<Glazblog/>

1. open TV after dinner to watch the news
2. switch to channel 3, french national TV for their news report that started a few minutes ago
3. immediately, see Tristan Nitot appear on screen !

Tristan, you're the best... I think you even beat Tantek

Free.fr ayant légèrement modifié sa console utilisateurs, mon extension Freerecord de programmation d'enregistrements télé ne fonctionnait plus. Je viens de la mettre à jour vers la 5.01. Malheureusement, suite à un crash système majeur, j'ai perdu la clé privée me permettant les mises à jour automatiques de Freerecord. Firefox ne peut donc pas proposer de mise à jour automatique de la 5.0 à cette 5.01 et il vous faut la recharger et la réinstaller ; cela refonctionnera pour les versions suivantes. Désolé...

I was wearing my black Firefox hoodie yesterday, walking in the streets of Paris with my kids and my dad going to a restaurant for my birthday when we had the big surprise to see another black Firefox hoodie walking in front of us ! Opened my jacket to show mine, Ooooh, Aaaaaah Two Mozillians from the B2G team, visiting the Mozilla Paris offices and spending some time in the nice Marais. It was really fun to meet only because we were proudly wearing our Firefox hoodie Small world, after all. Thanks for that, Mozilla !

CodeMirror offers a very convenient and light piece of code to fold code between curly braces. Very cool for the JavaScript editor into my codemirror2-based branch of BlueGriffon but not enough for the Source view of BlueGriffon itself. I needed to fold tags and not code so I wrote my own codemirror "plugin" for that. It's available here, licensing terms are included in the file. Enjoy !

I adapted my code from BlueGriffon to Firefox this morning. Apparently Tim Taubert independently had the same idea - and also the same UI - a while ago. I promise I did not know about his code when I started mine. Anyway, you can find my XPI for Firefox 5+ here. Warning, in the case of Firefox, it's still highly experimental, can lead to severe issues because of bug 707633. Restart Firefox after installation and you'll find a new panel in the Preferences window.

(if you experience long delay between the click on the XPI link above and the "Install add-on" dialog, that's bug 657581)

This is a response to David Boswell’s post.

Back in 1998, I was already a member of the W3C CSS Working Group (on behalf of EDF, Électricité de France) and Peter Linss, my current co-chair in the same Group, was an employee of Netscape. Peter wanted to hire me at Netscape but it was unsuccessful at that time because of a hire freeze... Two years later, I had left EDF to become the CTO of Amazon France and later Halogen and Netscape employee (and good friend) Pierre Saslawsky pinged me during a CSS WG meeting (was it in May in Sophia or August in Oslo...) and asked me if I was available. I answered positively. Back in Mountain View, he made a referral about me and Netscape's HR called me a few weeks later. Netscape paid me a trip to Mountain View for an interview. But because I said multiple teams looked interesting to me (if I recall correctly: Layout, Editor, Mail and IM), I ended up spending 3 whole days in interviews with all these teams. Layout because I loved it, Editor because I had a lot of experience about that, Mail because I implemented one of the very first MIME-compliant Mail User Agents, and IM because I found it really interesting. Met Vidur, Waldemar, Beppe, Scott, Jst, and many others. My interview with Beth Epperson (aka Beppe) went really well; she was managing the editor team and told me later she left the room telling everyone "I want him, period"

The last day, the CTO Clayton Lewis told me the interviews were positive. He asked me then "Do you want to relocate to the Bay Area or stay in Paris?". I replied "Stay in Paris if possible". He answered "Well, I usually prefer having my teams around me but if we cannot do it, who can do it... So let's do that: six months in Paris in Netscape offices and if working remotely with us does not work, you relocate to MV". I accepted with true joy.

I started working for Netscape the 1st of november 2000, starting with... a CSS WG meeting hosted by Pierre Saslawsky in San Francisco. I will always remember the "Too close to call" messages during election night, spent at Pierre's place. Arrived in MV right after the meeting. Welcomed by Carrie Friedberg to learn a Netscape 6 barbecue party was on its way Got my lizard badge (a pride you can't imagine!), my computer, my cubicle in less than an hour and spent the whole month in building 21, learning a lot, really a lot from Joe Francis, Kin Blas, Akkana Peck, Beth, Michael Judge, Charles Manske and few others. I left building 21 the first day with a load of new mostly black t-shirts, a Netscape 6 jacket and an enormous smile on my face.

I fixed my first bug after a few days only. Something in the Style Engine IIRC. Then lots of bugs in the editor and a few in the Style Engine. Kin Blas vouched for me for CVS write access. And I flew back to Paris at the end of november to work from Netscape offices until 02-aug-2003, after the final 15-jul-2003 layoffs. Formally left the Netscape payroll 02-nov-2003 but launched Disruptive Innovations 13-oct-2003 and we're still here 8 years later, still working full time on Mozilla and Web Standards. Yay !

And you?

Tilt is cool. Very cool. But I almost see it as a debugging tool and I wish the links were clickable, Firebug or DOMI could work. So I did what I always do in such a case, what I did long ago with Small Screen Rendering: I used CSS It's less powerful since the 3D is not dynamic but as a debugging tool, it's probably more useful.

Take a web page, any web page, and add this stylesheet to the document. Reload in Firefox.

body {
-moz-transform: skew(-6deg, 0deg);
-moz-transform-origin: center center;
}

*:not(body):not(html):not(a):not(img):not(span) {
-moz-transform: translate(0px, 6px);
-moz-border-bottom-colors: gray silver silver silver silver gray;
border-bottom: 6px silver solid;
-moz-border-right-colors: gray silver silver gray;
border-right: 4px transparent solid;
border-top: 1px gray solid;
border-left: 1px gray solid;
}

Note: you can use this very convenient bookmarklet: Test Styles. Just drop it onto your bookmarks toolbar and use it.

Update: of course, once we have 3D Transforms, it'll be even cleaner and simpler.

it's everywhere. Add-ons broken (hear disabled) by faster updates of Firefox are a pain for users. I think Mozilla could prevent this implementing the rather simple following rules:

• if an add-on's maxVersion does not match any more Firefox's version, show an alert/notification/arrowbox offering to disable the version compatibility check for that add-on, enabling immediately the add-on for immediate use ; it should be a real warning box, of course...
• if an add-on with compatibility check disabled is suddenly updated or auto-updated to a version matching Firefox, re-enable compatibility checking
• modify the add-ons manager to make the above clearer and make it easier to enabled/disable the compatibility checking for a given add-on (there is currently no UI for that and that's really lacking)
• when auto-update of add-ons is performed, let the user know if he/she has add-ons that are enabled only because their compatibility check is disabled

This is not an optimal solution, it's a short-term compromise to stop making users angry, in particular in the case of an add-on not served by AMO (and there are plenty of them) that could easily survive a maxVersion bump. Opinions?

When I wrote my article The faster release process of Firefox, I did not expect so many reactions outside of the inner mozillian circles. I did not expect that Mike Kaply, who was thinking in the same terms and himself pondering an article, would jump on the bandwagon. I did not expect Asa's incredibly rough answers to his posts. In fact, I got many private messages thanking me for my article. I need to say it again here: I never said the faster release process is entirely bad. But that's another discussion.

I read things that really hurt the community and I think some conclusions have to be drawn, and some changes probably have to be applied.

1. Mozilla is a lot of things. It's a Foundation, a Corporation, a large Community, millions of users, followers and evangelists. It's also a Manifesto, Products, Projects, Add-ons, Translations. For most of us in the Community, and for various reasons, Mozilla is also a very large part of our lives. We say "Mozilla should..." or "Mozilla should not..." because we do care about Mozilla, and we're not all nerds with only coding or localization abilities. We come from various landscapes, and if the coding skills of the community are used, the other skills are mostly ignored. The private comments on my blog post I received are very clear: some people did not want to express or delayed an opinion similar to mine in public (on a blog for instance) because they feared the reaction of Mozilla. Someone told me that "as soon as you start criticizing in public such high-profile decisions, you're tagged as a troll". I also got messages from add-on developers (XUL add-on developers I should say) saying they're fed up with the add-on update process, are afraid to have to do it now 10 times per year, and stating the new SDK supposed to resolve the issue does not offer them enough power for their extensions anyway. Like it or not, this is an indicator of a flakier relationship between the mothership and the community that has to be dealt with. Community does not need more goodies, it needs better integration and probably better support. Important detail: bugzilla and newsgroups are merely communication, and certainly not integration; and blogs sometimes, given the logorrhea of planet.mozilla.org, are a weak communication channel too.
   
   
2. Freedom has many meanings, as we all know it. In the US, freedom of speech is almost total. Well, unless you start saying things that hurt your corporate employer for instance. In that case, freedom of speech often triggers the employer's freedom to let the employee go... Between the collapse of Netscape/the second birth of Mozilla and now, Mozillians (I mean employees here) have rarely, extremely rarely crossed the line. My old friend Tristan Nitot for instance always takes extreme attention to what he posts on his blog or even says in public because the distinction between perso and pro is never obvious. This is not easy to live like that when you work in a Free/OpenSource domain and I am the first one hit by the issue. My blog is my open diary, and I'm used to publish here exactly what's on my mind. But there's a big difference between my little, so little person and the Director of Firefox though: my visibility is low, very low. I don't represent officially an application used by hundreds of millions of people around the whole world and the whole world tech press is not all ears/eyes when I say or write something. Should the Director of Firefox be able to say in public, in the name of his personal freedom of speech, he/she finds brother product Thunderbird's UI offending and ugly and he/she stopped using it? Yes, he/she should be able to do it. But he/she should also be able to never forget again contributors are free to stop contributing. A balance of powers, clearly.
   
   
3. Of course, given his visibility, his new position and the tone of his words, the whole world tech press has repeated ad nauseum Asa's words. Even if I think there's a serious strategic hole at the root of the problem, miscommunication did not help, to say the least. And miscommunication was created by misunderstanding and manichaeism. Nobody ever said Mozilla has to address all corporate needs, or has to provide ridiculous requests (Shaver said on his blog "one tab only", it's an excellent example) with a solution. As I said somewhere else, there is a large range of possibilities between "make corporations' lives easier" and "make corporations' lives harder". Given the world-wide reaction, I think it is now clear that the faster release process with fast EOLs causes the latter. Shaver and Sullivan said conversations with enterprises are ongoing. Better late than never. Don't forget governments, governmental or international orgs and military, please.
   
   
4. The Community does not make any kind of difference between corporate and individual users. Their involvement in Mozilla is for all users, wherever they are, at work or not, in all countries, whatever the religion, race, colour, gender or opinions. It has to be understood that decisions that leave a given class of legitimate users on the side of the road - whatever the reason - are often seen as destructive by the Community. Hey, that's the weak side of OSS: you benefit from the good bits and have to live with the bad bits.
   
   
5. The whole story reminds me of the "Get rid of the JS Console" frenzy a few years ago. The Community reacted loud and clear to that, and that decision was overturned. Now, a few years later, Firefox nightlies offers more and more developer tools and even more are coming. Firebug and the Developer panels of Chrome have shown that early adopters need web development environments that are not add-ons to the browser, maintained outside of the main stream, but built inside the main stream. Firebug is not distributed with Firefox probably because it induces footprint/performance hits but otherwise, it should be in. Please note this is why xulrunner-based app developers cry so much about Venkman: Chromebug has many issues in that environment and Venkman is most of the time broken, not really supported, and its feature set and severe bugs' list have not changed in years. Anyway, I wanted to mention the "Get rid of the JS Console" history because it seems to me (and it could be related to item 1 above and how the Community feels) that MoCo is more and more reacting as a microcosm. My discussions with the rest of community show an increasing number of "they're not listening, they say they are Mozilla and know" signals. MoCo, please, even if reading this you think this is a wrong reaction from the community, this is now far more than a few "trolls", it is factual and something must be done.
   
   
6. There is a major difference of perception between Users/Community and MoCo about what is Mozilla and what should be its strategy. This is absolutely normal. MoCo has to deal with daily operations of a large and visible organization having a lot (yes, a lot, even if it's small compared to other big names of the industry) of employees distributed all around the planet. It has to secure revenue streams and make strategic choices. Even sometimes painful strategic choices. It's fighting for survival in a highly competitive landscape. Users and Community see Mozilla only as the browsing alternative, the freedom of browsing choice, the ability to get rid of IE handcuffs in corporate environments, and the cool kid around the block allowing a well-customized browser on all platforms. For them, Mozilla is the expression of its Manifesto, period.
   
   
7. That feeling does not touch only the users or the Community. It apparently touches MoCo too. Reading #developers' monday IRC logs, the first word that came to my mind was "mutiny"...
   
   
8. Users are versatile. Show them something cool and they'll adopt it. Both at work and at home. IE10 will be cool. Fast and reliable. Given the specs Microsoft is pushing inside the CSS Working Group (grid layout, templates, flexing, etc.), it is clear that standards-based apps and add-ons are in sight. Fear the revenge of the blue e... Those who think corporations will never have any incentive to go back to IE if they left it are in my opinion plain wrong. Those who think the only competitors to Firefox are now WebKit-based browsers are also plain wrong.
   
   

It's an old couple needing just a bit of couple therapy. Nothing more but nothing less. They still love each other, no worries.

Now, back to code.