Archive for June, 2006

Back to the 1.8 branch, part 2?

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

I’m considering switching back to the 1.8 branch again. There’s a giant memory leak on trunk that it seems only I can see (yes, I’ve tried safe mode) that I’m having trouble narrowing down. Cairo is still incredibly slow on Linux. The tab scrolling thing that just landed is incredibly stupid, in my at least partly-qualified opinion, and interrupts my workflow a lot.

And to add to all that, ever since going to a music festival for 4 days and not using a computer at all, I’ve stopped really wanting to spend so much time on it in the first place, and I just want it to do what I want.

So yeah, I might switch back, to take some of the hassle away. That would also mean I’d file fewer bug reports…

Posted in Mozilla, personal | 3 Comments »

Bad Behavior

Monday, June 26th, 2006

I’ve just enabled Bad Behavior here. If it gives you any problems, please contact me.

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Extension reqest: animate one image

Monday, June 19th, 2006

I browse the web with image.animation_mode = once, because I, you know, value my sanity. However, there is the occasional image that I do want to see animate. Does anyone know of an extension that lets me temporarily animate one particular image? If not, I think a context menu item (only visible on animated images, of course) would be a good solution for anyone that feels like making one.

Posted in Mozilla | 1 Comment »

HTML is not an “Application Language”

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

Part of the reason is of course that HTML was originally a document language and is slowly evolving in being both that and an application language.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It shouldn’t be. HTML is fundamentally a language for displaying information. Accepting input should not be a part of HTML because a) It’s out of scope, and b) it’s useful in places that HTML isn’t. Manipulating information is also out of scope (and thankfully has never been mushed in). An application requires bits from all three: Accepting, manipulating, and displaying (it also benefits from a fourth: styling).

Posted in markup, script, web | 3 Comments »

Back to the 1.8 branch.

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

I’m no longer running firefox trunk nightlies, having moved back to the 1.8 branch. It was nice having the new features, and I wish I could keep testing them, but the performance was just too bad. I was able to stand it for a long while, but then I had to test something on 1.8, and after that I just couldn’t go back. It’s amazing how a fast browser doesn’t seem all that much faster, but a slow one feels awful.

The perf bugs (mostly on Linux, from what I gather) have been sitting there untouched for a while, as people focused on the 1.8 branch, and went to XTech, and had vacations, and the like. Vlad says there will be work on them soon, though, within “the next few weeks” (on the 30th in mozilla.dev.tech.gfx). And indeed, one small fix went in yesterday, though not enough to make me switch back.

Hopefully “next few weeks” from the 30th turns out to mean starting at the end of this week and picking up next, so I don’t have to stay away too long.

Update: So it seems that that in fact, it wasn’t just psychological, there was a huge regression that happened on trunk while I was using branch. I’ve moved back to about half and half for now, because testing trunk is important and I know there aren’t enough people that do it, but I hope the cairo bugs get fixed soon.

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Web2.0 / CSS 2.0

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

Ironically, Web2.0 is much like CSS 2.0. Although one was specced in advance and the other just happened, they both had/ve a lot of new things, some of which were/will be adopted, some of which were/will be unused, and some of which need/ed slight revision. Like CSS, when 2.1 comes out Web2.1 will be a more polished, mature technology. And like CSS, Web2.0 has major deficiencies that won’t be corrected until 3.0 ;)

Posted in web | Comments Off