Mozilla

Mozilla. The great beast. Hacking Mozilla is not for the faint of heart. It takes determination and more determination, and more than a little help from the great guys on #mozilla.

My involvement initially was to fix bug 34297, forms not working great when they have the display: none style. After a while lurking and testing, I dove in headfirst and implemented this patch (the largest I have done to date, I think). I have done a number of other fixes since then and I am now (for the last 3 months actually) an employee at Netscape, one of the principal contributors to Mozilla.

Netscape is great. I jump when they say, but they don't say much so I just get to direct my efforts into making the best browser possible. I think that's how they want it. I love them for it. Netscape has some of the brightest people I've ever worked with, and the San Diego office, where I currently am, has the greatest, friendliest crew I've ever worked with. Big change from America's Corporate Heartland.

Helper Stuff I Wrote

• The JST Review Simulacrum:: Reviews patches to Mozilla, looking for whitespace and other syntax problems.
• Mozilla Annotated CSS1 Spec. Put [CSS1-x.x.x] keywords in bugs and my script will find them and put them in the spec on the website, once a day, so people know what up with Mozilla CSS support. Later CSS versions and DOM support forthcoming.
• Mozilla Annotated HTML4.01 Spec. Put [HTML4-x.x.x] and [HTML4-#href] keywords in bugs and it will find them and put them in the spec so people know what up with Mozilla HTML support.
• Select Tests A really big bunch of dropdown and listbox tests.
• Radio Button Tests A big bunch of radio button tests.
• The Bigass Form Test All the form controls and submit buttons you could ever want. In an eeeety bitty living space. If you add parameters to the URL you can change the action, method and enctype of the form.

My Bugs

I am the owner of frames (an HTML feature which I personally detest but intend to make as good as I can) and I do a lot of work on form controls and form submission.

• Recent activity on my bugs
• My open bugs
• Bugs I have fixed (not entirely accurate, many were fixed as part of some of the bigger checkins and a few on the list were fixed by contributors)
• Bugs with fixes sitting around in them. Sometimes it takes a little while to get review, or if it changes UI, people bitch and bitch and nothing gets done for a while. C'est la vie.
• mailto form submit. Apparently a lot of people want to make forms with mailto URLs as the action, so that you can fill out a web form and send it. Well, your wish is my command :) Patch in bug. Personally, I don't see a great deal of use in the feature, but I guess I'm not the typical web guy. I certainly don't know how to
• [FIXED] The form submission rewrite: form submission was really hard to hack before. The new design is a lot more modular and easy to work with. And documented.
• [FIXED] display: none form controls, with a few more bugs that also cover it.

Developer Resources

• The Content and Frames Guide is a handy guide I wrote that explains the basics of content and frames and how they are created. This is definitely developer-level stuff so don't expect to understand it if you're not a coder.
• mozilla.org is the main site to go to for developer information, hacking guides, and policy. Not for news, really.
• The Mozilla post-1.0 Manifesto. Mmmm.
• Developer Docs at mozilla.org. Really mostly just useful for the String Guide (this link is probably out of date by the time you read this, go to the docs page).
• Bugzilla is where you go to file and look for bugs. Everybody's doing it. It's cool, c'mon.
• LXR. No one can live without LXR. LXR is your reference to all things source. Hint: the identifier search is not as useful as it seems like it should be. It misses things. Use freetext. It's pretty fast.
• Tinderbox. You can see what was just checked into the tree and find out what is burning.
• Auto-Generated Docs from the source. Uses JavaDoc syntax. Now if only more people documented their interfaces, this would be great.
• Form Tester: this is *really useful* because it shows you the raw data you sent to the server. My form tester uses CGI.pm and produces more readable output but doesn't show you the raw data.

User Resources

• MozillaZine, maintained by Asa, is the source for general end-user news.
• MozillaNews is a decent source for more technical news.
• #mozillazine is an IRC channel for people who need help with Mozilla.
• #mozilla is an IRC channel for developers.

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