

Update System

One of the biggest difficulties that the Mozilla Foundation has encountered in the months following the Firefox 1.0 release has been managing the Software Update System for distributing updates to 1.0 users. We had never done anything of this scale before, and the system in place is representative of approximately a week worth of work on my part prior to 1.0 with little understanding of the problems that the Mozilla release team would end up facing.

In this light, improving the Software Update System has become a primary objective for Firefox 1.1. We have already met several times, and there are groups now working on the various pieces of the system. Darin Fisher and I will be working on the client side segments, with help and input from Benjamin Smedberg, Doug Turner, Daniel Veditz, Chase Phillips, Chris Beard et al. I have developed some initial UI mocks which you can find on the Mozilla Wiki in the Software Update section, along with some growing but rough design documentation for the client side piece. Darin has figured out how to get binary patching working, and is working on a system for incremental background update download. I will post updates about the client side pieces as they develop further.

Source: Ben Goodger's Blog

Changes for Extension Developers

Last week I landed some important changes to the Firefox Extension management system. These changes involved almost a complete restructuring of the Extension system and offer the following benefits (briefly):

For developers: You can now have Extensions that live outside the profile and application Extensions directories. This may make development easier, because you can have your Extension source code live somewhere else, use the flat chrome packaging (instead of .jars) and place a file in the profile "extensions" folder whose name is the {GUID} of your extension that contains a path to the location of the Extension.

For users: You can install extensions by dropping their XPI into the profile or application Extensions directory.

For developers: You can install extensions by expanding the XPI into a folder whose name is the {GUID} of the extension, and drop it into the profile or application Extensions directory.

For developers: Before 1.1 (not yet, but soon) you will be able to install extensions by setting a registry key.

For users and developers: You will be able to uninstall an Extension by simply deleting its folder from the profile or application Extensions directory, or removing the text link file.

For developers: XULRunner applications will be able to specify their own special kinds of Extension install locations in addition to the profile and application directories, e.g. a special kind of registry key mapping, etc.

For developers: More comprehensive logging of installation and updating.

For users: Move Up/Move Down should now work properly.

The new architecture for tracking how Extensions are installed is much improved over the one used by Firefox 1.0 and will allow us to do many new and interesting things, make our build and release processes more efficient, make application install easier, and allow for other types of items to be more easily tracked by the Extension system.

I want to dish out thanks to Benjamin Smedberg and Darin Fisher for the excellent and prompt feedback on a 5600-lines-added-or-changed patch and helping get this checked in as quickly as possible for the Deer Park Alpha.

Source: Ben Goodger's Blog

The roadmap is not intended for public use or info on when a release will be. It is for a rough target date on when the devs should try to get things done that was decided upon months beforehand. dont worry though, only a couple more blocking bugs and then there will be a 1.1a release, should be within two weeks...depending on if they are going to release it as is after all the blocking bugs are fixed or if they are going to fix some of the regression caused by the new features.

11 bugs left blocking, 3 or more are already landed just need to tie up some things. and i think two of the bugs are just to enable the reporter tool for the release. so actually only a few bugs left blocking

Edit: Just seen this

schedule for 1.8b2 / Deer Park alpha1

We are currently planning to ship Gecko 1.8 beta 2 and Deer Park alpha 1 early next week.

We hope to be essentially done with work for these releases by Friday.

Thus, starting on Friday, drivers intend to become much more restrictive in granting trunk approval requests (and we'll also be a little more restrictive between now and then).

To nominate a bug for consideration as blocking these alpha/beta releases, please set the blocking1.8b2 flag to ?

Alright instead of bumping this thread every couple of days with new info I decided to start a blog and just post the news there. I'm asking you guys to post comments to this thread every so often to bump it to the top so that people can still see the graph and queries and other important info in the first post. Thanks

http://www.supernova00.biz/blog/ I'm still setting setting everything up and will set up the RSS/XML feeder in a few hours

EDIT: http://supernova00.biz/blog/atom.xml

Edited by supernova_00
  • 2 weeks later...

Found a broken website with firefox? Report it!

Check out my blog for more information (will post info here later just don't have enough time)

http://www.supernova00.biz/blog/

The build on my blog is a nightly!!! Please don't install unless you know what your doing

Broken Website? Report it!

You know how everyone seems to complain that some site does not work in firefox? Now you can do something about it, Report it! The tool, called "Reporter", is accessible from the Help menu and launches a simple wizard that lets you send Mozilla Foundation feedback about broken websites. It's not yet a part of the default installer, but you can enable it by doing a custom installation and checking the box in the list of available additions (with DOM Inspector and Talkback.) Once you report a site some mozilla hackers will take a look at it and see if it is broken because of non-standard coding or if it is indeed a Firefox bug.

This new tool is to report e.g.:

  • Sites Blocking Firefox Users
  • Draws the page funny
  • Causes your browser to get excessively slugish
  • Plugin Problems
  • Feature doesn't work

Download: 20050517 build NOTE: THIS IS A NIGHTLY BUILD

Edited by supernova_00

What's going on with Firefox 1.1?

I bet more than a few of you all are wondering what exactly is going on behind the scenes with the Firefox 1.1 development. Other than the new features that I post at the bottom of my "Road to Firefox 1.1" threads there have been over 1700 bug fixes since the 1.0 release and we still have a few months left with the 1.1 development cycle. Jesse Ruderman has an unofficial changelog on his site The Burning Edge. His changelog includes new features, layout fixes, memory leak fixes and whatever other important bugs have been fixed since 1.0.

next couple of days unless a security vulnerbility comes up...then all focus will turn towards fixing that. But my guess is tomorrow night for 1.1a, onyl 6 more blockers for Gecko 1.8b2 and only two are last minute changes while two other bugs are close to having patchs land. so its very very close.

As soon as these two bugs are fixed we will have 1.1a within a few hours:

Bug# 294630 - Crash when closing tab with picture [@ nsImageDocument::Destroy]

and

Bug# 281988 - Stop sharing DOM object wrappers between content and chrome

585940381[/snapback]

:D

Great news, I can't hardly wait. Although I have been using the nightly anyway, this will mean a more bug free version. Great work they are doing at Mozilla, that's for sure. Thanks supernova_00 for keeping us posted.

585937108[/snapback]

cant wait

woot woot :rofl:

What's going on with Firefox 1.1? (Part 2)

I have to new information to follow up on my last post about the Firefox 1.1 status. The Mozilla Foundation will release Firefox 1.1a beginning of next week...looks like Tuesday. Firefox 1.1a will be branded as 'Deer Park' not 'Firefox' and all the icons will be changed to a blue globe rather then the fox on the globe. This is being done to hopefully not confuse end users that this release is a final build when in fact it is a Developers Preview.

The reason for the Developers Preview is so that extension and theme developers learn what changes took place on the backend of the code, so that they have adequate time to fix any problems for the Firefox 1.1 release. Don't forget there are still new features to go into Firefox before the 1.1 release (which is still months away)...like the "drag and drop reordering of tabs".

The Mozilla Foundation has a page up now for what's new in Firefox 1.1a. See below for links.

Official 'What's New' page

Unofficial but more complete changelog

Deer Park Alpha 1 candidate builds available for testing

- We're pretty much there and have a round of builds that are very, very close to what we will ship as Deer Park Alpha 1 (what will eventually ship as Firefox 1.1)

- If you'd like to help us test these candidates, please grab one from the links below. Note that for our alpha releases, we know there are feature and polish issues that we haven't completely worked out but we want to get the core code out to our community so they can test out major Gecko and platform changes ASAP.

- The Gecko included in this candidate build is about one year of development improved since the Gecko that shipped in Firefox 1.0. We've also made major changes to the extension system. XUL application developers, extension and theme developers, and web developers are the primary audience for the upcoming Alpha.

- Oh, one other note, we've also added (thank, Robert) a new feature called "Reporter". This is a wizard for reporting broken websites. You can install this from the custom install and access it from the Help menu. Please report any broken websites you find in this candidate or the actual Alpha build using the new Reporter tool.

-These are candidate builds, not the final Deer Park Alpha 1. If these candidates test out well, we'll be shipping Deer Park Alpha 1 real soon. Also note that the naming and the artwork/branding changes are intentional, not bugs.

Linux || Mac || Windows

Edited by supernova_00
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