We discussed some possible ways to mitigate this and settled on including a TextArea-based fallback. Mihai’s done a tremendous job of providing a SourceEditor API in the browser that abstracts a lot of Orion’s own interface into a more general-purpose editor widget. In Firefox 10, we’ve enabled Orion by default in the Scratchpad for the first time. Cedric Vivier used the SourceEditor API for the Style Editor and it’s worth noting that it does not support the TextArea fallback at all in Firefox 11.

Now we’re trying to add some important new features to the SourceEditor component. Things like “Find in File”, “Incremental Search”, “Context Menus”… Y’know, things you’d expect from any normal text editor. The TextArea fallback has made that increasingly difficult to do and in some cases, impossible. The cost of maintaining this API has become untenable for future work.

So we’ve removed the TextArea fallback for Firefox 13.

This may have some unforeseen implications for us. We discovered earlier this week that at least one popular addon was using the SourceEditor and I wanted to broadcast this here just in case there are other developers or users who rely on the TextArea fallback. If you are one of these people and this is going to cause pain, please post here, to dev.apps.firefox or file a bug.

In my earlier years, I was always intrigued by the story of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, well before reading the steam-punk confection of the same name by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Even more intriguing was the woman in the story, the Lady Ada Lovelace. Ostensibly, the world’s first computer programmer, she didn’t let a minor thing like not having an actual computer to work with hold her back. She was a visionary, her mind exceeding the technical capabilities of the day to foresee a world of general purpose, programmable computation machinery.

Like many others, I still find her a fascinating character; a noble, the daughter of the darkly-twisted poet Lord Byron, perhaps a little sickly, taking interest in an intellectual exercise inhabited entirely by men and producing code! What would she think of software and computing today? Of the social aspects of open source code? Would she find it mendacious and boring because anybody could do it or would she take it to new and exciting places?

Things are different today, though not as much as we might like. Women have made considerable contributions to the fields of math and computer science. Names like Adele Goldberg, Anita Borg and Grace Hopper command well-deserved reverence. I have the great fortune to work alongside some truly brilliant women here at Mozilla, both in code and within other important areas of the organization. I live with one of them and if I didn’t think it would be a little awkward for both of us, I could tell you just how inspiring she has been to me. I think Lady Ada would be pleased to know any of them.

(I tried to find an image of Grace Hopper and some old machinery, but I couldn’t find anything CC-licensed. Instead, I will link to the Flickr Blog post which has some neat pics).

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust me)

Things

So, in addition to my previous 7 things, I’ll relate just a few more:

1. I have two dogs. Dakota and Jester. They’re retired racing greyhounds we adopted through the great people at Maritime Greyhound Adoption Program. They’re great dogs and we couldn’t imagine not having them around.

2. NERDERY ALERT! I have another “secret” blog at http://n3wb.com/boolean. It’s not really a secret (I’ve linked to it from my tweetstream before) and I don’t write on it nearly as much as I used to. I tend to post nerdy reviews of technology and gadgets there or whatever else isn’t really suited to posting here which I use primarily for blogging about mozilla-related topics. Really though, I think that separation is totally fake and I should probably just combine the two blogs. But I can’t and probably won’t.

3. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 I got as a present when I was 9 or 10, I think. I graduated to a C64 shortly after that where I started to get into programming BASIC before moving onto 6502 assembly and Forth. After a brief stint with a monochrome PC that had a “turbo” switch, I upgraded to an Amiga 2000 which I continued modding and upgrading for nearly 8 years. By the time I was done with it, it had a 68030 accelerator card, 8MB of RAM(!) and, I believe, a 50MB hard-drive. I taught myself C (K&R!) from reading the Amiga ROM Kernel manuals in 1988-89 and building programs on a copy of the SAS C compiler two years before I had my first internet connection.

I am still looking forward to a new incarnation of the Amiga. Paradoxically, I also hope there is never another computer bearing that name again.

I think that’s plenty.

The Taggees

@mleibovic! @EnglishMossop! @deezthugs! @Boriss! @shorlander! @robodesign! @felipc!

You’ve all been tagged! (please forgive me)

Jan Odvarko and John Barton have been working hard on getting a Firebug extension together to track event listeners on DOM objects. The Firefox parts needed to make this work were tackled by Olli Pettay in heroic fashion. You can download the alpha release here: http://getfirebug.com/releases/eventbug/1.5/. You will need Firebug 1.5b1 and Firefox 3.7 alpha (nightly) for this to work.

But before installing, I recommend you read Jan’s blog-post:

Software is hard | Eventbug (alpha) Released.

With that, I’ve updated my AutoGrabUploader script and made it Even Better™! The one thing it didn’t do before was automatically dump the URL of the screenshot into the clipboard for easy pasting. You had to select it manually from the webpage that appeared in the browser. I’ve fixed that so it now gets added to the clipboard as you’d expect.

The list of requirements are pretty much the same as last time:

• Mac OS X 10.6 – template’s been saved with newer version of Automator
• Some kind of web-enabled remote storage (I’m using “people.mozilla.org”, but if you’ve got MobileMe you could do this with an iDisk or some other WebDAV-enabled system)
• MacFUSE + SSHFS – only if you need to mount a folder through SSH!
• FastScripts Lite
• Grabup-selection-template 2 workflow.

Install MacFUSE and sshfs as before. See the notes on the MacFUSE project page for getting that working. I had to remove a library from the sshfs application bundle to make it go on my laptop.

Unzip and edit the Grabup Selelection template in Automator as below (click the image to see the full size version):

automator screen grab uploader on flickr

When you’re done, save it to your ~/Library/Scripts folder as something like “Grabup Selection”. I have two of these, one for Selection and the other to grab a whole window. Use the Type dropdown in the Take Screenshot action to select Window and resave (careful not to copy over the interactive version).

The last step is to assign it a hotkey in FastScripts. Open FastScripts’ Preferences panel and assign Grabup Selection to a hotkey. I use Shift-Cmd-6 for selection and Shift-Cmd-5 for full window. Right next to the default Shift-Cmd-3 and 4 for the Mac’s default screenshot shortcuts.

If you’ve made it through this, congrats! Let me know if you have any problems.

I think the biggest change to Firebug from version 1.3 and earlier is the new activation mechanism and it’s something that can take a bit of getting used to. It’s definitely something we could have blogged more about during the coming months and it still causes some users pain. Honza wrote an excellent introduction to it, which I’ve mentioned here before.

One trick that has stymied some users is how to see an initial request (GET) from an HTTP server if Firebug isn’t active. Or how do you follow Net traffic from one domain to another when you click on a link?

The secret is on the Firebug status icon’s context menu and it’s labelled “On For All Web Pages”.

Selecting this option will open Firebug for any page you visit, giving you a seamless view of your network traffic. Deselecting that option will allow you to turn it off again.

The complementary function, “Off for All Web Pages” will also do a little more than just turn off Firebug. It removes the list of active webpages Firebug has registered, essentially clearing the scene. If you’ve ever visited a webpage and wondered why Firebug was active on it, it’s because you turned it on there before, then probably closed that tab with Firebug still open. Subsequent visits to that or any other webpage you had Firebug opened on (and didn’t turn off!) will reopen Firebug. Selecting “Off For All Web Pages” will clear that list so you don’t have any more surprises.

Don’t forget to turn off “Off For All Web Pages” when you want to use Firebug again. Opening it and pressing reload may confuse you.

(thanks to “brahmana” from IRC for reminding me to write this post)

Lastly, my standard plea: please report any bugs you find on the project’s issues page.

From this:

(Firefox adds %20 for each of the spaces when you save it as a bookmarklet)

The above snippet grabs the currently selected text in a web-page and opens it in a new window. Add it to a bookmarklet of your own on your toolbar and you have a convenient way to open new text in a separate tab. For bonus points, install the keyconfig extension to create a keyboard shortcut (you’ll need to force-install the extension and write a little function to get that to work). Thanks to Neil Lee for the keyconfig tip!

A colleague asked me how I stay on top of the constant surge of information produced by Mozilla and Firebug and whatever else I follow. The question was a good one in and of itself and I replied with my little list of things I read and said I might blog it, because it could be helpful. His reply suggested a Seven-things-style meme to find out what other people are reading and how they stay on top. At the risk of having the entire internet hate me, I conceded that this was an excellent idea.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t believe any one person can possibly stay on top of the incredible volume of information and noise produced in and around Mozilla. Especially when you start doing transitive closures on the information and pulling in data about Mozilla and ancillary projects. I am not claiming this is definitive or even remotely efficient. It sort of works for me, and it’s settled into enough of a routine that I can stick with it.

So, without further ado, the meme-ified questionnaire:

Q1: What is your reading schedule? Do you have a schedule?
I have a schedule, but I also read randomly when I’m stuck someplace with my phone and have decent wireless connectivity. I typically start the day with email and bugmail, then check important feeds. Twice per week (usually), I check digestified versions of dev.planning and platform. Usually Monday and Wednesday. I don’t have it scheduled, (though maybe I should!) but I read feeds throughout the day. I will admit that they can be a strongly seductive distraction from real work. And of course, there’s IRC competing for my attention.

Q2: What do you read daily and how often?
E-mail, naturally. Several times / day, first pass, check for urgent messages, scan subscribed lists and subfolders later.
Blogs / Planet (with coffee)
Bugmail. Check once morning, once afternoon.
Firebug Bugmail. As it comes in.
Firebug working group individual emails

Q3: What do you read more than once / week? How often?
newsgroups, dev.planning, dev.platform
Blogs, Newsfeeds

Q4: What blogs/feeds/newsgroups do you read? (list three or more)

blogs:
lifehacker
daring fireball
schneier on security
michael geist
planet.mozilla.org – this I have been reading less of late, mostly because of the noise. Highlights from About:Mozilla newsletter fill in the important gaps.

feeds:
cbc/bbc
macnn
engadget

newsgroups:
firebug discussion group
mozilla.dev.planning
mozilla.dev.platform
mozilla.dev.extensions

Q5: Lastly, name a guilty pleasure in your feedreader:
kotaku!

bonus question: What do you use to read feeds?
I use Feedly. I used to use Vienna, but found the app was stagnating somewhat. I have also tried Times, which came with this year’s MacHeist bundle and it looks good, but prefer Feedly’s integration with Firefox. I considered trying Fever which looks promising.

Now tag at least three people you want to hear from (making sure you notify them via email, twitter, or whatever means of communication you have in case they don’t actually read your blog all the time):

Deb Richardson
Mike Beltzner
Kev Needham
Curtis Bartley

Let the meming begin!

IRC user Templarian mocked up this design using the Silk icon set from FamFamFam. I think it looks pretty sweet.

He’s also started a discussion on the Firebug Google Discussion group, so please leave comments there, in the Flickr photo or right here if you don’t feel like traveling.

And while we’re on the topic, you should check out the latest Firebug 1.4(a30) in the latest nightly of Firefox 3.5. It’s coming together.

But first, we’d like some feedback on a little feature introduced with this version. “Minimize to status bar” is the new little down arrow next to the “Open in New Window” and “Close” icons on the tab strip. On the Mac, it looks like this:

Clicking that down arrow will drop the currently open Firebug panel into a new icon on the status bar and leave everything running. This sort of approximates the old behavior where you could turn on Firebug and still close the window and receive updates on the console and net panel, but not requiring a separate window to be active. There was some discussion in today’s meeting about the ramifications of this behavior. I think the biggest contention was having multiple icons on the status bar. As you minimize more Firebug panels, you get more icons. This could look a little strange, but on the plus side, you get a visual indicator of how many Firebugs are actually running.

So, if you’re into testing bleeding edge debugging software, install this into a testing profile and try it out. Leave us a comment here or on the Firebug discussion page.

I would also like to note that auto updates to the 1.4 alpha line should be working again after a somewhat embarrassing typo made by yours truly to the install.rdf file. Thanks to “geki007″ for finding the error!