Update: We had to pull these changes out of Firefox 4 because of some regressions that they caused. We will revisit this issue after Firefox 4, and will hopefully deliver this set of fixes in the next version of Firefox. I landed a patch today which changes the Firefox 4 built-in spell checker in two important ways: Firefox 4 will be able to correctly spell check words containing hyphens, such as the English word “scot-free”.

Let's go back to spring, 2006. I was a regular guy, who knew how to write code, and had some free time on his hands. Back then, after a few years of using free software extensively, I decided that I wanted to stop being only a consumer of free software, and I wanted to give something back to the amazing free software community. So, I set out to seek an answer to what today seems like one of the most important questions that I ever asked myself, career-wise: “Where can you have the most impact?

As landing multiple patches together has become common practice on mozilla-central, we've started a semi-official policy of requiring people to back out all of the changesets in their push if something breaks. This is a good thing, because mozilla-central is not a very good place to test bustage fixes, and it helps the tree to get to a good state very soon. However, when you want to back out multiple patches in a push, backing them out individually using hg backout is a real pain, it basically means that you have to merge N times if you have N patches to back out.

Some of you might remember reading my blog post on my experience about porting the Bugzilla Tweaks jetpack to the Jetpack SDK. I talked about almost everything in that post except where you can find the actual extension! That was intentional, because there were quite a few bugs in the early versions, and I didn't want to release something which is basically broken. But those issues have been mostly solved now, and I'm releasing the jetpack as a Firefox extension.

Recently, I decided to convert my Bugzilla Tweaks jetpack to an extension based on the Jetpack SDK, which is still under development. This post is meant to be a document of my experience with the Jetpack SDK for creating a real-world and useful extension for Firefox. As the very first step, I needed to actually get the SDK set up and running. So, I went straight to the Getting Started guide.

One of the things that we at Mozilla would like to do better at is the amount of time it takes between when you launch Firefox, and when it starts up and is usable. We've been tackling this problem for quite a while, and have already made tremendous improvements. But we think we can still do better. Last week, Vlad landed the function timer API, which can be used for producing a log of how much time it takes to execute any given code block.