A call for open source programmers

Now that Firefox 3 is out and so many of us dislike some of the new default behaviors I thought of a way that a number of us could be made very happy, but it requires the services of programmers within the open source community.

With Firefox being an open source project I’m thinking that someone much smarter than me could take the code for Firefox 3 and the code for Firefox 2 and combine them in a way that could give us the speed of Firefox 3 but the look, feel and UI behaviors of Firefox 2. It should also accept either Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 extensions and themes, although I’m not sure which. Mainly I’m thinking about losing most of the Smart Location Bar and reverting it to a Firefox 2 address bar and ditching the new zoom system in favor of Firefox 2’s text zooming. If someone wants full page zoom with it they should be able to easily add the existing extension that does the job.

I’ll admit I have no idea how doable this is, although I know that Shawn Wilsher on Planet Mozilla said giving us both the old and new UIs is simply impossible. Perhaps what I’m hoping for is similarly impossible, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about coding to have a clue about how hard what I’m asking for would be, other than what Shawn is telling us.

I don’t have a clue what this browser would be called, although it certainly wouldn’t be called Firefox since Mozilla isn’t making it. One thing I do know is that if someone could do it, even just for Linux, it would make a lot of people very happy. (Sorry, but if it’s a Windows or an OSX app it would be completely useless for me.) So what do you open source programmers think? Would you be willing to take on this project, or at least look at it to see if it may even be possible?

Correcting WINE and a pair of Firefox notes

As I was going through Planet Ubuntu this morning I found a nice post from Scott Ritchie that resolves something that was bugging me about WINE. Bug 235593 – Wine Desktop Entry erroneously calls wine an “Emulator”! addresses what some may call a picked nit but I think of it as an annoying error. The issue is a rather simple one. When you right click on a Windows executable (.exe) file with WINE installed it gives you an option to “Open with Wine Windows Emulator” which is simply wrong because WINE stands for “Wine is Not an Emulator.” This bugged Scott for long enough that he was able to hunt down a fix for the issue. You can wait for the fix to make it’s way to you in an update or you can visit Scott’s blog and get the info you need to fix the bug on your system yourself. Also, if you’d like to help with translating the fix Scott would love to hear from you.

Christer Edwards found himself without a mouse and has discovered a number of Firefox keyboard navigation shortcuts that you may not be aware of. There’s also a complete list in the Firefox Support area you may want to bookmark for later reference.

I was also able to discover a fix for a really annoying Firefox bug this morning. You can middle click on a link to get it to open in a new tab, and I remember having missed clicking on a link or even just clicking in the content area and getting a pop-up telling me that I hadn’t clicked on a link. But since starting to test Firefox 3 I’ve found that if I accidentally middle click on something that isn’t a link it opens a page in that same tab using whatever is in your system clipboard as the URI. To me that is not only a pain in the butt but it should at least open the site in a new tab, which is what happens when you middle click a link. I ended up filing Bug 440707 – Center clicking on a non-link treats clipboard contents as a link in the current tab, but I was informed that a similar bug already exists, Bug 135884 – Middleclick on browser content area loads clipboard as URL. I also found out that the behavior that bugged me so much in fact wasn’t a bug, but a “feature.”

/me coughs into his hand as you hear “bullshit”

If this bugs you as well I have a fix for you, thanks to Boris Zbarsky on Bug 135884. Simply go into your about:config and see if you have a preference labeled “middlemouse.contentLoadURL” (without the quotes, of course). If you have that preference you need to set it to FALSE. If you don’t have that preference right click in about:config and add a new Boolean entry called “middlemouse.contentLoadURL” with a setting of FALSE. Now if you accidentally middle click anything other than a link nothing will happen.

NCI announces unofficial educational project

New Citizens International, that wonderful resource for noobies and oldbies alike, has announced that there is now a non-commercial area to the east of their sandbox in Kuula. You can work on your building and scripting there and if you have a question you can put it in a notecard and drop it into a nearby gadget.

Visit their blog for additional information.