Cameron » Lizard

Always show the location bar in Firefox

Cameron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:10:06 +0000

Not showing the location bar hides a very valuable piece of information from the user. There have been recent discussions on making the information it conveys even more visible to the user. Why is it then that Firefox allows websites to hide it? IMHO, the valuable nature of this information from a security perspective vastly outweighs the slight visual improvement this provides for small popup windows.

To disable this:

Go to about:config
Find dom.disable_window_open_feature.location
Double click to toggle it to true

Hat tip to Mozilla Links

PS. See Bug 337344

Was invented here!

Cameron — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:50:35 +0000

Does it amuse any of you as much as it does me that MSN.com is currently prominently pushing an article recommending IE users switch to Firefox or Opera?

In the most valuable real estate on the MSN homepage (probably making it some of the most valuable real estate on the web) is an image promoting a news story about the Dixie Chicks and the Grammys, wait 10 seconds or so and it changes to “3 Top Web Dangers: The biggest online threats and how to avoid them.” Threat number one is of course IE.

Firefox 2 Add-on Developer T-shirts

Cameron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:45:26 +0000

Some months ago, Mozilla decided to reward extension developers who made their extensions compatible with Firefox 2 before October 1st. However, there has been some delay getting these shirts delivered to developers. By the number of queries on the forums and mailing list, a lot of you are curious about this, and while some of us (ie. me) hang out in #addons on irc.mozilla.org in order to receive all the news, for those who don’t, I decided I’d post a little update.

firebot: tshirt status is As of January 12th, the t-shirts were incorrectly shipped to Mozilla HQ instead of to extension developers. The shirts are currently on the way back to the t-shirt company to be shipped to developers. United States residents should expect to get theirs around the end of next week or beginning of the following week.

(For those of us for which that takes a little thinking about, Jan 22nd is the estimate.)

Theme installation broken temporarily

Cameron — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:10:26 +0000

It seems I did more than just break download counts – theme installation was completely fubared Our apologies – we’ve now fixed the problem (thanks to Giorgio Maone and Wladimir Palant.)

Also in the latest update, Morgamic fixed a bug which caused your add-on to be updated (as in, jump to the top of the recently updated list and RSS feed) when you changed some of the metadata associated with it (eg. add-on description.) Add-ons are now only “updated” when a new version is uploaded. (While it could be argued that an extension is actually being updated when the developer adjusts the metadata, we believe that uploading a new version of an add-on is what users actually expect when viewing add-ons that are recently updated.)

The Remora meeting yesterday was a long one, but productive IMO. We thrashed out a lot of scheduling and target milestone stuff… and although we’ve missed our current ship date twice already, this time I’m remotely confident that we can make it, as long as we don’t change our requirements again… heh.

I broke download counts

Cameron — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:59:56 +0000

Yup, nobody’s AMO download counts are working right now – I’ll take the credit for that

It seems that while tidying up the install buttons for add-ons which work on multiple platforms, I added an extra span tag and the whole thing disintegrated. Ah well. In other news, I fixed a 404 with our rss link rel=alternate stuff and styled the comments, previews, and add-on history pages for rustico.

AMO bugfixes

Cameron — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:23:31 +0000

This week we’ve been tweaking the new theme – there we re s ev er al bu gs that we discovered after launch that Fligtar, Shaver and myself have been patching.

The next thing you can expect to see is information about Sunbird add-ons on AMO. Because it’s not used as much as other Mozilla applications, it won’t appear in the footer of the site, but you will be able to search for Sunbird-compatible add-ons, users arriving via the “get more extensions” and “get more themes” links from the Sunbird add-on manager will get a Sunbird header image, add-ons which are compatible with Sunbird will show that compatibility information on their listings pages, and Sunbird-only add-ons will actually be installable

Hopefully in Remora we can streamline the process of adding another application. I foresee a non-application-specific header and site name (ie. Mozilla Add-ons rather than Firefox Add-ons.)

AMO reloaded

Cameron — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:15:49 +0000

Yesterday, just before the release of Firefox 2, we pushed our new addons.mozilla.org theme to production. In the spirit of rushing things at the last minute, it was all mashed together in rather less time than would be preferable and still needs a bit of love, but it looks great

I think we’ll pass the hat around and buy Shaver a pony – he deserves it!

SeaMonkey add-ons on AMO

Cameron — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 04:00:52 +0000

Bug 342816 is now fixed – SeaMonkey add-on developers rejoice!

Add-ons which are compatible with SeaMonkey will now show that compatibility info on their listings page, you can now filter your search results to only show SeaMonkey-compatible add-ons, and SeaMonkey-only add-ons are now actually installable (they weren’t before!)

Along with a fix for the approval queue that only affects add-on reviewers, this is hoped to be the last change we ever have to make to AMO v1/2.

First, an introduction

Cameron — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 02:09:03 +0000

I decided it’s time I blogged. I had an old livejournal but it’s been far too long since I updated it, and it doesn’t allow me to have feeds associated with tags, so it was time to move on. I also think that there’s not nearly enough communication between developers and users of addons.mozilla.org, so this blog will serve that purpose too.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cameron. I prefer to be known by just the one name, hence the domain (cheers to Justdave for the idea) … also cameron.com was taken

To my involvement with Mozilla: I first started using Firefox at 0.9.3 and it changed me (D&M R US). After responding to a call for volunteers to help out review add-ons at (then) UMO I gradually became more interested and involved with the project. Nowadays I hang out in #addons and #amo on moznet (as Cameron of course), provide user support and triage bugs. More recently I’ve also been dabbling in development a little – fixing trivial and minor bugs and learning about fancy stuff like CVS, patches, ssh, command line interfaces (I’m a windows user,) and Subversion. I’m involved with the team we’ve got together working on Remora (AMO v3) and even if I’m not quite up to major hacking I’m having a great time

Yes, the blog uses the default theme, but I’ve heard recently that perfect is the enemy of good (thanks Shaver). Someday when I’m bored I’ll find/make a theme and think of a better title (maybe).