I’ve written many Jepacks to solve little annoying problems mainly related to urls and tabs.

JetColorTab, the 50 Line code contest’s winner born to solve a need without installing full features extensions.

In these days the Mozilla community (and me) has debated about the future of Jetpack and XUL and many people says “a big number of extensions can be written simply using standard DOM and HTML”

This sentence intrigued me so I’ve tried to rewrite Table2Clipboard (T2C) for Jetpack, T2C makes a simple operation, it copies HTML selection also DOMRange to clipboard preserving the format and many other aspects.

After 30 minutes the porting was completed (excluding the UI not yet rewritten) so heavily DOM oriented extensions can be easily ported to Jetpack but some XUL code remains.

Extensions like NoScript or AdBlockPlus today are very hard (impossible??) to move to Jetpack and hopefully this is not necessary because XUL sits near to us for a long time

Little fixes to T2C required

• Jetpack version 0.6.2 doesn’t allow (or at least I’m not able) to use modules so while waiting for CommonJS comes to Jetpack it is necessary to copy all scripts into the main jetpack file
• HTMLTableElement, HTMLTableCellElement, HTMLTableRowElement are not “visible” so expressions like

  if (a instanceof HTMLTableElement) {}
  

  don’t work but this isn’t a problem because the code can be written more efficiently

  if (a.localName == "TABLE") {}
  

• gContextMenu.target can be replaced by the standard Jetpack context.node, the parameter context is passed for example to beforeShow()

Where XUL is necessary and improvements required

• Jetpack allows to obtain the text or HTML selection using jetpack.selection but it doesn’t expose the focusNode so I used jetpack.tabs.focused.contentWindow.getSelection() (i.e. XUL nsISelection)
• XUL clipboard supports flavors but under Jetpack you can set only one at time, so you can’t add text version plus html version of same content, I think the ’set’ method should have an ‘add’ mate
• T2C needs to access to CSS using ownerDocument.defaultView.getComputedStyle
• T2C uses the inIDOMUtils, it should be great if this interface become available from Jetpack

Jetpack Table2Clipboard can be downloaded from the Jetpack Gallery

After reading the Mike Connor’s blog post and the Firebug’s post blog I realized XUL developers are closer to a revolution.

I have only a few questions in my mind and my stupid answers.

Q: Is it really so difficult to write XUL extensions?

A: For me no and I’m not a so clever person! OK there is a learning curve but every complete (non strictly complex) system requires to study, to learn and to compare itself with other people. Please don’t  confuse “rich” with “complicated“.

Q: We really need new addons ecosystem?

A: Maybe we need a lightweight ecosystem but XUL is the right way, Jetpack sounds good but today it is strongly tied to the browser, this will change when Jetpack for Thunderbird will be published.

I love Jetpack believe me

Jetpack suffers from its so called “JQuery oriented syntax”.

I don’t like the sentence “JQuery oriented syntax” simply because doesn’t exists a “JQuery syntax”. JQuery uses Javascript closure syntax construct, I admit sometime it is very ugly and code tends to became naturally obfuscated

Are we sure “JQuery oriented syntax” is really so simple for newbies?

I agree with Daniel Gazman blog post, solution can be worst than the problem.

Q: Is restarting the browser after an addon installation so terrible?

A: I want my Operating System doesn’t require to me to restart after an update but I don’t care if my browser must be restarted after an addon installation/update. People are so lazy, people are so stupid? They accept OS reboots but suffer browser restarts? This is really a strange world!

Q: Is the problem related to Google Chrome success?

A: I don’t like so much Google Chrome, ok its startup time is amazing, then? What other feature is so fantastic? I’m a programmer and maybe I don’t see “commercial” related problem.

Maybe someone forgets that “Firefox is a platform”, Firefox isn’t a simple browser.

You can reuse your XUL platform know-how to create extensions for other applications; Thunderbird, Komodo, Songbird, Prism (my favorites four XUL applications)

You can create standalone applications using the XUL platform, too.

You can use extensions also on your mobile phone thanks to Fennec.

Please apologize me for my bad English and my rant

I encountered the following problem: Change font and color for XUL tree based on user input. The user chooses the font and picks the color from a dialog and the tree widget is immediately redrawn with the new styles.

Changing styles for XUL trees requires the implementation of a nsITreeView, some nsIAtomService manipulation and some Mozilla CSS Extensions, definitively a bit verbose but enough simple after a dozen of attempts .

The Mozilla CSS tree extensions are mainly pseudo-classes that can’t be modified from code, so you need to create a CSS text snippet with new values and then “reload” it.

Reloading CSS files can be accomplished using the nsIStyleSheetService service, it only requires a nsIURI pointing to the CSS resource.

Based on the scenario described above the styles are generated at runtime so I need to create a CSS style representation and stores it for example on a temp file. The styles don’t really need to be persisted on disk so why do I need to create an unuseful file?

Well using the “data:” protocol it is possible to encode the generated CSS string and pass to nsIURI the data uri without needs to create temporary files as shown below.

function applyUserStyles(cssStyles) {
    // myTreeChildren is the CSS class name used for the tree
    // obviously can be parametrized
    var css = '.myTreeChildren::-moz-tree-cell-text {' + cssStyles + '}';
    var data = 'data:text/css;charset=utf-8,' + encodeURI(css);
    var sss = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/content/style-sheet-service;1"]
                .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIStyleSheetService);
    var ios = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/network/io-service;1"]
                .getService(Components.interfaces.nsIIOService);
    var u = ios.newURI(data, null, null);
    if (sss.sheetRegistered(u, sss.USER_SHEET)) {
        sss.unregisterSheet(u, sss.USER_SHEET);
    }
    sss.loadAndRegisterSheet(u, sss.USER_SHEET);
}
 

Maybe a simpler solution exists and my code is the worst way to proceed, if you know a better way please tell me

I spent the Christmas holidays working on VisualDiffer, the Komodo visual folders/files comparison extension.

Now I want to migrate VisualDiffer from extension to standalone application using XULRunner because the folders comparison feature is mature and using it from an extension can be a bit complicated.

The migration requires some intermediate steps

• Remove dependencies from Komodo code (especially the unified diff algorithm)
• Remove dependencies from unified diff algorithm!!
• Complete the file comparison feature allowing in-place editing using Bespin.
  Bespin can greatly simplify syntax highlight for different languages, search in file and so on
  Honestly I’m considering also to stay with Scintilla (actually used by Komodo) but I love Bespin
  
• Use a cool graphic layout, especially toolbar icons
  I’m not a GIMP guru so if somebody would to help me he/she would be welcomed
• Allow user defined fonts and colors (low priority task)

I hope to release the VisualDiffer V1.2 for Komodo in a couple of weeks but also not Komodo aficionados can take a look to it installing the beta version on Firefox 3.5.x (also 3.6b5) and SeaMonkey 2.x.

Under Firefox and SeaMonkey the “files differ” feature isn’t implemented (Komodo dependencies) but you can test the folders differ feature that is totally based on standard Gecko interfaces, you can find the VisualDiffer item under the Tools menu.

Obviously VisualDiffer on Firefox is a nonsense because it isn’t a browser oriented extension I distribute this version with Firefox support with the hope a larger community can try it and give me feedback before I jump on the XULRunner world.

The V1.2 beta 1 can be downloaded from here.

VisualDiffer is inspired by the fantastic Beyond Compare but this isn’t a mystery

Thanks to the contribution platform available at AMO I bought one book and a couple of software licenses (not open sourced).

I can say that the AMO contribution feature is a great success for me, dozen of donors for two ‘not so famous‘ extensions like Table2Clipboard and ViewSourceWith.

Now I’ve a little budget to use to make contributions because NOW it’s my turn!

I’ll contribute to Firefox extensions without forget other open source projects especially the utilities, I love the little time saver applications

I chosen low ‘Suggested Donation’ amount for my extensions but this has generated very expensive PayPal fees per transaction so I’ll make fewer contributions but all higher than 5$, I would the software authors take maximum profits from donations.

I hope in my country (Italy) PayPal made available micropayments very soon.

I would like to receive contributions also for my Komodo extensions, strangely the official dafizilla website doesn’t attract donors (I don’t like to fill it with banners and donations messages), I hope rumors about the Add-On Store will be confirmed and the store will host not only browser (i.e. Firefox) extensions and more important it will host also free/open source components.

This week I’ve received four times the same (i.e. duplicated) ViewSourceWith (VSW) bug report that sounds…

“ViewSourceWith stopped to show the icons on context menu, this regression is present on Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10)”

I use Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) and all works fine, so I’ve burned a Karmic Koala ISO and tested it discovering the “regression” exists.

Debug -> Add logs -> Remove logs -> Clean Profile -> DOM Inspect -> MozRepl without find where the problem occurs.

Last resort -> Bugzilla -> Found!!!

The Bug 527253 unveils the mystery!

This isn’t a regression

ViewSourceWith isn’t the guilty, Firefox isn’t the guilty but… Gnome is the guilty

Type the command shown below from command line and restart Firefox

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true

EDIT Or use the UI to obtain same result (thanks to mzz) system -> preferences -> appearance -> interface -> show icons in menus

This worked for me and also for two bug submitters (the other two guys do not replayed to my hint)

So remember Bugzilla is your friend

This is a non technical post

Read full story at ZooBorns

I’ve received great and unexpected feedback about PluginChecker on my previous post so I’ve decided to refactor its code and better integrate with the standard Extensions Manager.

The original ugly dialog has been removed and informations about the new installed plugins are shown directly onto the Extensions Manager.

PluginChecker v0.2 can be downloaded from SourceForge and from AMO.

In these days the net is populated by blog posts about the .NET Framework Assistant plugin for Firefox, its disabling and the fact Firefox does not warn user when a plugin installs itself without explicit permission.

Well, this is a old problem at least for me, indeed I discovered it some time ago when my Firefox crashed (apparently) without reason, discovering after a couple of days that Microsoft Office 2003 plugin fought with Foxit Reader and Google update plugins.

The problem was that I never installed Office plugin!

Disabling Office plugin Firefox stopped to crash.

After that experience I decided to write a simple (very simple) extension that at every Firefox startup checks if there are new plugins installed.

Nothing so cool, only a quick and dirty solution implemented in a few of hours.

Waiting Mozilla implements a better solution than mine you can install PluginChecker.

If you expect to find PluginChecker innovative or the “I-can-live-without-it” extension you are on the wrong place, if you expect a not intrusive and simple solution to unattended plugins installation than you can take a look at it.

You can download PluginChecker from SourceForge.

Today visiting a website that gives invites for Google Wave I received the message shown below

This is the first time I see a similar “invite”

Well, no thanks I prefer to move away from this website, period!