xenoveritas.org

So I'm playing around with keyboard event handlers in JavaScript, and I notice that Mozilla has a field called isChar documented. isChar becomes is true when the key is a character.

Simple enough, right?

Well... no. From the linked documentation:

There is currently a known bug affecting the return result, which is always false and never true. Please see the discussion link in the sidebar for more details.

Firefox has crashed. Would you like to restore session or lose EVERYTHING you were just doing?

You have selected to Restore Session. Firefox is now going to ignore you, and start a new session anyway.

Firefox: working at the speed of Firefox has stopped responding. Would you like to: Close this application? Wait for it to respond?

Mostly in an effort to ensure that I can find them again later, here is a list of the Firefox Extensions I currently use:

Mouse Gestures

Allows the use of mouse gestures to control your browser

Adblock Plus

Blocks various advertisements. I can't remember what drove me over the edge to finally install this, but something did.

Flashblock

Prevents Flash ads from playing, allowing you to click to activate them.

I've never really like the concept of operator overloading. I mean, it can make sense in certain cases, but in other cases *cough*iostream*cough* it's just ugly. "<<" should always be "shift left" and shouldn't randomly change to "send to stream."

But, anyway, one of the more annoying instances of "operator overloading" is Mozilla's (or, specifically, Firefox's) use of the middle mouse button. I've previously posted instructions on how to make Firefox under Linux behave more like Firefox under Windows by setting the middle mouse to act the way it does under Windows.

Well, I've been busy. Sorta. So, here's some status on what I'm working on.

FireTorrent

Still porting it to C++. It loads .torrents successfully, but the majority of the protocol implementation needs to be done differently since C++ XPCOM allows a multithreaded approach.

Vana'diel Clock

I've made some graphical fixes which will be released as 0.7.5 shortly. My planned changes for version 1.0 currently crash Firefox. No, really.

World of Warcraft

I've stopped playing it. My user interface mods are, essentially, dead.

This may sound kinda silly, but it's possible to make it so that the middle mouse doesn't do what it does in X - namely, paste whatever you selected.

The problem with Firefox is that, frequently, this means you'll be going to some random website. When you type random text into the URL bar, Firefox will run a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on it - effectively taking you to whatever the first result is.

This is kinda cool, in that you can actually find the right website you want by doing this occasionally (try "news for nerds" some time), but if you've got something random selected (text you just deleted, some weird command), you'll wind up going someplace completely random.

Play Tetris in Mozilla! MozTris is an implementation of Tetris using Javascript, HTML 4.0, CSS, and the Mozilla DOM. It also makes use of the PNG format for various images. If you use Opera, you can also play MozTris!

This will not work in Internet Explorer.

Bruce Perens gave a talk where I work today on the topic of Open Source in the business place. One of the topics that came up was Firefox, where he mentioned that the next version of Internet Explorer and that they took that from Firefox. (Some might disagree about where they stole it from...)

Anyway, I got to thinking. As hinted above, tabbed browsing really wasn't an open source innovation. But what really is has to be Firefox's extension mechanism.

I have a love-hate relationship with XUL. There are some things I'd do differently, but ultimately, the ability to add cross-platform features to the browser UI via XUL overlays is an extremely powerful ability.

I might as well try and hype up what's coming, even though it's not quite there yet.

The biggest addition is alarms. The last version laid the ground work, this version includes the actual implemention. Sort of.

There's still quite a lot of work I need to do to decide exactly how the alarms are going to work. Right now they successfully get created and persisted across browser sessions.

I'm still working on the UI for creating them and managing them once they've been created.

I'm also going to look into adding a Balista calendar or (more likely) a "next x matches" schedule.

Compiling Mozilla under Windows requires a C++ compiler. Previously the only way to compile Mozilla under Windows without having to pay big bucks for the Visual C++ environment was to use the free Cygwin utilities, but those didn't include all the features that Microsoft's compiler did and didn't offer all the features that Mozilla has to offer under Windows.

Microsoft has since released the build environment (but not the GUI tools) to allow developers to write software under Windows without paying large amounts of money for Visual Studio. However, the process for doing this is fairly poorly explained. (And for good reason, it's long, annoying, and impossible unless you do some extra credit which is dubiously legal.)