I'm writing this quick entry as a desparate plea out there: Anyone who has an hour or two and knows some XUL-fu skills, can you please take a look at my FXPointer extension? This thing worked fine in Firefox 3.0, but unfortunately some change in Firefox 3.5 causes FXPointer to completely break the location bar. Every time I've tried to debug this problem, I've failed and I don't have a lot of time these days to work it out. Read the rest of this entry ...

§546 · October 16, 2009 · Firefox, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on FXPointer Broken – You Can Help! · Tags: , , ,


I'm delightfully surprised at how much attention Mozilla is apparently giving SVG. First they've hired jwatt to work full-time on SVG. Now it looks like some students also have an interest in advancing the SVG implementation within Mozilla. Great!

I don't have the experience of a seasoned Mozilla hacker (only a couple patches years ago), but I do know that SMIL, SVG Fonts, SVG in CSS and SVG text-specific edge cases could use some work from a SVG 1.1 perspective. Hopefully they get in contact with jwatt, rlongson, roc, dholbert and birtles and get some ideas rolling...

§518 · January 20, 2009 · Firefox, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 4 comments · Tags: , ,


This day was five-and-a-half years in the making: the initial patch to add SMIL support has landed on Mozilla trunk. SMIL is the Open Web way of doing declarative animation, I use it on my site here and there via FakeSmile. This Mozilla patch is partial support for SMIL within SVG only (not HTML). Note that SMIL support is disabled in the build by default, as roc says "we should enable it when we've got enough implemented that we wouldn't feel embarrassed about shipping it. " - but this is a significant step forward.

Thanks and congratulations go to Daniel, Brian and Robert! Also thanks to Erik and Ian for putting some SMIL tests into Acid3. Not that this had anything to do with it. Oh, no. 😉

Opera has supported SMIL in SVG for a couple years now. Anyone want to place bets on who will be the second to release a browser that supports it? Mozilla? Apple? Google? Microsoft? What, did I say something funny?

§516 · January 15, 2009 · Firefox, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 5 comments · Tags: , , , ,


Poo. Declarative animation in SVG won't make it for the Firefox 3.1 release. That's a big shame, though I trust that it's the right decision.

§503 · September 30, 2008 · Firefox, Software, Technology, Web · Comments Off on No Smiling in Firefox 3.1 · Tags: , ,


Rather than twittering these and missing a sizable chunk of people who might be interested, I thought I'd post a couple quick links to very cool news in the SVG world: Read the rest of this entry ...

§497 · September 11, 2008 · Firefox, Safari, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · 6 comments · Tags: , , , ,