Escaped Thoughts

I've made a small foray into the world of Camino add-ons myself. Somewhat ironic, perhaps, but at least I did follow my own advice.

It started with ChimericalConsole, which is a simple JavaScript console for Camino. We've always said it would be something that would be best done as a third-party tool, since we aren't developer-targeted, and since no-one had done it yet and I found myself using the ugly Console logging hidden pref one too many times, I went ahead and wrote it as an add-on. I'm still not really happy about using an input manager, but hopefully this will motivate me to work on a real plugin architecture.

Then, mostly just to show the vocal minority that wants it that it could in fact be done outside of Camino itself, I wrote AsceticBar, which removes the favicons from the bookmark bar and adds Safari-like markers to folders and tab groups. I still think it's a much worse UI, but hopefully it will mean one less group of people agitating for the aesthetic prefs we have always said we won't be adding to Camino.

Both are available at my new hacks page. Enjoy!

Category: Camino

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I've now had my first and second experiences with the obnoxious auto-reply verification system that some people are apparently using to try to prevent spam. For those not familiar with the system, the idea is that only people you have placed on a pre-approved list can actually email you directly, while everyone else gets an automated reply email telling the sender to jump through some hoops to prove they aren't spam. When (if) they do so, then their email shows up in your inbox. In other words, it's a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to email.

The text of the two auto-generated emails is fairly similar. Both start out with “Sorry for the inconvenience”, and a plea for understanding that they just don't want to deal with spam any more. That's nice, but guess what? I get spam too, just like everyone else. Yes, it sucks, but you don't see me making my spam someone else's problem.

Both emails I had challenged where replies to someone who had emailed a list address looking for help. I was willing to spend some time trying to help them, but not if it means having to go to some website and fill out a form to prove that I'm not a spammer. So here's a tip: if you want people to actually reply to emails you send, don't use challenge-response email systems. If you go out of your way to make it hard for me to talk to you, I'm just not going to.

Category: Geek

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Trackbacks on posts more than a month old will now go to a bucket where I have to approve them, rather than being posted directly (not that I imagine anyone will run into that limitation, given the rarity of trackbacks to my posts).

In related news, I hate spammers.

Category: Geek

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Although I said we are entirely focused on getting 1.1 out the door, we have been giving some thought to what comes next. One big goal is to start iterating faster; there's a balance between releasing often enough to keep people interested and getting new features in their hands and not releasing so often that people stop bothering to update because each new version brings only one or two small things that they don't care about.

Since it's hard to know what the development team will look like in the future we can't plan too much yet, but we have started looking how to make 1.2 happen soon by targeting a few feature areas and focusing pretty closely on those. That's not to say we won't keep fixing miscellaneous bugs; just that we'll be mindful of not tackling anything too big that isn't something we really need for 1.2

Once 1.2 is out, we can turn our attention to 2.0. That may seem like a strange version number jump, but 2.0 is when we plan to move to Gecko 1.9, which will be quite a change. The biggest is the switch to Cairo, an entirely new drawing system that should solve some long-standing performance issues in Camino. Perhaps more visible to many people is the awesome work that Josh has been doing to rewrite the form widgets that Camino uses and Firefox will start sharing with us; it's still in progress, but already it fixes many of our old widget problems, gives us a much cleaner code base to work from, and (probably most controversial to some Camino users) will give us the fall-back behavior that lets simple widgets look aqua, but styled widgets look like the page author intended.

What about Camino-specific changes in 2.0? Definitely too early to say. Have some ideas, and know a thing or two about Cocoa? Stop by #camino on irc.mozilla.org and we'll be glad to start assigning you features :)

Category: Camino

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“So 1.1 beta is pretty cool,” we hope you are saying to yourself, “but when is 1.1 going to be released?” Hopefully the answer is very soon, but as always the real answer is, “When it's ready.” We really want to get 1.1 in everyone's hands, but we need to make sure it's solid. Right now we have at least one random crasher that we are hunting down, the sporadic “some pages don't render until the window is resized” bug, and a few smaller regressions. What we really don't want is to ship 1.1 and have people saying “1.0 was much more stable; I guess I'll stick with that.”

So we've basically locked down our features, and are limiting most bugfix work to things that are regressions from 1.1. The last thing we want to do at this point is risk adding more bugs while we squash the last of the bugs we know we have in 1.1 beta. So while we are definitely filing away all the feature requests we are getting in response to the renewed interest sparked by the release of the beta, whatever awesome new feature you suggested, no matter how much we would like to implement it, is not going to be in 1.1 if it's not 1.1 beta. Right now our all-consuming priority is to get 1.1 out to everyone who has been patiently for all the cool new features we've already added since 1.0. On the other hand, we do want to hear about each and every “this works in 1.0.x but not in 1.1” problem you see, so we don't accidentally leave you wanting to stay with 1.0.

Category: Camino

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I've been reading a fair number of the little mini-reviews people have been posting, and the comments in response to them. In no particular order, some thoughts about various things I've seen:

• Session saving seems to be pretty popular with everyone, so I'm glad we got that for 1.1.
• People still think the Acid 2 test matters. I guess I was hoping it had died down and people had forgotten, but no such luck. The most disturbing was a comment someone made that “Safari is a more standards-compliant browser because it passes the Acid 2 test and Camino doesn't” Um... not so much. WebKit is getting better and better at compatibility, but when it comes to actually working with the most sites, WebKit most definitely does not beat Gecko. Large portions of the Acid 2 test are about obscure edge cases that may never appear on any site. The fact that jinglepants did a serious of very target fixes to make WebKit pass Acid 2 was cool, and apparently a huge publicity win, but it did not magically solve all of WebKit's other compatibility bugs. It's like all the hubbub that comes up periodically in the video-card world: it's nice that they can micro-optimize their cards to look good in the benchmarks that everyone uses, but what actually matters is whether or not the hot new games will actually run.
• Yes, we are not on the leading edge of browser features. There were a fair number of “Yawn, Browser X had that feature a year ago”. comments. You know what Browser X has for every value of X I saw in those comments? Paid, full-time developers. The fact that we are staying at least somewhat competetive despite having less that one full-time developer if you add all of us up and all of us being volunteer is, I think, pretty cool.
• Either most people didn't read all the release notes, or they all work for the government. The notes were organized by release, top down, so “New in 1.1b“, then ”New in 1.1a2”, etc. Many, many mini-reviews mentioned Kerberos support as one of the big new features they picked out of those lists—a feature that I think we only ever had requested twice (both by people with .gov email addresses), but was new in 1.1b. So unless there was massive hidden demand for it, its prominence in other people's versions of the feature list suggests a lot of people just never read past the first section.
• We don't have anti-phishing support. This is the one that bothers me, because we never said it, and it's not true. This appears to be people blowing the MySpace password-stealing fix out of proportion; if I have a page on a site you log in to, and I can steal your password without your knowledge, that's not phishing, and that's what we fixed. We'd like to have real anti-phishing as a feature, but we don't yet, and it's unfortunate that people will likely judge us as not having lived up to claims that we didn't actually make.

Of course, that's all smaller, random stuff. The overwhelming tone I saw is that people are happy with the way 1.1 is shaping up. Once we squash a few important bugs, we'll be ready to ship a 1.1 that a lot of people are really going to like.

Category: Camino

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