Is this something any Firefox enterprise users are hearing about?

The message this year was focused was on creating new habits. I called it “Helpful Habits for a Happy New Year.”

The five areas I picked were:

• Physical Habits
• Intellectual Habits
• Financial Habits
• Emotional Habits
• Spiritual Habits

I would encourage you in this New Year, pick a couple of those areas and come up with new habits that you are going to start. And habits you are going to stop.Then write it down! Keep yourself accountable. And make this a great new year.

If you’d like to give it a listen, it’s here.

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I’ve received my first email about the fact that with Firefox 8, users are now asked if they want to disable your CCK, depending on how you chose to install it (probably in one of those places that Mozilla now considers “forbidden”)

If you have NOT deployed Firefox 8, in your organization yet, you need to read this article about disabling the various dialogs that appear.

The problem is that you need to set these preferences in Firefox 7 via something like the CCK so that the dialogs won’t appear. If you’re already moved to Firefox 8, it’s too late.

In the future, it is now recommended that you ship your CCK using the distribution mechanism which I documented last year.

Honestly, there’s no really good solution to this for enterprise, but the right place to participate in the discussion is the Enterprise Working Group Mailing List. (Although there isn’t much discussion going on there anymore.)

Going forward, I’m going to try harder to offer solutions instead of just doing a lot of complaining.

So, lately with Tyler Downer’s post, there’s been a lot of talk about Bugzilla and triage and other things. Yesterday, I was debugging a problem and discovered a bug that had been open for 5+ years with no fix (even though the component it was in had been rewritten in the mean time). (And before you ask, yes I posted a patch.)

The fact is that Bugzilla is a mess, not just with unconfirmed bugs, but with bugs that are no longer relevant, bugs that have already been fixed and more.

So here’s my thought:

Stop all non critical activity on the Mozilla project for one week. All development, all test, etc. Have everyone in the community (and I mean everyone) attack Bugzilla and get it as cleaned up as possible. Have awards for the people that resolve the most bugs.

Thoughts?

If you read any books about successfully making change in your organization, they bring up the important of getting the stakeholders on board with the change early on in the process. As I look through the history of Firefox, I see over and over again where Mozilla made major changes and failed to communicate with the stakeholders before making changes. Here are just a few examples:

Change: Personas
Stakeholders: Theme developers

When Firefox introduced the concept of Personas, they failed to account for incompatibility with themes. This continues to be a problem to this day. As a result, they completely alienated most theme developers.

Change: Rapid Release
Stakeholders: Enterprises, Add-on Developers, Localizers, Bug Triagers

When Mozilla introduced rapid release, they failed to account for additional work for localizers, bug triagers and add-on developers. They failed to account for enterprises that have dependencies on longer life cycles.

Change: Third Party Add-on Notification
Stakeholders: Add-on Developers

When Mozilla announced third party add-on notification, they failed to account for the shear amount of third party add-ons that are out there. According to Mozilla, a full 75% of installed add-ons are NOT from AMO. When this change goes in, it’s going to seriously impact the add-in community.

Change: Removal of Firefox Community Editions
Stakeholders: People Repackaging Firefox

When Mozilla removed Firefox Community Editions, they did it silently. Simply turning the page into a 404. They didn’t even realize what they’d done until someone told them.

Change: Removal of Status Bar
Stakeholders: Add-on Developer, Users

When Mozilla removed the status bar, they failed to account for the fact that it would break so many add-ons. Luckily sanity came in and they got something to fix it before Firefox 4 shipped. But users continue to complain about the loss of the status bar.

Change: Removal of Version Numbers
Stakeholders: Everyone

I realize this change was reverted, but this is another classic example of just throwing something out there without really gauging what the impact would be to the community.

Recently there was a blog post on planet that talked about remembering that Mozilla was not a company supporting a community, but a community supporting a company (or something like that). That might be true with the Mozilla organization in general, but when it comes to Firefox, they behave more like a company that makes decisions without really regarding how they will affect the rest of the community. Or maybe they do think about it but just do a very poor job communicating it.

The argument is generally “we discussed that in the newsgroups,” but I don’t buy it.

We live in a modern age where people communicate in blogs rather than newsgroups, and this is an area where Mozilla falls way behind. The main Mozilla blog doesn’t even allow comments, and when the add-ons blog is used to communicate changes, they are always posted after hours west coast time. So there are no responses from Mozilla to questions until usually a full 12 hours after the posting. Announcements like this should happen early in the day on the west coast so there can be an active discussion. They also do a very poor job moderating, with comments taking as long as 24 hours to show up.

In the end, despite all the information that comes out of Mozilla, they do a very poor job actually communicating. Communicating is not just about producing words or announcing things, it’s about having an interactive dialog. And lately (especially as an add-on developer), it feels like most of the time it’s just Mozilla saying “this is the way it’s going to be.”

That’s not how you get people to buy-in to your ideas.

The first thing I learned is that richlistboxes don’t participate in layout the same way as a listbox, particularly in a (edit: tabbed panel in a dialog) dialog. If you dynamically add items to them, they will push other items off the dialog. (edit: Rows attribute should have never been in the richlistbox docs – I removed it)There’s a “rows” attribute on the richlistbox that would seem to be for this, but it doesn’t work. Most people probably just end up setting max-height or explicit height and width, but I don’t like that. Here’s what I came up with.

If you are going to dynamically add items to the listbox, set it to flex and then query the width and height during window load and explicitly set the width and height to be those values:

  var listbox = document.getElementById("myrichlistbox");
  var listboxStyle = window.getComputedStyle(listbox, null);
  var width = parseInt(listboxStyle.getPropertyValue("width"));
  var height = parseInt(listboxStyle.getPropertyValue("height"));
  listbox.setAttribute("width", width);
  listbox.setAttribute("height", height);

If you are adding items in the XUL using a template or being explicit, hide the richlistbox and put a vbox in its place. Then during load, query the size of the vbox, set those sizes to the rich listbox and hide the vbox/show the richlistbox.

The second thing I learned is that headers don’t work properly in richlistboxes. Like me, you probably placed headers at the top of your richlistbox the same way you would for a listbox thinking, “It’s a listbox, so listbox headers should work.”But you might have noticed that when you scroll your richlistbox, the headers scroll away. Working around this was a little trickier. Come to find out, richlistboxes don’t support headers properly. To fix it, I found the one place in Firefox that uses a richlistbox and has a header – the Applications tab in preferences. Here’s the code:

<richlistbox>
  <listheader style="border: 0; padding: 0; -moz-appearance: none;">
    <treecol value="First Header"/>
    <treecol value="Second Header"/>
  </listheader>
</richlistbox>

The style stuff looks ugly, but it’s to make it appear properly on Linux.

I hope these tips will save my fellow add-on developers some work.

One of the statements that keeps getting thrown around in the discussion about the Firefox rapid release process is that because the releases are every six weeks, there isn’t really enough time for any major changes. This statement is patently false, and there’s an easy way to prove that – the Firefox button.

The Firefox button was a huge change for Firefox 4. I would wager it cost (or will cost) companies across the world tens of thousands of dollars (or more) in rewriting of support scripts, redoing of screen shots and actual support calls.

Let’s assume for just a minute that the switch to the Firefox button had been done within the context of the rapid release cycle. How would it have happened? Could it have been phased in? Could it somehow have been done across multiple releases? No. The answer is that between two “minor” releases, the change would have simply been made. What’s the takeaway?

Whether or not a change is major or minor has nothing to do with time. It only has to do with the change.

So how do you mitigate a situation like this? I’m glad you ask. You do what Microsoft did and provide a Group Policy (or preference) to turn on the menu bar by default. This allows the browser to be deployed without taking this change. I received quite a few emails when Firefox 4 was released with folks asking this specific question. I had to tell them that there was simply no easy way to do it in Firefox without writing an extension. I considered adding it into the CCK Wizard, but simply haven’t had time.

We’ll finish with a story. Last week my wife finally bit the bullet and upgraded from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4/5. She’s technical and has been using web browsers for 10+ years. Her first comment? “Where did my menu go?” I said, “Everything is in the Firefox button now.” She said, “I want my menu back.” So I showed her how to get rid of the Firefox button and go back to the old menu.

You’re messing with 10+ years of muscle memory here. Change is hard. And expensive.

I’m excited about the new version of Personas Interactive that Brand Thunder just released.

If you don’t know, Personas Interactive builds on the Personas features in Firefox adding in things like multiple background images, Personas specific toolbars, galleries that can be hosted on any site and more. It removes the limitations of Personas.

This new version gives the user more control, including adding social network buttons to every theme and weather customized to your location.

But the coolest thing in it is support for our new TweetTheme. Combined with PI 1.2, TweetTheme gives you a full Twitter experience in your browser, including Twitter in sidebar, tweeting and searching Twitter from your toolbar, as well as a viewer that shows your last twenty tweets. It really shows off the power of Personas Interactive. I hope you’ll try it out.

You can click here to install Personas Interactive with TweetTheme.

And you won’t believe what Brand Thunder has coming up next. BT:Engage lets you build your own themes that will work with Personas Interactive. You can try it out now!

Here’s what I did:

Per the Thawte instructions, I use on IE on Windows to manage my certs. After importing my new cert into IE, the first step was to export it. Important: When you export the PFX file do NOT check the box to include all the certificates in the certification path.

Next, I created a new cert database using: certutil -N -d .

Then I imported my cert using pk12util: pk12util -i {filename}.pfx -d

Thawte has created a new intermediate cert to work around this problem. It can be downloaded here.

You need to download it and import it into your database using this command:

certutil -t "c,c,C" -n "thawte" -A -d .< new_thawte.cer

You should now be able to sign your XPI.

One other thing I ran into was finding a version of NSS that worked properly. I ended up using this one.

It occurred to me that the government has TONS of stuff that they could probably sell to get us out of debt. Why is the government holding on to tons of crap when they could just sell it?

When families need to get out of debt. They sell stuff. They have garage sales or sell stuff on craigslist and eBay. So why can’t the government?

So here are some ideas:

• The Smithsonian has millions of artifacts that aren’t even on display. Sell them!
• Instead of putting all the Space Shuttles in museums, take one apart. Sell the tiles. People would pay thousands of dollars for Space Shuttle souvenirs.
• Clean out all the old junk at NASA and sell it.
• Does the Library of Congress really need all those books? Sell some.

Wouldn’t it be great on the next Independence Day for the government to be financially independent?

Can you think of any other junk the government has that it could sell?