Firefox
The main piece of news for day 2 in the Firefox Summit 2008 is that everyone is now trapped in the small town of Whistler after a rock slide cut off the highway that connects Whistler to Vancouver. Fortunately, nobody was injured because of this. However, clearing the massive boulders that are blocking the highway will take 5 days according to official sources. Since the summit ends this Thursday, most attendants need to go to the Vancouver Airport on Friday to catch flights to their home countries. The cause of this rock slide is unclear at the moment, but there are people in the summit who are speculating whether a company whose name starts with an 'M' is behind all of this. A bug was filed in Bugzilla to track the issue, and some of the currently-proposed solutions involve riding bears, taking boats, or taking helicopters. In reality however, we will most likely end up going through a different route that takes around 8 hours in bus.
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Submitted by Ayman on Thu, 2008/07/31 - 4:13pm
The Firefox Summit 2008 started today in the city of Whistler, BC, Canada. Around 400 contributors to the Mozilla project gathered to meet, share thoughts and discuss the 3.0 release of Firefox and plan for the next releases. I'm attending the summit as the Arabic localizer. I will post a daily highlight of the summit on my blog, so let's start with day one.
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Submitted by Ayman on Wed, 2008/07/30 - 8:54am
The Arabic version of Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 is now available. The key features of this release are:
- Session management: Ever closed a tab by mistake? This features lets you undo and reopen the tab.
- Phishing protection: The browser warns you about scam attempts and phishing websites.
- Enhanced search: You will receive query suggestions as you type your search strings, and it's even easier now to install and manage new search engines.
- And more: Better theme, builtin support for feed readers, ... etc
This is a testing version. If you are willing to help refine the Arabic localization, please download and test. Otherwise, just want for the final release, which should be some time soon.
Download links for the Arabic version:
Windows
Linux
Mac
Enjoy, and thanks to everyone who helped in the translation effort!
Submitted by Ayman on Thu, 2006/08/31 - 10:44pm
I wrote two CSS debugging bookmarklets to ease the pain of XHTML/CSS development under Internet Explorer. They mimic two commonly used features in the Web Developer extension for Firefox. The first outlines block-level elements, and the second displays ID and class information. Although that such functionality already exists in Web Developer and other bookmarklets, I couldn't find anything that is compatible with Internet Explorer and works offline (What I found are bookmarklets rely on including remote stylesheets).
To test a bookmarklet, simply click its link. To use it, drag and drop the link to your Links/Bookmarks toolbar, and press the resulting button when you want to activate the associated functionality. These bookmarklets are tested with Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 6.0, and Opera 8.5. I haven't had the chance yet to test with KHTML/Safari, but I think they should work because the code is standards complaint.
Anyone who's worked with XHTML/CSS for a while knows that Internet Explorer support for standards is lacking to say the least. It has many obscure bugs and compatibility issues. Firefox is my platform of choice for web development because of its compliance with standards and the plethora of development and debugging tools and extensions available (most notably Web Developer and FireBug). Once coding is finished under Firefox, I validate the code and test with other browsers (IE, KHTML/Safari, and Opera). Most of the time the code works on Opera and KHTML without any issues; however, IE often produces problems, and while working around them, I used to wish I had Web Developer's features for IE. Now I have these bookmarklets. They took me like 5 minutes to write and test under Firefox, but IE silently failed to produce the desired results until I did another hour of work. I adopted Web Developer's styles for outlined elements and ID/class information for consistency. And now I'm sharing them here now hoping that others find them useful as well.
Submitted by Ayman on Sat, 2006/08/26 - 12:08am
Here is a quick tip for Firefox users under Linux. If you find loading the current text in clipboard as a URL when middle-clicking on the current page annoying, then type about:config in the location bar, search for middlemouse.contentLoadURL and set it to false.
This feature may has some uses, but many times I middle-click somewhere other than a link, and Firefox tries to load whatever text in the clipboard as a URL. Since that the text won't an actual URL most of the time, Firefox loads a random website that is the result of a Google "I feel lucky search", which is very annoying!
Submitted by Ayman on Fri, 2006/01/27 - 9:05pm
I was phone-interviewed by Baxter Yazbek a couple of months ago, on Firefox localization and the 1.0 release. The interview (along with a nice article on Firefox 1.0) is out now on the 15th of February issue of Asharq Al Awsat newspaper. it's available online too (Arabic).
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Submitted by Ayman on Fri, 2005/02/18 - 7:28pm
