Mozilla Links Newsletter - 24 - November 3, 2004

Firefox 1.0 Release Candidate is here. Since the Preview Release it presents only some minor final touches like improved Print, Live Bookmarks and New Window toolbar button icons. Icons in the option menus also got a nice makeover. Thanks to new settings in the Options/Advanced/Tabbed Browsing page, now you can tell Firefox to open links from other applications like e-mail clients and instant messengers in a new window, a new tab or reuse a current tab. Even more important development has gone to fixing more than 250 bugs since the Preview Release. If you are more interested in using Firefox than bug reporting, the Mozilla Foundation suggests you may better wait for the release of Firefox 1.0 expected for November 9^th (less than a week from now) to avoid the hassle of too frequent updates.

For those of you who need to know more about what Live Bookmarks is about, mozilla.org has a nice web page with the details of how this feature brings RSS and other content syndication formats to your favorite browser.

And in the miscellaneous section, this month Google released Google Search Desktop (beta version, Windows only), a tool for indexing and searching documents in your computer powered by Google's now legendary search engine. Unfortunately it doesn't include Thunderbird messages or Firefox/Mozilla Suite history among the searched documents. To change this, you can request support here. Plus, The Boston Globe wants to hear about your recent switch to Firefox.

Thanks for reading and please let us know your comments and suggestions.

Percy Cabello - Mozilla Links

Better Mozilla

Review: Mozilla Archive Format 0.4.2
Developed by Christopher Ottley

The Mozilla Archive Format (MAF) extension, provides Firefox and Mozilla the ability to open and create web page archives (MHTML) like those generated by Internet Explorer. Web archives include all contents of a web page: text, images, functionality and style. So you can create a web archive, send it to a friend and be sure that he will receive it with all contents in place. If he is running MAF or Internet Explorer that is.

Once installed, MAF will add two new options to the File menu: Save Page In Archive

and Save All Tabs In Archive. To create a web archive (.MHT), in the File menu, select Save Page in Archive. In the Save MAF File dialog, select MAF MHT File as the file type and browse to the location you want to save the archive to.

Now the archive can be opened with MAF or any other program that handles MHT files like Internet Explorer. To open it with MAF, in File menu select Open File.... In the Open File dialog, select MAF MHT Archives and browse to the saved MHT file.

Additionally, MAF can create a compressed web archive with an included ZIP utility. When saving a web archive, select MAF Zip Archives (*.zip.maf) or MAF Zip Archives (*.maf.zip) (there's no difference other than the file extension) and select a location to save the compressed archive. The resulting file will be a ZIP file you can open with MAF or any other ZIP utility.

Even further, MAF lets you compress your web archive with your preferred compression tool (like WinRAR or our favorite 7-zip) installed in your system. You will have to first set the appropriate command in MAF options (Tools menu/MAF/Preferences). Now, to save a web archive compressed with your preferred compression tool, select MAF Archives (.MAFF) file type when saving an archive for the current web page or all tabs.

Review: Firefox Ultrabar (Beta)
Developed by Vpop Technologies, Inc.

Firefox Ultrabar as its name suggests, brings a new search toolbar for Firefox. To some degree it is an extended version of the default search bar that comes with Firefox. It includes search terms highlighting and comes preloaded with a large number or search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Google news, GMail, Technorati, Feedster, eBay, Vivisimo, Altavista and others, so chances increase that you may not need to download another search engine.

But what really sets Ultrabar apart is the capability of adding search engines by example. You can perform a custom search with your preferred search engine and Ultrabar will learn how to ask that search engine in the future, adding it to the available search engines.

To teach Ultrabar, go to a search engine website (I tested Puerto Rico Yellow Pages) and enter the word "ubterms" (without quotes) as your search term. When the search engine results return, Ultrabar will prompt for adding the new search engine. It will even locate the appropriate icon for the search engine making it look really nice. A limitation for this capability is that the method the search engine uses to send the search terms has to be GET. In brief, if the search results webpage doesn't show a long address in the location bar with your terms in it, it won't work.

Another nice feature is an engine manager with which you can edit, organize, add and remove search engines. When you change the search engine and there are terms in the search box, Ultrabar will start an automatic search. Annoying or useful will depend on individuals and occassions but I would like to see it as an option. Ultrabar automatically checks for the most current version and is available in "themes" for several websites like Netflix, Yahoo and Google among others, that come with some related bookmarks to the main button and tools for some sites. For example, Ultrabar for Blogger adds a button that will open a Blogger blog entry form with the current web address.

According to the Firefox Ultrabar website, coming versions will add drag-and-drop capabilities and the ability to edit additional menus.

Tip: Clean Your Fingerprints
Contributed by Percy Cabello

If you have concerns about what happens with your data (what you saw and what you typed) after an Internet session, you will find here some actions you can take to insure your information keeps to your eyes only.

• History. Mozilla and Firefox keep tracks of what web sites you visit so you can easily return later if you forget the web address. Tell Firefox to forget those web sites also. In the Tools menu, select Options.... Select the Privacy page. Click on the History
  
  section and press the Clear button. If you don't want want Firefox to keep a track, enter 0 for the number of days Firefox remembers web sites.
• Forms data. By default, information you type in web forms is stored by Firefox so you can easily reenter the same web form or fill a similar one. To clear saved web forms data and prevent further recording, in the Options/Privacy page, select the Saved Form Information section and press Clear to delete all saved forms. Uncheck Save information I enter in web page forms and the Search Bar to prevent further recording.



• Saved Passwords. Whenever you enter a password in a web page (mainly on log on pages) Firefox will ask by default if you want to store that password, so the next time you need it, it will enter it automatically. To change this behavior, in Options/Privacy page, select the Saved Passwords section and press Clear to delete saved passwords, View Saved Passwords to see which passwords you have saved and what they are, Master Password to set a password you will need to enter once per session to unlock all others, and uncheck Remember Passwords to prevent Firefox asking to save a password.
• Search History. Terms you enter in the search bar are also saved. To delete them, right click on the search bar and select Clear Search History.



• Cookies. Many sites you usually visit will very likely store a small file in your computer called a cookie. Information stored is used to enhance your experience with the website the next time you visit it. To manage your cookies, block and set rules for cookies behavior, go to Options/Privacy page and select the Cookies section.
• Cache. Mozilla and Firefox will save a copy of every page you visit to provide faster access if you want to revisit a web site. To customize it, in the Options/Privacy page, select the Cache section and press Clear to delete all saved web pages. Enter an amount of hard disk space you want to dedicate for storing web pages or enter 0 to save no pages.

If you are using Mozilla Suite or Firefox in a shared environment such as school college or an Internet cafe, make sure to check these settings and clear your information before leaving.

PowerTip: Extend Your Extensions
Contributed by Percy Cabello

You may have realized that with a new Mozilla Suite/Firefox version, several of your extensions suddenly stop working. In many cases it's not because there's a problem with the extension or the browser but simply because the extension creator declared in the extension a too low limit for the browser version number it works with. Authors do this because they are not sure at this stage (before official 1.0 release) if something will change in Firefox that may affect his extension. So he defines a conservative versions range. In some cases, like from 0.10 to 1.0, there are no changes so extensions defined with a 0.10 upper limit can work fine in 1.0.

This limit is specified in a manifest file all extensions include. It contents information like name, version and author, plus, which products and versions it works with. If it says the maximum Firefox version it supports is 0.10 (Preview Release) then it will stop working in 1.0 (like the latest Release Candidate).

You can extend the version range of a particular extension by manually editting the manifest:

• Go to Mozilla Update and save an extension (XPI file) to your computer (right click in a link,
  
  Save.
• Open the XPI file with a ZIP file manager like WinZip or 7-Zip. Extract install.rdf.
• Open install.rdf in a text editor. Look for a line like this <em:maxVersion>0.9</em:maxVersion>. As you may deduct, this extension will only work with Firefox up to 0.9. To make it work with 0.10 or 1.0 just change the 0.9 to the desired version. Now save the file and update the XPI with the same ZIP tool.



• To install it, drag the updated XPI to Mozilla Suite or Firefox. It will ask to restart the browser.

If there is some problem when restarting Mozilla Suite/Firefox, restart in safe mode and disablee or uninstall the just installed extension. Now you know there is a real breaker in the version change and you should wait for the appropriate update by its author.

Community: Pat MacDonald on Firefox Ultrabar

As Firefox keeps raising awareness among corporate and home users of the capabilities of Mozilla technologies and the open source initiatives, technology companies keep broadening their offerings to support Firefox. Like WinPatrol (featured in a past issue of Mozilla Links) which recently announced the availability of its privacy protection tool for Firefox, Vpop Technologies is now offering Firefox Ultrabar (reviewed in this issue).

Vpop Technologies, Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and delivers Internet utilities like Open SRS, Blogware, NewsHub, and Jots.com and have worked with GE, Tucows, Cisco, InfoSpace, and Yahoo. So, this month we asked Pat McDonald, one of Vopop Technologies' founder and sales manager about the process of delivering a product for Firefox.

ML: How long have you been working on Ultrabar before you decided to do a similar product for Firefox?

We originally launched UltraBar back in 2001, shortly after Google launched the Google Toolbar. We thought the Google Toolbar was an awesome tool that only had one limitation, all of your searches had to be on Google. We decided that people might like to search other engines as well as Google. We built the UltraBar with that in mind.

ML: How does the idea of supporting Firefox came out?

PM: While we were proud of the IE version of UltraBar, we couldn't stand working in the IE environment. Crashes, fly-by installs, and security breaches were all reasons for wanting to work on a much better browser. We also looked at the toolbar space and recognized that there was not another single company that was creating custom toolbars for Firefox. A nice benefit of working in the Firefox environment is, since it is written in XUL, you can tell that there is no spyware, adware, or, what I like to call 'bad guy stuff' on the bar.

ML: How would you compare the process of creating a toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox?

PM: The IE bar involved both coding and concept in an area we had not worked before so it was difficult. The Firefox bar had a concept defined but a new environment (for us) in which to develop so it's difficult to draw a comparison. Like all languages, we had to learn the rules of the game for XUL but once that was done, development was easy in comparison.

ML: Firefox Ultrabar is both a product that you give out for free and a service. You offer your customers the chance to count with a search toolbar customized for their needs. What is customizable on these versions?

PM: The base of the toolbar (the hard part on the learning curve) is done and at this point, any piece can be customized rather quickly.

ML: Can you comment on some of your customers? Netflix, Wells Fargo and Cisco are currently featured in your web site, are they all customers?

PM: I can comment just a bit on these. We worked with Cisco to create a Firefox bar for their intranet. The bar accesses key areas of their intranet and we built in about sixteen different search engines. The bar is currently being tested by their intranet security team. One Cisco employee said "This is the best tool we have at Cisco". We created the Netflix toolbar because I wanted a quick and easy way to access my account, my queue, and to search Netflix. The Netflix version of our toolbar is the most downloaded toolbar behind the standard toolbar. While Netflix is not a customer, we do hope that they sees the value in the bar, as their customers have, and chooses to make it available to all of their customers.

ML: What plans do you have for the Firefox toolbar? Any new features, premium paid versions, or localized versions. Maybe open sourcing it?

PM: We have significant plans, not the least of which include integrating the toolbar with our bookmarking service, Jots.com. We are also working on our links manager that will allow you to manage links/menu items/buttons on the bar, similar to the way the engine manager works. The last improvement I can break with at this time is a blogging component that works with most blogging tools/systems. (No bias here, but the jots.com and blogging integration are two of the coolest functions that I have ever seen in a toolbar.)

Thanks to Pat for his time for this interview.

Month In Review

Calendar and Sunbird Help Project Launched

Rod Whiteley announced the launch of Calendar Help, a project to create a help system for Mozilla Calendar (an extension for Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird) and Sunbird, the standalone application. The project was launched with a prototype for Sunbird only but it aims to provide end-user help for all Calendar versions, platforms and languages.

The project is currently looking for writers, reviewers and translators to contribute. If you think you might be able to help, even if you have never contributed to a project before, please contact the project.

Nvu 0.5 Released

Disruptive Innovations and http://www.linspire.com">Linspire, Inc. released Nvu 0.5, a Mozilla-based web page editor, featuring several important enhancements

• Syntax highlighting
• Built in inline spell checker
• Better horizontal and vertical rulers
• Bidirectional text flow control
• A smaller Windows installer (6.5MB)
• A much requested easter egg

Also, this month Disruptive Innovations turned its first year.

SFX

The community is getting ready for Firefox 1.0 and so are the launch parties at MozParty2 where you can join or organize one anywhere in the world. This is a great opportunity to meet other Mozilla and open source enthusiasts near you, and who knows, a chance to start a local marketing branch in your community.

A new IRC channel has been launched where you can go to share live your ideas for spreading Firefox. Get ChatZilla and attach to SFX IRC.

A explosion of buttons, wallpapers and avatars is being produced by the community. My current favorite: Rakaz art.

In coordination with Mozilla Europe, Bart Decrem, Mozilla's marketing leader made a press tour in Europe during October 22 - 28. In UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany, assisted by Gervase Markham, Axel Hecht, Peterv and Tristan Nitot, he contacted European media outlets .

Also in Europe, Tristan Nitot announced that Mozilla Europe will be present in Interop 2004 Paris Trade Show (Nov 3 - 5) with nothing less than a 54 m² (about 580 sq. feet) booth with computers to test drive Mozilla products and talks about Mozilla, Nvu, web standards, open formats and maybe also OpenOffice.org and

Bugzilla.

Finally if you are helping to spread the word on Firefox you have the chance to share your picture and become famous through the SFX gallery.

In The Field

Contributed by Robin Monks

It has been an exciting month in the field. Talk (c|Net, QCtimes) comes that Google is planning to make a browser with Mozilla Firefox and/or Gecko for a base. I'll be keeping a close eye on this as it progresses.

Back on the homefront, SFX has reached its 10,000 name goal for the New York Times ad and talk of a nov9.org style site is rampant. Launched on October 19, donors of $30 (students $10 and families $45) were entitled to have their name listed along the ad. After 10 days, 10,000 donors and US$250,000 was the signal of the campaign success. According to Rob Davis, coordinator of this project, about $50,000 will go towards the ad and the rest to other marketing related activities. For more details, check the Red Herring magazine's interview to Rob Davis.

Tristan Nitot from Mozilla Europe, recently announced the start of a project similar to the New York Times ad to get a full page ad in a german newspaper.

There are still free GMail accounts available and some Distributed Computing Projects like Folding@Home, CP.net, LHC are cropping up.
This months' cool tools are the Real-time HTML Editor and the Spellbound Spellcheck

for Firefox (similar to IEspell for IE).

I'm Robin Monks,
In The Field

mozilla.org Now Serving Localized Versions of Firefox

Since October 23, Firefox nightly builds (development versions) are available in several languages and for different regions. L10n is available in Albanian, Catalan, Chinesem Czech, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Singhalese, Slovenian and Swedish. This covers 88% of the Internet population according to Global Reach, as noted by Gervase Markham.

Localized versions of Mozilla products have been available for a long while by several independent projects. But including them among regular Mozilla builds will surely help users' sense of 'officiality'

Less Critical Vulnerabilities in Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird and Camino

On October 20, Secunia reported two new vulnerabilities in Mozilla, Firefox and Camino products, related to site spoofing. One case is that a web page in another tab can display a dialog while seeing a web page in the current tab. So users could be fooled into thinking the information is being requested by the current site. A similar case is related to web forms, which could allow a malicious web page to grab focus from another tab and capture keystrokes you entered in a trusted web page in the current tab.

A workaround for the second case will be available in next browsers' release (see bug 124750). Secunia recommendation is to avoid visiting trusted websites (like your bank or web mail sites) while visiting untrusted (new) web sites, or disable JavaScript.

On October 25, Secunia reported another vulnerability affecting only Linux versions Mozilla Suite (1.7.x), Firefox (0.9 and later) and Thunderbird (0.6 - 0.8). Due to improper permissions on downloaded files opened in external applications, this could allow a user to read other users' files, which are currently opened through the download dialog box in external applications.

Fixes are already available and should be included in next Firefox releases.

Check the last 10 security advisories for Mozilla products at Mozilla Links website provided by Secunia.

Mozilla International Sites

During last weeks we have seen the launch of a number of Mozilla related websites . Some time before, Spanish localization team launched MozillaES, serving news, themes and localized versions of Mozilla products. Mozilla Taiwan does the same in Traditional Chinese Most recently, Tristan Nitot, Mozilla Europe president announced the greek and italian versions of the Mozilla Europe website, joining English, Spanish, Finnish, French, German and Norwegian.

Last Minute: A9.com Toolbar Now For Firefox

Continuing with what already is a trend among browser utilities developers, A9.com (Amazon's web search site) is now offering its toolbar for Firefox users. The bar features searched terms highlighting, information and reviews of the visited web page (like the ones available for Amazon products) as well as recommendations provided by Alexa. If you have an account at amazon.com you can log on and build a history of web searches, store your bookmarks and create personal notes for visited websites.

Projects

Contributed by Brian King

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

mozdev.org is an international community effort. It may have originated in the US, but 2 of the core admins are based in Europe. Project requests come in from all continents. Project owners speak many languages. This is the world we live in. For software to succeed, it has to have the capability to reach out globally. Mozilla has known this for a long time, and the latest efforts to host Firefox locales in CVS and have official localized builds of Firefox 1.0 is just another step for Mozilla and Mozilla technologies to make an impact all over the world.

mozImage 0.10

A simple image browser
For: Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla browser
Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX


The goal of mozImage is to create a simple image browser based on the Mozilla Framework. It has a simple and fast user interface that you can see on screen shot page.
Here are some key features:

• Slide show
• Scale images to window size
• Single key shortcuts
• Show thumbnails
• Fullscreen preview
• Open and modify image throught external applications

Biobar 1.2.1

A toolbar for bioinformatics applications.
For: Mozilla, Firefox
Platform: Windows, Linux, All platforms where mozilla can be compiled
The code has been improved for efficiency. Some bugs have been corrected.

Notable Highlights:

• Supports searching BioCyc
• PDBsum searching enabled



• Alternative spliced Database (ASD) searchable
• Full collection of Databases supported can be found at http://biobar.mozdev.org/Databases.html

fireFTP 0.83.3

An FTP client for Firefox.
For: Firefox
Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX
The excellent Firefox browser now has a brand new tool to go with it! Introducing fireFTP, a cross-platform FTP client which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. And unlike many other FTP clients, it's completely free!


Notable Highlights:

• Cross-platform client
• Resume Capability
• Supports many FTP servers

Habari Xenu 0.9.0

A Cool XUL News Aggregator.
For: Mozilla, Firefox
Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX


HX is heading towards full stability. It now runs on both Firefox and Mozilla.
Notable Highlights:

• Works on Firefox and Mozilla
• Settings Editor Wizard
• Much better parsing
• Faster because it stores a HTML file of the parsed feed locally that it uses till expiry
• Forget LastVisitDate option

Checky 2.4

Resource validation and analysis Extension.
For: Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape
Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX
Changes since 2.3:

• Bug fix for file upload validations on Firefox and Mac OS X. Thanks to C.P. Lim! Perhaps this solves BUG 993433 too?
• Disk space validation during Mozilla and Netscape installation removed.

citations 0.1.10

Tools to bookmark quotings and other.
For: Mozilla, Firefox
Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX
Notable Highlights:

• Citation URLs are opened in a separate view with the possibility to search and highlight the citation content in the window
• Citations can install under Firefox 0.9+ in the new extension manager system
• Removed from installation the file citedb.rdf. The file is now created on-the-fly the first time it is required

Linkvisitor 1.0.20041021

Mark links as visited or unvisited.
For: Mozilla, Firefox
Platform: All
Now works in Firefox 1.0 PR (0.10.1) and Mozilla build 20040707 and above (Mozilla 1.71+ -> Mozilla 1.8a4)

Read more about each of these projects in the full report.