Category: mozilla

The DOM Inspector was checked in to the Mozilla Firebird trunk today and it should appear in tomorrow’s nightly builds. For those not aware, the DOM Inspector is the ultra-useful browser extension for — among other things — analyzing CSS within a webpage. For instance, you can select an element on a page and the DOM Inspector can tell you how the document’s CSS rules cascaded to produce that element’s styling.

I’m really stoked about this check-in since the missing DOM Inspector was one of the few things holding me back from Mozilla Firebird. Now if I can just get URLs from Thunderbird to open in a new Firebird tab, I’ll be all set :). And, some say that there’s a solution to the open-new-tabs issue as well.

I don't doubt that switching to Firebird/Thunderbird is a Good Idea(tm), but I'm still unsure when the development team will officially make the switch. Reading over the roadmap, they say that “[it’s] clear now that we will not be able to switch to Mozilla Firebird by the Mozilla 1.5 final milestone” — but they don't elaborate on when they expect that switch might be :-/.

Update 11-13: I’ve discovered that Firebird still doesn’t have inline autocomplete in the location bar (URL bar). Bummer.

Thanks to bug 56301 being fixed recently, the latest builds of Mozilla now include the spellchecker built right in (it used to be that you’d have to install the spellchecker separately). I’m really pleased about this since it’s not only one less step that I have to go through each day (yeah, I upgrade Mozilla every day), but it also means that the spellchecker’s reliability is now tied to the core Mozilla development (I’ll explain).

When the spellchecker existed as a separate plugin, it had no association with the Mozilla team. So, if the spellchecker stopped working, you’d just be stuck without a spellchecker until the spellchecker guys got around to fixing it (which could sometimes last for months on end). Now that’s it’s integrated with Mozilla, if the spellchecker breaks, the core Mozilla team will work towards fixing it. And, even better, the spellchecker won’t check quoted text anymore either.

As mentioned on Asa’s blog, Henrik Gemal has created a Mozilla Related Blogs page. All the usual Mozilla blogs are there (BlogZilla, Hyatt, and so on) and, much like DFWBlogs, they’re listed in order of how recently they’ve been updated.

Smooth scrolling has been implemented in Mozilla. To see it in action, just download a recent nightly build and add this line to your prefs.js file (while Mozilla isn’t running).

user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true);

If you’re not familiar with the feature, smooth scrolling slides text up pixel-by-pixel during a scroll, instead of a chunk at a time (IE also has this feature). This didn’t initially sound very useful to me, either, but this thead on the gtk-devel-list (for GTK development with Linux) conveys that smooth scrolling allows for scrolling & reading the text at the same time.

Sure enough, smooth scrolling does make it easier to scroll and read text in quick succession. The physics of the current implementation isn’t perfect yet (gravity, velocity, and so on), but I still consider it an improvement over regular scrolling.

If you’re running the Mozilla nightlies, you may have run into this one by now — you can only select filter-by-subject when creating new filters.

This first appeared in Saturday’s builds, and it’s not yet fixed. However, as more duplicate bugs are filed alongside it, I’m sure it’ll get some attention.