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You knew it had to happen. Malware for Firefox. It happens all the time with IE (so much so that my 17-year-old niece needs a fresh install of Windows every 3 months), but Firefox has been a little less prone — though not imune — to malware. See the BitDefender blog post and the Infoworld article which has a bit more detail.

Now Firefox 3 does contain Malware protection, but apparently this plugin is delivered via other system compromises to the filesystem, and apparently Firefox doesn’t question already installed plugins.

BTW, the malware registers itself as GreaseMonkey. If you care to, you can follow the Slashdot food fight on this topic.

More as I find out more…

Menus and dropdowns seem like attractive design choices because they conserve screen real estate while providing users access to a potentially large number of commands. But if you resist the easy out of menus and dropdowns, you may find that your applications become far more usable.

Survey the software you use for yourself, both browser- and desktop-based. Think about which applications provide the most invisible, effortless interfaces. I doubt it will be the ones that hide commands in complex menus and dropdown systems.

For some negative examples, let’s look at Firefox and its more social cousin, Flock. Each app offers an advanced bookmark management mechanism, but the usability of that mechanism suffers in each due to over-reliance on cryptic menus.

During a recent GTD weekly review, I suddenly realized how many distractions had worked their way into my daily office routine: personal email, personal instant messaging, entertainment feeds, Facebook. I suspect such time-wasters pose a bigger danger to web developers than to other professionals, if only because the programs they run in are so central to our work. I run Firefox for web development, Adium for instant messaging, and NetNewsWire for industry news all day out of necessity. If I allow my personal distractions to jump out at me from those programs, my productivity plummets.

This weekend, I worked hard to de-tangle my professional and personal lives. My tools? Flock, the Mozilla-based “social browser,” and Meebo, the browser-based IM aggregation service. My goal was to separate all personal bookmarks and RSS feeds from NetNewsWire and Firefox into Flock, then move all my personal IM accounts from Adium to Meebo. The end result was a self-imposed firewall between productive time and fun time. (Thanks to many a Lifehacker article for the basic idea, if not the implementation.)

I was expecting the next major advance in JavaScript for Firefox to come from replacing SpiderMonkey with Tamarin, Adobe’s donated VM for ECMAScript 4. In fact, Tamarin can already do some JIT.

Now surprise, surprise — SpiderMonkey can do JIT as well, as Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO describes in his blog. The technique used in both Tamarin and SpiderMonkey is called tracing, where during code execution, each hotspot (code that is executed a whole lot) is traced and compiled, so the next time it is executed, the compiled version is used. The beasty is called TraceMonkey and boasts several orders of magnitude improvements over the old SpiderMonkey.

Since this JIT involved actual compilation, you have to look at which architectures TraceMonkey supports. Again from Brendan’s blog:

We have, right now, x86, x86-64, and ARM support in TraceMonkey. This means we are ready for mobile and desktop target platforms out of the box.

Sweet. I guess that means the Intel Macs are supported.

There are still some bugs, of course, but this is great news for sophisticated Ajax apps on Firefox. Will Microsoft respond? Is a JavaScript JIT upgrade in the works for IE? This is an arms race I can get excited about.

Update: John Resig of JQuery has some more details and demos about TraceMonkey.

Colleagues here at PFD demanded I add this blog after sending it out as an e-mail.

I’m the fellow that translates what the developers say into English for the business people. I then translate the spreadsheets into quasi-code on the reverse communication flow. I’m a Business Analyst. I gather requirements for software projects, hold the developers to the requirements, assist (sometimes do) testing, training, pathway mapping and pretty much anything that anyone on the team tells me to do.

With the caveat that I did NOT do a scientific or even methodological test of the new browser, I present my results:

I installed FireFox 3 Release Candidate 1 on my Windows XP SP3 machine and have been running it through a few of its pace and thought you might be interested in my anecdotal testing:

1. I usually keep 7-10 tabs open when working, in addition to a
   Word/VISIO or Excel Session. I keep Thunderbird (e-mail client) open
   and usually stream audio on WinAmp from www.folkalley.com. With two monitors running, I’m usually down to 1100 Mb of free RAM on FireFox 2 (which usually pulls between 65 and 80Mb of system memory with all the stuff our project team pushes to my browserthe BB DevTeam puts on its pages. I’m running a typical workday session now and FireFox 3 is only using 45MB, reason enough for me to use it.
2. The Bookmark manager is sooooo much easier to use than FireFox 1 or 2.
3. <ctrl><+> and <ctrl><-> magnifiesdoes the entire page, not just the text. Trey kewl.
4. You don’t have to go into about:config to monkey around with your MIME associations- there’s a new Applications
   icon in Tools that not only allows you to select previously associated applications-file types, but to assign whatever you want to open files.
5. It IS faster- noticeably so on opening sites. Mozilla’s DevTeam also integrated the security inside the browser so there are a few new
   twists- for example there’s a robot icon to the immediate left of the address field, mouse over and it will tell you if there’s any real
   identification for the site (the sites have to enbale the ID through Firefox, so it’s TBD [to be determined], I guess, but a nice feature).
6. The release notes show a couple of extremely minor issues- easily handled. And like R2.0, the Add-Ons Manager makes certain your add-ons
   will work in the new browser.
7. Add-Ins- quite a few showed as incompatible with the new version. Colleagues here at PFD World Headquarters reminded me of an add-in called Nightly Tester Tools. I used it back in the FireFox 0.9 days but got so frustrated with it that I abandoned it within minutes. The latest version works like a dream. Install it, on FireFox reboot, override all the incompatible add-ins. Most seem to work. Like any other Add-In issue, you may need to return here and disable them one at a time if you have issues.

These add-ons were incompatible in my version:

• AVG Safe Search
• Bandwidth Meter and Diagnostics
• Dummy Lipsum
• FEBE
• FireBug
• Forecastfix
• Google Browser Synch
• InFormEnter
• LinkedIn Companion
• MIME Edit
• PicLens
• Selenimum IDE
• ThinkVantage Password Manager

FireFox3 will continue hunting for your FF2 addons and letcha know when a compatible version is released.

At my recent Web 2.0 Expo talk, I exhorted developers to get comfortable outside the Firebug/Firefox safety zone. By rotating between Opera, Safari and even IE as our primary development environments, we can really get to know those browsers – and perhaps learn to utilize their non-standard features. Switching things up, however, can inhibit productivity until you learn your way around each browser’s tools.

To that end, I offer these step-by-step instructions for finding computed styles in all four A-grade browsers. I chose the display of computed styles as my “debuggers are cool” use case because it’s an obscure but useful feature for CSS debugging. Most of the time I can debug styles by looking at my debugger’s snapshot of the current cascade for a given element. But sometimes that’s not enough. If I’ve assigned a value of “inherit” to the font-family of an element, then the cascade snapshot won’t tell me what font is actually applied to that element. (Not being a designer, I often can’t tell the difference between various sans-serif faces, especially at small sizes.) Luckily, computed styles can give me the information I need.

As these examples demonstrate, debugging tools have come a long way in the last couple of years. Let’s make the most of them for all of our UI-layer needs.

Internet Explorer 8 and DebugBar

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IE‘s JavaScript debugging tools have finally matured, but its CSS ones lag behind. Even IE8, with its built-in debuggers (under Tools > Developer Tools), won’t show you computed styles. Luckily, Jean-Fabrice Rabaute has crafted DebugBar, an plugin for Internet Explorer 5+ that adds all sorts of useful tools. Install DebugBar, fire up your version of IE and choose View > Toolbars > DebugBar to make the plugin visible. Then click the “DebugBar” icon in the resulting toolbar to open the DebugBar sidebar. You’ll see two tabbed panes, one below the other. Choose the “DOM” tab on top and the “Comp. Style” tab on the bottom. In the upper pane, you should see a target icon with the caption “Drag target on document to find element.” Drag the icon anywhere on an open web page and you’ll see computed styles for the corresponding element in the bottom pane of the sidebar.

I can now cross Microformats off my list of “technologies whose value I recognize even though I’ve never had the chance to use them in real life.” Last week I created three hcards for the new Pathfinder website, one each for our Chicago headquarters, our New York office, and our head of sales. Now, if you’ve got a browser plug-in that can parse microformats, you can import our contact information directly into Outlook, Apple’s Address Book or your PIM of choice.

A little background

Microformats, for those who don’t immerse themselves in grassroots front-end technologies, are at the core of what’s become known as the “semantic web.” The basic idea is that by adopting a set of standardized markup patterns, we can create websites that are more easily parsable by both humans and machines. More from the “About microformats” page:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

The most popular and best-known microformat is the hcard, an HTML implementation of the standard vCard format used to store and exchange address and personal information in a wide variety of software applications. If vCards are basically electronic business cards that can be imported to or exported from your contacts manager, then hcards provide the same functionality in the browser.

I found four more bugs and two more feature requests to add to yesterday’s massive, minutiae-laden post about the Firefox 3 bookmarks manager:

Feature request: It would be awesome if you could sort your bookmarks by specific criteria, then make that sort order permanent. This would work exactly like the iTunes "Copy to playlist order" command. As in Firefox 2, you can approximate this by sorting your bookmarks alphabetically, moving them to a new folder, and moving them back. Then, even when you revert back to the "unsorted" view, the bookmarks stay in alphabetical order. Of course, this is way less necessary in Firefox 3, which can remember different sort orders for different bookmark folders, thus obviating the need to wrangle some folders into natural sort and others into alphabetical sort by brute force. Still, it’s a nice-to-have.

Feature request: The Views menu in the top toolbar should be broken out into separate Show and Sort menus. This is commonly accessed functionality, and it’s really annoying to have a two-item menu where each item contains around 10 sub-items which can only be accessed by clicking the menu, moving down, moving right, then moving down again to locate the desired item.

Bug: If you accidentally try to move an item to the same folder it’s
already in, it will simply disappear. Thank god for command-Z,
otherwise I would have accidentally deleted a folder with hundreds of
bookmarks.

I’m a trigger-happy bookmarker, likely to command-D any page that seems like it could be of use in the future. I’ve learned to live with my affliction, but the Firefox 2 bookmark manager doesn’t exactly make my life easier. The problem? An interface that mimics the look and feel of a filesystem but deviates substantially from users’ expectations about how a filesystem operates.

With Firefox 3 now in its third beta release, I recently spent some time determining how its completely overhauled bookmark manager stacks up. The verdict? I see lots of cool new features, but it’s not a home run yet. I’m not sure whether the issues I saw were bugs, as-yet-unimplemented features, or poor design choices. Regardless, the Firefox 3 Beta 3 bookmark manager leaves several Firefox 2 annoyances unfixed and creates a couple of its own.

I’ve been playing with the page-zoom feature in Firefox 3 Beta 3. Thanks to the hard work of the Mozilla folks, Firefox is now the third major browser (behind Opera and IE7) to support this feature. (Safari, of course, supports page zoom on the iPhone but not yet on the desktop.) I don’t know whether to be elated or annoyed.

A little background: For years, browsers have allowed users to scale the font-size of any web page using built-in browser controls. The text would get bigger, but other page elements wouldn’t. Increasing your font size wouldn’t affect the layout of the page at all. If sites weren’t careful about how they built their CSS, absolute positioning and fixed-width elements would conflict with the zoomed-up font sizes. The result wold be pages where the main content was readable, but navigational and chrome elements looked grotesquely distorted or in some cases disappeared into the seams of the CSS (see photo below).