Mozilla Links Newsletter - 14 - March 2, 2004

================================================ Mozilla Links - English Edition Issue # 14 - March 2, 2004 ================================================

Welcome back to Mozilla Links!

Do you use bookmarks? Most likely yes and most likely you are familiar with the inconvenience of not having your bookmarks available at every computer you connect to the Internet from.

A solution for this is using online bookmarks. Bookmarks Synchronizer is a Mozilla Firefox extension that let you connect to an FTP server and synchronize your bookmarks that are stored in an XML file. Setup is easy; just write in your FTP server address, username, password and a name for the XML file (by default called xbel.xml). To start, press Upload to create the file on the server and set if you want to automatically download the file on startup or upload it when you close your browser.

Download this nice tool here: HYPERLINK

Another approach is based on Sitebar, an open source application that allows the creation of accounts, store your bookmarks and even further, export/import to/from Mozilla's bookmarks file and share them. Online Bookmarks is a free Sitebar-based website serving bookmarks for Mozilla in a sidebar. You can visit http://www.onlinebookmarks.co.uk or add the sidebar directly to Mozilla Suite or Mozilla Firebird, at:

javascript:sidebar.addPanel('SiteBar','http://www.onlinebookmarks.co.uk/sitebar.php','')

Mozilla Links keeps growing and we are pleased to announce the availability of a brand new Russian edition. To subscribe to this and other localized versions, just visit http://newsletter.mozdev.org and select the desired language.

If you are interested in translating Mozilla Links into your own language, please visit HYPERLINK for the details.

Thanks for reading and please send any comments to [e-mail:newsletter-feedback@mozilla.org] .

Percy Cabello Mozilla Links

---------------------------------------------------------------------- In this issue:

1. BETTER MOZILLA - Dictionary Search - Smart Character Set Detection - Limiting The Number of Character Sets

2. THE NEWS - Mozilla 1.7 Alpha Released - Non-Profit Mozilla Europe Group Launches - Minimo 0.1 Released: Mozilla for Small Devices - Slides from Recent Mozilla Presentations Online

3. MOZILLA INSIDER

4. MOZILLA PROJECTS - Project of the Week: Web Developer - Independent Status Report

5. MOZILLA LINKS POLL

6. CONTACT INFO

1. BETTER MOZILLA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Featured Extension: Dictionary Search (developed by Jaap A. Haitsma)

Dictionary Search provides a very easy way to lookup or translate a word in a Web page in an online dictionary such as dictionary.com. Simply select the word that you want to lookup. Then right click and select "Dictionary Search for ...". A new tab will open with the meaning of the word you selected. It works for both the Mozilla Suite and Firefox.

There are a lot of dictionary engines available, listed in the project's web site.

Try it here: HYPERLINK

****

Mozilla Links Tip: Importing and Exporting Bookmarks (contributed by mozillatips.com)

In Mozilla Suite:

- Start the Bookmark Manager (Ctrl-B or Bookmark Menu and select Manage Bookmarks). - To import bookmarks, open the "Tools" menu, choose "Import..." and browse to the file you would like to import. - To export bookmarks, open the "Tools" menu, choose "Export..." and enter the file name you would like to export them as.

In Mozilla Firefox:

- Start the Bookmark Manager (open "Bookmarks" menu and choose "Manage Bookmarks"). - To import bookmarks, open "File" menu, choose "Import..." and browse to the file you would like to import. - To export bookmarks, open "File" menu, choose "Export..." and enter the file name you would like to export them as.

Note: Bookmarks are always imported and exported as an HTML file, and are imported as a new group at the bottom of your current bookmarks.

Complete tip: HYPERLINK

****

Mozilla Links PowerTip: Limiting The Number of Recently Used Character Sets (contributed by Daniel Wang)

To control the number of recently used character sets Mozilla remembers and displays in "View/Character Coding" submenu , follow these instructions:

- In Mozilla browser, type "about:config" in the Location Bar - Find the setting for "intl.charsetmenu.browser.cache.size" - Set the number of character sets you want Mozilla to remember

****

Need more tips? Try the TipBar Extension to get the Tip of the Day in Mozilla Firefox. Grab it at http://tipbar.mozdev.org

You can also visit http://www.mozillatips.com for more fun tips for your favorite browser.

Have a Tip or a PowerTip? Let other users know about it by sending it to [e-mail:newsletter-feedback@mozilla.org] .

2. THE NEWS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (contributed by MozillaZine, your source for Mozilla news and advocacy. http://www.mozillazine.org )

Mozilla 1.7 Alpha Released -------------------------- The Mozilla Foundation has unveiled Mozilla 1.7 Alpha. This release features improved popup blocking, with a better method for detecting and stopping popups and the ability to open blocked popups. Mail & Newsgroups now supports multiple mail identities per mail account (though there is no user interface for this yet) and also sports several usability enhancements. In addition, this version of Mozilla adds support for the onBeforeUnload event and includes a newer and enhanced version of ChatZilla, which now understands the /ignore command. Mozilla 1.7 Alpha is also smaller than 1.6 and page load times have improved since the last release.

Mozilla 1.7 Alpha Release Notes: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.7a/

Download Mozilla 1.7 Alpha: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/#1.7a

Full story: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4365

Non-Profit Mozilla Europe Group Launches ---------------------------------------- A new non-profit organisation founded to advance Mozilla within Europe has launched. Mozilla Europe aims to promote Mozilla, encourage contributions to project and provide services to stimulate enterprise adoption. The group plans to work with existing Mozilla communities throughout the continent and has the full backing of the Mozilla Foundation, which has designated the nascent organisation as its first international affiliate.

Based in Paris, Mozilla Europe has three main goals. The first of these is to promote Mozilla and derivative products throughout Europe, building upon the work of local Mozilla groups. The second is to encourage developers, companies and organisations to support the project, either by contributing code or supplying funding. The third is to bolster adoption of Mozilla in enterprises by offering several services, including technical support, deployment assistance and development work.

Mozilla Europe was founded by former Netscape employees Tristan Nitot and Peter Van der Beken, with Pascal Chevrel, Axel Hecht, Olivier Meunier and Jan Varga also on its Board of Directors. The group will be funded by donations from individuals, corporations and educational institutions. Individuals may also become members of the organisation for a fee, though the online payment system is not up and running yet.

Mozilla Europe: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/

Full story: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4338

Minimo 0.1 Released: Mozilla for Small Devices ---------------------------------------------- Version 0.1 of Minimo, a Mozilla browser for small devices, has been released. As well as creating a slimmed-down version of Mozilla for PDAs and the like, the Minimo project also aims to allow developers to embed Mozilla in any system with limited resources.

Much of the Minimo effort has focussed on reducing code size and memory footprint, work that can benefit anyone embedding Mozilla in environments where memory and storage is tight. In addition, several optimisations have been made specifically for small devices, including a small screen rendering mode (an extension to enable small screen rendering in the Mozilla Application Suite and Mozilla Firefox is available) and a slimmed down user interface (though this is not final). Some (fairly old) screenshots of Minimo show these two features inaction.

Minimo 0.1 is available for ARM devices running Linux with the GTK toolkit. The release has been tested on Familiar Linux 0.7.2 running GPE on the iPAQ 5555 and iPAQ 38xx.

Minimo 0.1: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/releases/arm/0.1/

Full story: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4353

Slides from Recent Mozilla Presentations Online ----------------------------------------------- In the last few weeks, two Mozilla developer events have taken place. The Mozilla Developers Meeting in Europe 4.0 took place at the FOSDEM 2004 open source conference in Brussels, while the more recent Mozilla Developer Day was held at the Mozilla Foundation's offices in Mountain View, California. Several presentations were given at these events and the slides from some of them are now available online.

Brendan Eich's talk on Mozilla Futures: http://www.mozilla.org/events/dev-day-feb-2004/mozilla-futures/

Gervase Markham's talk on the Mozilla Foundation: http://www.gerv.net/presentations/fosdem2004/slide00.html

Daniel Glazman's talk on Nvu: HYPERLINK

Alex Fritze's talk on application development in Mozilla: http://www.croczilla.com/~alex/fosdem2004/

Bernd Mielke's talk on layout debugging/triaging: http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/fosdem2004/slide1.html

Full stories: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4361 http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4362 http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4414

3. MOZILLA INSIDER ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (contributed by Alex Bishop)

Major changes have been made to Mozilla's string code recently, though this work is largely compatible with the previous string implementation, minimising disruption for developers (bug 231995). Darin Fisher has written a lengthy technical message outlining the changes.

More documentation has been published in recent weeks, this time from Christian Biesinger and David Baron. Christian has written a document that explains what can be found in each directory of the Mozilla source code tree, while layout developer David has floated some ideas for simplifying the reflow reason/type mechanisms.

Users who regularly download large files will be pleased to hear that saving files greater than 64MB in size no longer clobbers the disk cache in the latest nightly builds (bug 229984) and those with Sun keyboards can now use their Find and Help keys to full effect in Mozilla (bug 229438).

Darin Fisher's message about string code changes: [e-mail:/groups]

Bug 231995: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231995

Christian Biesinger's document on the Mozilla tree structure: http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225227/tree_structure.txt

David Baron's reflow reason/type proposal: [e-mail:/groups]

Bug 229984: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229984

Bug 229438: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229438

Full status update: http://www.mozilla.org/status/2004-03-01.html

4. MOZILLA PROJECTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (contributed by Brian King)

Project of the Week: Web Developer

The Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. Current tools include converting form POSTs to GETs, hiding images, outlining block level elements, disabling styles and many more. It provides quick access to page validation services and developer tools such as the JavaScript console. This is not only of interest to developers, but to users as well with such functions as cookie deletion and disabling, image hiding and window resizing.

****

Independent Status Reports

The independent status reports include news and updates from Mozilla application and extension projects hosted on mozdev.org and elsewhere in the Mozilla community.

The latest report was posted on February 29, 2004 and includes:

Feed Parser v0.4.1, an RSS Parsing Engine written in JavaScript, has made a public release. Notable highlights are complete support for RSS 0.9x and 2.0, a logical and easy to use syntax, and it is supported by Gecko 1.4 or newer. http://feedparser.mozdev.org/

JRex - v1.0a is a Java Browser Component with set of API's for Embedding Mozilla Browser within a Java Application. The following features are complete: Webpage Rendering, Navigation, History, Profile & Preferences and much more. http://jrex.mozdev.org/

Mycroft - 1000 search plugins, Search plugins for Mozilla and Firefox. Since the last status update one month ago, we've added over 200 new search plugins, reaching now our 1000th. Since Firefox is out, visits at our website have tripled. While we are happy about Mycroft's success, but we cannot handle the additional workload. So we would be really happy if you could join the team. http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

HON - 1.2, which tells you if the Website you are browsing is accredited by the Health On the Net (HON) Foundation, released HONcode Status 1.2 on February 25th. It now uses a new format for the list of HONcode accredited Websites (URLs are now encoded in MD5 instead of clear text). Please update! http://hon.mozdev.org/

Forumzilla v0.4.7, an extension to Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird for reading RSS feeds, includes another fix for the duplicate message problem and also now ignores whitespace around URLs in subscriptions.txt Next on the agenda includes plans for a subscriptions dialog for managing subscriptions so you don't have to hack subscriptions.txt. http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/

IE View - v0.7, which enables you to view pages/links in Internet Explorer, has added the most-requested enhancement: a preference setting to specify the browser path. IE View cannot always find Internet Explorer on its own (because of non-standard installations, some international builds, etc.), and some people prefer to launch a different browser instead (Opera, etc.). http://ieview.mozdev.org/

cdn - Compact Menu 1.6, for reorganising the menu bar for custom usage and more space, has undergone an overhaul including rewritten code, repackaged for smaller download, and the Firefox version includes a fix for Bug 5844, where the Go menu failed to list previously visited sites. http://cdn.mozdev.org/compact/

QuickNote - v0.5.3, a Note Taking Extension, has upgraded with a bug fixes and stability release. Rejoice International users! True International Character Support has been implemented. Notes are now set to UTF-8 encoding. There is also no more Multiple Floating Window instances. http://quicknote.mozdev.org/

MozManual - Final 1.0, a Manual for First Time Users; a brief overview and feature guide, has a draft preview of the Dutch version ("Nederlands") now available. Work continues to produce an HTML version of the manual, which can be used as an online tutorial/ introduction to Mozilla. http://mozmanual.mozdev.org/

MessageID-Finder - v1.9.4, is a Mailnews/Thunderbird extension which finds the corresponding message to a message id. Many small bugfixes have gone into the latest release. If anybody wants to translate MessageID-Finder into his own language, please contact the project owner. http://messageidfinder.mozdev.org/

Launchy - 1.9.0, which open links and mailto's with external applications, has added support for The Bat! and now has a one-click-install option. http://gemal.dk/mozilla/launchy.html

Read more about each of these projects in the full report at HYPERLINK

5. MOZILLA LINKS POLL ----------------------------------------------------------------------

In our last issue we asked if you plan to make Mozilla Firefox your main browser, here are the results:

- It already is 57% |]]]]]]]]]]]] - Yes, as soon as it gets some 7% |] feature in the roadmap I am missing - Yes, as soon as it hits 1.0 11% |]] - Yes, if it becomes part of a suite 6% |] - No, I'm fine with Mozilla 18% |]]]] Application Suite - No, I'm fine with my current browser 1% |

(*) Results may not sum up to 100% due to rounding.

This issue's poll: Do you use online bookmark services such as http://www.onlinebookmarks.co.uk's?

- Yes - No, I haven't found one that suits my needs - No, I didn't know they exist

Let your voice be counted at http://newsletter.mozdev.org

------------------------ ADVERTISEMENT ------------------------------

Mozilla CDs are available worldwide right now for only US$5.95 plus low shipping and handling. This is a great opportunity to contribute to the Mozilla Foundation and have a handy copy of your favorite Internet applications to share with your friends.

You can also subscribe to the Mozilla CD for US$17.95 and get every Mozilla CD release delivered to your hands for a year.

Mozilla T-shirts are available starting at $15.95.

Visit http://store.mozilla.org now!

Your ad can be here! Visit http://newsletter.mozdev.org/mlsp.html for more details on how to reach 6000 worldwide readers!

6. CONTACT INFO ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Mozilla Links(TM) is a bi-weekly electronic newsletter published by the Mozilla Links Newsletter project.

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGEMENT : Visit http://newsletter.mozdev.org to subscribe, unsubscribe and set other subscription options.

YOUR PRIVACY : Only a valid e-mail address is required in order to receive this newsletter. It will not be used for any purpose other than those related to this newsletter operation and administration such as delivery, support, removal or similar.

COMMENTS : Welcome at [e-mail:newsletter-feedback@mozilla.org]

Mozilla Links is currently translated into Traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, German, Japanese, Polish and Russian.

Copyright 2004 by the Mozilla Links Contributors. The Mozilla Links Newsletter is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 license, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/legalcode