mozilla

Thoughts on the future of web-based HTML editors

March 9, 2010 - 00:37 — Ehsan Akhgari

The ability of editing HTML content on the web is nothing new, we've all used it to write emails in Web-based email clients, post content on our blogs, adding content to web sites, etc. Web sites usually do this using the execCommand API, with either iframes put into designMode, or contentEditable elements, and occasionally utilize things such as the DOM Range API and -->

Force RTL updated

November 24, 2009 - 00:11 — Ehsan Akhgari

I just uploaded a new version of the Force RTL extension, which finally fixes the extension to work on recent Firefox and Thunderbird versions (Firefox 3.6 and Thunderbird 3 betas and above). This new version of the extension adds support for the new intl.uidirection.ab-CD preference added in bug 478416 by Neil Deakin.

Moving to Toronto

October 22, 2009 - 00:21 — Ehsan Akhgari

As many of my fellow Mozillaians probably know already, I've moved to Toronto to work full-time for Mozilla Corporation. It's been a very exciting process so far. Toronto seems like a great city, and it's been very nice to meet some of the fellows which I've been known only online in person, and it's even greater to get a chance to work with this group of very smart people on the project that I love. This is the best deal that anyone can get: making a living by working on something that you love, in a great place with the great community which we know as the Mozilla Community.

Show right-click menus on form elements

February 18, 2009 - 23:22 — Ehsan Akhgari

Ever since bug 404536 has landed, a number of users have been angry. What that bug did was removing the context menu for HTML form elements. This change annoyed mainly two classes of users: those who were accustomed to those context menus, and those who used extensions which add menu items to the context menus for form elements (along with other elements, possibly), most notably, Firebug.

Unicode installer and updater available soon

January 10, 2009 - 14:54 — Ehsan Akhgari

Until now, localization projects which did not have a Windows code-page assigned to them were out of luck for localizing the installer and updater user interfaces for all Mozilla-based applications. We all know that code-pages are evil; here are the main problems encountered with code-page based localization of these two applications:

First Persian Firefox builds available

December 3, 2008 - 10:58 — Ehsan Akhgari

The first Persian Firefox builds (built by Tinderbox) are available! These builds, according to Persian Mozilla Dashboard are 86% percent complete. Nearly all parts of the browser are translated. The remaining things to translate include a number of security error messages and UI strings, and the installer (which is in fact translated, I'm just working on bug 305039 to make the installer Unicode, so that we can have a useful Persian installer). These will hopefully be finished soon as well.

HTTP Accept-Ranges support improved

December 1, 2008 - 00:21 — Ehsan Akhgari

I thought I'd blog about this, hoping some web developers may find it useful.

Previously, Mozilla's HTTP protocol implementation did not check the presence of the Accept-Ranges response header. The job of this header is to tell the client whether it can perform HTTP range requests, and if so, in what units should it express its range requests. Practically, the only unit used by web servers is bytes, so this header's job in the real world is to tell the server whether it can perform range requests at all.

Testing in Mozilla talk

November 30, 2008 - 21:00 — Ehsan Akhgari

I gave a talk on Mozilla Software testing approach as part of my Software Testing course. You can find the slides (built using S5) here. I introduced a number of tools that we use for automated and manual testing, and also gave an overview on parts of the process employed to use the tests in real life.

You can grab the slides. I hope that they'll be useful to you.

Persian Firefox: Sneak Peak

November 26, 2008 - 11:49 — Ehsan Akhgari

Look what we're building!

Persian Firefox (فایرفاکس فارسی)

First Private Browsing extension

November 11, 2008 - 23:47 — Ehsan Akhgari

I did expect the community to get interested in extending the Private Browsing mode by developing extensions, but I didn't expect it to happen this soon! I'm happy to announce that the first Private Browsing extension has been developed by the community member Kurt Schultz! This extension adds a toolbar and a status bar button to Firefox for quick access to the Private Browsing feature, and lets you toggle a few of the underlying preferences as a bonus! Grab it while it's hot from AMO!

Ehsan Akhgari