Use Tables!

On the title: The Dialog of death just sounds so much better than the “Slow Script warning”. Regardless, if a developer encounters a dialog like it unexpectedly, it generally means they screwed up. Unfortunately, right now they can’t in any way check why that happened. If they stop the script, then that’s just that and they have no way of going back into the slow state. If they choose to continue running the script they won’t get anywhere either because usually in cases like that all other UI is hung.

Solution? Add a debug script button to the dialog if and only if there’s an active debugger open. The debugger can be Firebug or Venkman, but it should work just as well if an external debugger is in use (like the ATF one that you get when developing XUL stuff in Eclipse). There’s a patch for branch and for trunk on bug 341764, but I would definitely prefer if this solution only ended up on branch (permanently), given that creating an optional dependency in DOM on JSD seems not that right (in this case optional means that DOM will still build fine without JSD (–disable-jsd) and will just use it if it can).

So now the waiting is for the review people to notice my requests and hopefully have time soon.

technorati tags:javascript, soc, mozilla, slow-script-dialog, google, jsd, venkman, firebug, webdevelopment

So the last few days I’ve been trying to get a profile of Venkman/JSD startup. First I’ll talk about the hurdles I met along the way for a bit. I decided that the results and conclusions I took from them are probably better off on a wiki page. Please feel free to let me know what you think about them. (more…)

So, 3 days after barcamp ended, Google gave me official word that I’ve been accepted in the Google Summer of Code. I will be working to improve the JS Debugging experience in Mozilla Firefox, specifically for webdevelopers. In order to do so, I need input from the (other) people who debug their own javascript on a daily basis.

• What’s missing?
• What’s been done wrong? What’s been done exceptionally right?
• What tools do you use? Why?
• Do you use Venkman? Why, or why not?
• Do you use the MS Script debugger? Why, why not?
• Is either tool better than the other, and if so, why?
• What kind of problems do you spend the largest amount of time on, and how can a debugger help you change that (or at least shorten that amount of time)?

You can email me a response to those questions, but you can also comment on the tracking bug for my project, or on this blogpost. Thanks in advance!

So that’s it. Gone is XTech. Thanks a lot to the kind folks at Mozilla who let me go there and socialize and everything, and I’m hoping to see lots of you at Barcamp!

Right, so I’ll be visiting XTech in Amsterdam, thanks to the kind people at the Mozilla Foundation. If anyone wants to meet up, shoot me an email and we’ll see what to do about it.

While I’m at it, I am looking for people who debug or profile JavaScript/AJAX on a regular basis. The definition of debugging is specifically not just about using a debugger - alert()s, event logging, DOM Inspecting, it all counts. I would like to know:

• What kinds of problems you spend the most time debugging
• What software/tools you use to do so
• What annoys you about said software, or what new features you think would make your job easier
• What you like about the software you’re using, cool factors, etc.

You can drop a comment here, email me, talk to me on IRC (Hannibal on moznet, I tend to be on more than I should, if I’m not there you can use memoserv), or just harass me in person when XTech starts tomorrow. Comments are very much appreciated.

Apologies for the lack of any real substance. It’ll hopefully get better soon. Or something :-).

Meanwhile, I just noticed I missed the deadline I’d set myself, since we’re stuck at 119 bugs filed for ChatZilla, and I still haven’t finished the damn message filter thing. Well, at least I have a usable build with the filter squirmed into __display, so I guess we’re going places. Hopefully.

Ah, also… if you check out my location, and use the Sattelite view, you’ll notice there’s blank land there. That’s because my home has only been there since July last year (though construction was underway before that, obviously) and the sattelite photos aren’t all that recent, apparently. If you scroll down a tiny bit though, you can spot a Russian sub in the harbour. No idea what it’s doing there, it’s been there since I first came here, and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon.

Public discussion about some issues is here. I filed that bug over a month ago. Nothing is happening. I am, needless to say, annoyed, because:

• There is still no consistent policy about how to review extensions. If there is one, undocumented, saying that you just need to check the little boxes on the reviewer page if the browser works, and the extension seems to work, and you can uninstall it and everything, then that’s not enough. By far.
• There is no policy on how to review comments, and way too many comments, imho, get pruned because they are critical of the extensions. There are very few extensions that have a rating below 3 stars, mostly because of this.
• There are not enough reviewers, and it’s not publically known that anyone can apply, it seems.
• On the other hand, I suspect several of the people who applied of late are applying just to approve their own extensions. There is no safeguard against that currently. The background required is also not sufficient in my eyes. Right now just about anyone can apply, and that’s wrong. We shouldn’t restrict it to just extension devs either, but these people should have a clue…

Bleh. I don’t have the solutions, I’m just annoyed right now.

Bug 95849
So. I watched a talk of some economist guy who’d done a study on the motivations of the people who had CVS Access in early 2004. He proved that people who are married or long-term committed do more work.

Moral of the story: I need a girlfriend.

In other news, the other talks were semi-interesting. The Flock talk was cool, it finally gave me an idea what they thought they were doing.

Now I’m off to go drink with the Drupal people.

Yup, I’m officially healthy again. No school yet though, except for my honours course in the evening.

So now I just downloaded IE 7. I kind of like it, I kind of don’t. Here’s what I don’t like so far:

• It still requires a reboot of my machine to install (and probably the same to uninstall). I know, OS integration and all… it still sucks!
• It looks awful, in my opinion, on the Windows classic theme in WinXP. Especially the new tab… thing, which is just a dark grey, well, blob, kind of thing, without any clear function. Unfocused tabs are the same kind of dark grey.
• It thinks about:blank should never end up in the back/forward history.
• I can’t set my homepage to a URL from the clearly visible UI (ie, there’s probably an option in the Options dialog, but the homepage UI only cares about the current tab).
• Not having the menu bar there unless I press the Alt key is inaccessible. It also leads to page shifts when I do want to use it, so that’s kind of annoying. The only way to make it always appear, as far as I’ve been able to figure out, is to right-click the toolbar on the tab bar (not anywhere else, as you’ll get no context menu or the window bar’s context menu) and select ‘Classic menu’. This is not really discoverable either, and I’m wondering how I’d get there without a mouse. Lastly, the menubar is positioned oddly, snuggled in between the url bar and the tabs and other useful buttons.
• The import feature failed to detect my Opera, Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey installs. I’m struggling to understand what else it would want to try to find to import bookmarks, cookies or feeds from (though I suppose for feeds there’d be certain feedreader stuff).
• I said ‘failed to detect’, what I mean is, the option to import from an application is greyed out, which I take to mean (without further indications) that it didn’t find anything I could import from.
• The favourites organizer thing in the menus is fugly. The buttons are badly anti-aliased, for some odd reason because ClearType is now enabled by default, just for IE. The favourites organizer popup in the toolbar closes whenever I delete something, making it hard to remove multiple things. I can’t select multiple items in it, and I can’t delete folders without using the slapped-on-very-long file context menu (why the hell is that there - I don’t want to virusscan my bookmarks, do I?).
• There are no addons for blogging, del.icio.us, Technorati, anything remotely ‘interesting’ from a web perspective. What I did find were various download managers (why do people need those, incidentally?), and an 89-dollar “HTML and Header inspection application”. I’m already missing my Launchy menu, my webdeveloper toolbar (editing the CSS and seeing the results live - Microsoft, catch up here please!), ChatZilla (of course), BBCode formatting, and being able to write my own stuff for it. (I probably could write my own stuff, but it’d be run natively/compiled, which means mistakes you make can easily lead to crashes (such as with the 89-dollar app, according to the reviews)).
• Half the app is in Dutch (my Windows XP, and accordingly IE 6, is in Dutch), half in English (there was no language-specific IE 7 beta download, as far as I’ve been able to find).
• They stashed the Go menu in the View menu (which is large already, and that with 6 submenus too…)
• Unlocking the toolbars doesn’t allow me to move items (at least, I can’t figure out how to do so). By default, my tab bar has a >> sign at the right, under which are the Help and Windows Messenger buttons. I can’t remove these buttons, as far as I can tell, nor can I make them appear on the toolbar normally. OK, it turns out I can make them appear after I right-click the toolbar and uncheck the ‘Lock position’ item. On that context menu, there’s also a Customize… option which allows me to remove them. However, the back/forward/urlbar/refresh/searchbar toolbar thing doesn’t have a context menu (it has the window bar menu, so I can close the application from there…). I’m still puzzled about what ‘Lock toolbars’ does in this case. I can’t move the toolbars above or below the menu bar, from what I can tell, nor can I have a toolbar on the same bar as the menu bar.
• It doesn’t ship Google Search by default (huh?).
• Where is my bookmarks toolbar?

I’m done for now. What I did like was the feedreader. Firefox/Mozilla/SeaMonkey really really really needs something like that. All the Opera and IE people are going to be laughing their butts off every time we open a feed and get a nice display saying that this XML document doesn’t appear to have style information associated with it… We also can’t make live bookmarks from rss urls. Why is that? Firefox won’t even recognize the feed: urls this blogging software comes up with!

Something that’s been bothering me for a while now, is that there is no policy (that I know of) with regards to javascript errors caused by extensions. A lot of authors (even those writing well-known and much-used extensions) are sloppy about them. People worry about this.

What do you do about errors? What do you do about strict errors? Should we have the reviewers do a code review? Just double-check the js console? I feel there should be public questioning of this, because they at the very least indicate that the authors are not as careful about their code as Mozilla reviewers (and their standard procedures) are. Whether we should care greatly about that is up for discussion, of course.