Mozilla

I don’t like the new Thunderbird theme.

Chris Ilias 21 Comments

I’ve been using Thunderbird branch builds daily, since before the new Thunderbird theme landed, two and a half months ago; and the new Thunderbird theme has not grown on me. It’s too beige. It’s too yellow. There’s no variety of colour. It lacks vibrancy. Every time I open the latest 1.5 release, it’s such a welcome relief on the eyes, after looking at TB2.

I’m sorry Arvid. I know you worked hard on the new theme. I understand the desire to have a visual difference between TB1 and TB2; but I don’t see the improvement. I don’t see the theory behind the changes (except for the background of the message-list pane); and after two and a half months of daily use, I think I’ve given it a fair shot.

UPDATE: Not labelling these screenshots was intentional. Show this post to someone who’s never seen Thunderbird, and see what they choose.

[screenhot od TB2]

[screenshot of TB1.5]

A note about Nightly Tester Tools

Chris Ilias 2 Comments

If you use Nightly Tester Tools to bump up the compatibility of an add-on to enable it on your installation of Firefox or Thunderbird, that does not guarantee that the add-on will work. Nightly Tester Tools is a tool for testing.

Add-ons are built on top of Firefox/Thunderbird code. When the Firefox/Thunderbird code changes (new version), that may break the add-on, or worse, the add-on may cause the new version of Firefox/Thunderbird not to work. This is why the whole “add-on compatibility” thing exists in the first place. Add-on authors can state which versions they know their add-on will work on. When you bump the compatibility, it doesn’t magically fix and bugs that may occur, when trying to use that add-on on a new version of Firefox/Thunderbird. You run the risk of breaking your installation of Firefox/Thunderbird.

For some add-ons, there may not appear to be a problem; but there’s no guarantee, because it hasn’t been tested. That’s the point.

Gecko is Gecko

Chris Ilias

I just read a post by Robert Kaiser in mozilla.dev.general, that contains a great link:

http://www.geckoisgecko.org/

I see it as something like www.googleityoumoron.com, but for web developers. It might be useful for users of Mozilla-based browsers, other than Firefox.

The Mozilla Developer Center also has a good article on Browser Detection and Cross Browser Support, if you come across a website, that is too specific in its browser sniffing.

Someday….

XPAT on news.mozilla.org

Chris Ilias 5 Comments

[The Thunderbird 2 version of this can be found here.]

Every once in a while, someone on news.mozilla.org will enquire about receiving an error message “A News (NNTP) error occurred: xpat not supported“, when trying to search newsgroups on news.mozilla.org; so I thought I’d post my ‘stock’ answer. 🙂

News.mozilla.org is hosted by Giganews, who’s servers do not support XPAT commands.
To quote one of the Giganews support personnel:

“The XPAT command attempts to search through our entire spool of over 700 million articles, to match on a specific keyword, that is often found only in a handful of newsgroups. The command puts enough of a load on our servers, that several people using this at one time can affect the performance that all of our customers receive.”

Disabling XPAT support is not an uncommon thing. When using the “Search Messages” function in Mozilla Thunderbird [Edit–>Find–>Search Messages], the XPAT command is used to search that news server. The workaround for this is to make Thunderbird search messages locally. There are a couple of ways to do that:

1. Use the search bar [View–>Toolbars–>Search Bar].
[screenshot]

2. Before opening the search window, you can switch to offline mode [File–>Offline–>Work Offline]. There’s also an offline toggle icon in the bottom left of the Thunderbird window.
[screenshot]

Additionally, all mozilla.* newsgroups are archived on Google Groups, which is searchable using Google Groups.