A few steps forward: the tab titles, menus, etc. are no longer vertical, though the address bar still is, and the glyphs are centered on a vertical “base” line. For Japanese that doesn’t make much difference, but Latin script as in this example looks much better than in the previous version, where the glyphs were […]
This is my first lash-up prototype of a browser displaying data:text/html,油こほりともし火細き寝覚哉 as vertical text. Click on the thumbnail or here to see the full-size image. When I say lash-up, I mean lash-up: you will notice that everything is vertical, including the tab titles and the address bar, where you can see the first couple of […]
First impressions of a nightly build of Fennec on a Samsung Galaxy S II: Things that work: Downloadable fonts including astral characters RTL astral characters (this has a downloadable font as well) RTL UI (in general) … Things that don’t work (some of these may be issues with the sites, some are certainly bugs in […]
Ever since support for bidirectional languages was implemented in Mozilla by me and my colleagues at IBM. and through all the improvements and bug-fixes that have been made since, one thing that we never got quite right was text with diacritics, aka nikkud, aka harakat, especially in justified text. This was a real obstacle in […]
… in a drama mini-series on Israel’s commercial TV channel: What browser are you using? Why don’t you use Firefox? I can download it for you in a second. I can’t imagine hearing a reference like that on prime-time television even a year ago. I’m not sure exactly when Firefox became part of the mainstream, […]
I was saying yesterday that it’s a pity that there’s no localisation of Firefox into Aramaic. I wasn’t very serious, because I didn’t think there would be many people who would use it, but it turns out there’s at least one potential client: Monica Bellucci. Monica … can speak Italian, French, English and Aramaic fluently. […]
July 15th, 2003: America Online on Tuesday said it has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape Communications subsidiary amid a reorganization of its Mozilla open-source browser team … The layoffs come as the loose Mozilla.org group, which had overseen the open-source development efforts of the Mozilla browser, transforms itself […]
Well, it should at least increase my geek credibility
Reading some of the controversy surrounding recent feature-set decisions by the Firefox team, I can’t help wondering whether they are falling into the 80/20 fallacy.
It’s definitely good news that the standalone version of Mozilla Composer will have configurable toolbars, as seen on this screenshot. It removes at a stroke all the excuses previously used by iso-8859-1-centric fanatics for not fixing the bug that there is no toolbar button to set the paragraph direction.
I spent most of today debugging an issue that I knew nothing about this time yesterday, and now know a bit more about. I seem to have come up with an empirical solution, at least Note to bug reporters: saying things like “a lot of effort regarding arabic support in mozilla especially the arabic/bidi support […]
Joel Spolsky has been reading Peter Trudelle and Matthew Thomas, and draws the conclusion that distributed open-source development doesn’t have the bandwidth to achieve results — a conclusion which Matthew himself doesn’t agree with. I have noticed another characteristic of a project like Mozilla as opposed to a conventional development project within a company. To […]
I am having an ambivalent reaction to fixing a bug that has been resisting me for the last nine months. Of course it’s immensely satisfying to have a result from the many hours that I’ve spent in the debugger chasing it down. Debugging is like a scientific research product (not that I’ve ever done one […]