FREE Firefox?

Let's assume one is a "normal" Firefox user, so based on Windows and with no knowledge about using directly the mirrors (or without intimate knowledge of obscure acronyms). And let's assume the same person wants a FREE web browser, one with no binary blobs, with source available and not blocking the content from its user.

The challenge is, going from the Firefox start page, find a way to download the FREE version, without using external websites (so no Google search).

Answer: Expand the menu thingy at the top, then go to the About page, then to the blog and find there an apologising post with a deep-buried link inside.

Shooting yourself in the foot, part 53326: Mozilla

Step 1: with bad design decisions one after another (Australis is a shining example of that) slide yourself into irrelevance;
Step 2: when market share goes below some threshold, the main sponsor diminishes (or suspend?) payments;
Step 3: in retaliation, hurt the users by forcing om them a sub-par alternative as a default;
Step 4: profit bleed even more angry users and go even faster into irrelevance.

Brilliant strategy Mozilla!

Myself, I am still using Firefox for the time being, but that's exclusively due to Gecko.

Firefox 29

Probably everybody already heard there is a new Firefox release and it changes many things and already has an opinion about it. Unfortunately I don't have the audience to gather a significant sample, but if anyone runs such a poll, I would be genuinely interested.

Which Firefox user interface do you prefer?

1. Firefox 29 (the latest, just released)
2. Firefox 4-28 (still on long term support)
3. Firefox pre-4 (before the "keyhole")
4. Seamonkey (the suite)
5. I don't care (as long at it open web pages)

Of course i am coming here from an angle: I prefer the apps on my desktop to be consistent with each other, as layout, structure, widgets placement, shortcuts, behavior( I was happy the old Firefox never got the "keyhole" on Linux.) Still, not enough to move to something like Midori , where the look and feel is totally native but the set of features smaller.

On the Mozilla scandal

Like many of you, I too received the Mozilla email about "helping" with communications regarding the "activities of the past week", which is an euphemism for the Brendan Eich scandal. It comes with a FAQ you are expected to quote when talking about the issue.

Since all communications from Mozilla on the topic were opaque, either in blog posts with comments disabled or emails from generic addresses where is useless to reply, I finally decided to write something. Anyway, April 1-st, when I learned about the topic, wasn't a good day to write about serious issues. It may be not me my business what happens inside the Mozilla corporation, but if the Mozilla community feels a need to guide my public communications about it, then maybe it is.

So I am totally unhappy with Mozilla to caving-in to pressure from bullies. It creates a serious precedent and a slippery slope. What's the next step? Once a new CEO is announced, no matter who he is, the browser will be blocked by anti-gay websites? It looks like we are going towards a Balkanized web, where the "best viewed with [Internet Explorer|Netscape Navigator]" buttons are replaced by "blocked for browsers whose CEO have private opinion X".

Seriously, instead of personal political opinions of the Mozilla CEO I was more concerned about him wasting resources on the mobile OS unicorn while the browser looks more and more like a Chrome copy-cat.

G+ and RAW photos from the eyes of a FOSS photographer

I use GIMP for almost all my photography editing by choice, so when reading today a couple of articles about the new RAW photo editing capabilities in Google Plus and how those put Google in a fight with Adobe, as its only worthy competitor, I noticed in both a similar (your probably know how those articles are usually written) expression, along the lines of "don't mention GIMP, while nice it doesn't count". I knew about the RAW import for a few days, but it was not news for me, I don't plan to move my photography storage and editing to the cloud, but now the GIMP comparison made me genuinely curious what is it about.

So away we go! I have handy some RAWs from a recent shooting, it was a matter of uploading one and doing a few clicks, right? Not so fast! The first try, the first FAIL: while the RAW image uploaded properly and it was shown correctly as a JPEG in browser, editing does not work with Firefox, Chrome is needed.

Normally at this step I would give up, I won't change browsers any time soon, but it caught me in the proper mood for that, so I downloaded Chromium. No luck either, this time for an undisclosed reason. No luck with Chrome either. It should be because I am running Linux or they don't like my video driver (according to the troubleshooting page on G+). Clearly, they don't want me as a user. I was so close to call it a failure and make a funny gesture towards Google... but I was already mounted, gave it another try, this time with Chrome under Windows, fully proprietary. Of course it worked. I can write a bit more than two paragraphs cursing Google for their useless effort.

At the first look, it is a simple interface: next to your picture there are some buttons for various adjustment operations, grouped in two categories "basic" and "Creative" (as you will see later, "Creative" is just a feel-good name, there is little creativity in applying a series of predefined filters).
In the "basic" area are some tools which are a must for any image to be published: tune image is doing exposure/color adjustments, details is for sharpening and crop & rotate to correct image framing. Everything with an easy to use interface. Still under the "basic" category, there is a not so basic feature: selective adjust. I found it cute and original (still, no match for selective adjustment from a proper image editing software), you drop adjustments points in the image and tune it around them. In the "creative" category a first tool is black and white conversion (in my opinion, also the single really useful from the category). It is simple still powerful, allowing to adjust the conversion based on specific colors and fine-tune it. If about "drama" and "center focus" I am quite neutral (I can see how they may be useful for some, but with a lot of fine-tuning to prevent excess), starting with "frames" I heard a shout in my head "Instagram!". We are on the edge of the bad taste realm. Use everything with extra-care. "Tilt-shift" is again some cute toy you use on your pictures and pretend it was made with a dedicated lens. The interface is simple and effective, the final result not so much. "Vintage" and "retrolux" will damage your picture, but they are the wet dream of the ordinary Instagram user, will make the image hip, damaged but hip. Do not use.
As a conclusion, I can say this is no threat to Photoshop and will not replace it ever, is no treat to GIMP either, even it will be more used than probably any of them, is a tool with a different purpose, for a different audience. It may be some competition for tools like Lightroom and Darktable, when they are used for simple "RAW development", but only for simple use cases (no perspective correction? no noise removal? indeed, simple cases). Talking about real competition, it is real competition for Instagram/Facebook, but this probably makes for less sensationalist titles.
I will end my conclusion with a RAW image, first in its initial unedited state and with what I consider good and bad editing.

On winning the internets

The easiest way to win the internets is to post some cute picture with kittens, but I have no recent pictures with kittens. Then what's the next best thing? Pictures with puppies, but I don't have those either. Then the next best thing? Pictures with babies! But... wait! I have one of those:

YouTube.ro

With some fanfare (including a personalized logo), yesterday was the launch of YouTube in Romania. Beside some irrelevant content contracts nobody cares about, I am not sure of the purpose of such launch, I am publishing content on YouTube for over 6 years, but just out of curiosity I tried loading the .ro website this morning to be grated with this:

note: this is running an up to date Fedora 18 with an up to date Firefox 20. Fun stuff.

OSOM in images

This is a short walkthrough in images of the OSOM conference as I saw it today happening in Bucharest.

It pretty much went as expected But I still not understand why the Adobe offices were a right place for a FOSS conference, Maybe it was their wonderful proprietary reader running on a proprietary OS used to display many of the sides, or maybe it was the free sodas. Anyway, a solid presence from Mozilla and ROSEdu, but also tracks from Drupal and openSUSE And, of course Chris from Fedora, kind of a rockstar, who made the conference turn from Romanian to English language (no problem, our communities are quite fluent with English) During the presentation he made an important point the invitation to tomorrow's Fedora release event which also happens in Bucharest. Beside the presentations, the most important part was the opportunity to meet again old friends from various local communities. Stay tuned, a similar report will come in the next couple of days from the Fedora event.

Social API, Facebook and Firefox

The most talked and hyped feature in Firefox 17 is the social API, intended to bring integration with various services in the browser. Knowing the first release will come (only) with Facebook integration (and knowing Facebook's history), I expected it to be a disaster, with potential to kill the idea... so as soon as Remi's repo provided the packages, I yummed them to see what is all about.

First thing to know, and this is a good thing, is not automatic, you have to go to a certain URL and enable it

This will add a few toolbar buttons and a sidebar

The sidebar will stay on while browsing other sites, but is already a problem: it has a certain (large) minimal width, and if your browser window is not big enough, the layout of many other websites will be messed-up (arguably, is their fault for not flowing correctly). Forget about it on a small display, like a netbook.

I find the sidebar one of the (too many) Facebook's most annoying features, it make content move all the time in front of your eyes,fortunately you can remove it. Just imagine a browser window with such sidebars from all the social sites you use: Facebook, Google +, Twitter, Flickr and such. What space is left for the actual page content?

Another annoyance: 4 buttons were added to the toolbar. While the notification an chat may be useful al the time (hint: install Pidgin, configure its Facebook chat with Jabber and you don't need the in-browser fb chat, how many a day are you going to use the friends or config buttons? Unfortunately, you can't customize which buttons are shown. As you can't customize either their position: open the Customize Toolbar dialog and you can drag them around, but they won't land anywhere, only stay in place.

What you can do is head to the Tools menu and disable it (you can also remove it, but maybe I will need it later if a reader will flame me in the comments). Again, imagine the menu if/when you have 10 such services installed.

Is too early to say, I upgraded Firefox only this morning and had enabled the fb integration for a short while, but I felt a browser performance degradation with it on (resource-consumption wise, Facebook IS a pig while browsing normally, not unlikely for the widget to be too).

Search by images

Even if visible in plain sight, the feature to search by images in Google is less known and it can be incredibly useful and a good alternative to some other less accessible services. Let's have a look at using it.

Start at the Google image search at http://images.google.com/. Did you know you can drag images from your desktop or URL from other windows into its search box?

Or if you are less accurate with dragging, the search box has a photo icon which you can use to copy/paste URLs or upload images? Good to know on both accounts.

When researching the feature, my first idea was to try a picture of the supermoon I recently shoot in Vienna. The result is accurate, Google identified it as a full moon (technically, a supermoon is a full moon), offered good links, including a Wikipedia article and some similar images (is the moon, it looks alike in all photos).

Then I wanted something different, so tried an image with the old Mozilla Firebird logo I had lying around from another recent article. Yet another success, logo recognized correctly as a logo, as Mozilla's, good links, etc.

Of course is not all roses, when trying with another picture which is 1.) harder to identify and 2.) not available on the Internet, the result can be funny (and totally off - I don't think I am a horse)

But still, for pictures not available online, it can be quite good and still useful, here it identified pretty accurately two person in black dresses (or at least two black things) doing something together.

Fun, fun, but I said it can be useful, let's do something useful, like searching for stolen inappropriately used/licensed images. After the supermoon above, my second try was a photo with cherries which a while ago I used as my desktop wallpaper and also posted in a few places (the cherries season is close!). Yet another success, Google identified it not only as cherry, but as sour cherry, which it actually is, probably based on the content of the pages using it. A good description taken from wiki, a relevant first link and a bunch of related pictures and then a link to my photography blog hosting the image. Not bad at all.

Now let's look further: the image can be found in a few Wiki pages, which is normal, I uploaded it to Commons myself. Then the fun begins (the image originate from my blog with a CC-BY-SA license or from Wikipedia, also with a CC-BY-SA license).

There are pages where the image is hotlinked directly from my server (so I could have detected its use from Apache logs or even could have blocked external referers, but that would have been evil). Of course, no links back, no credits, no nothing. The fun part: I can see with my bare eye another cherry picture on that page which is taken from my blog.

And there are pages hosting their own copy of the image, some with edits (like adding some text on top) and some at large resolution (those are taken from Wikipedia instead of my blog).

I won't police those sites, the picture was up for share (albeit under a different license, not at Public Domain) and this article was not intended to whine about copyright offenders, but to show the use of an image search tool. Have fun with your own searches!

A history of Mozilla browsers design

Writing the piece on FOSS design, it made me think about past experiences in various communities and brought back memories to the point when I decided to put down some thoughts on Mozilla browsers (won't cover other apps today) design history as I saw it, both as an user and from my involvement with its community. Even if the screenshots below are taken mostly from Wikipedia (try to run 10-15 years old binaries on a current Linux desktop), all the experiences are mine.

As Mozilla has its roots in the old Netscape, a history of its design must start with Netscape, which in its time was very popular, the most used web browser, but was not very good on the "looks" chapter. It was using its own widgets set, allowing the application to run on multiple platforms, but in none of them looked very good. When Internet Explorer came, it dethroned Netscape on many ways: it was already installed (the monopoly lawsuit on the matter has its own history) and it was "good enough". But it also had a better design, it used native widgets and it looked "native" (on Windows, of course), simple and familiar, while Netscape remained with the antiquated look and feel.

Late Netscape 4.x look

You maybe know the story of Netscape going Open Source as Mozilla after its management read The Cathedral and the Bazaar and also as the only chance they saw against the Internet Explorer assault.
It debatable if their move to rewrite the entire suite from scratch was a good thing or not (on one hand it was a chance to get rid of the old cruft, on the other it was a huge delay), but here I talk only about the design, so the rewrite brought also a new interface and new widgets. At the time there were "milestone release" from the development tree, working to various degrees. It also has a new interface with a "futuristic", non-native, look, to show the power of XUL and allowed for a new feature: theming - at the time making the interface themeable was the rage of the industry, I don't know who invented it, but Winamp (by then also an AOL property, as Netscape) made it really popular.

Early Mozilla suite look (M3)

During the "milestones" stage the interface didn't change very much:

Early Mozilla Suite look (M8)

Then it moved to numbered, pre-1.0, releases. Those releases saw many changes who led to the 1.0 like tabbed-browsing, which at the time was not adopted for their friendliness (they are NOT better for usability), but for pragmatic reasons: it was painfully slow to open a new window, but a new tab was faster. Also the new pair of themes, "Classic" and "Modern". It was also the start of Netscape's "design sabotage" of Mozilla.
Netscape moved to Open Source, but they tried a "hybrid" model, while having the Mozilla suite as Free software, they kept the Netscape suite derivative (just a rebuild) the old proprietary way. And they used they engineers, placed in strategic positions, to keep this reality. One example is the default look: the suite included by default two themes, "Classic" was a direct copy of the old Netscape 4.x look and was the default for the Mozilla Suite, with the intentions to keep the end-users away, while Netscape had "Modern" as default, to attract users:

Mozilla Suite with the Classic theme

Netscape Suite with the Modern theme

Of course the community routed against it, then were sites providing tons free themes. And Open Source developers did even better: the "Classic" theme was made to use native widgets which, despite the still ugly icons, it made it work way better.
Another Netscape idiocy happened around then (while not directly design-related, it links with the following step): annoyed by the prolonged development delay, they released a "stable" Netscape Suite release based on an early Mozilla Suite beta, which was slow and ridden by bugs, a bad impression for users.

With the mantra "Mozilla is for developers, Netscape is for users", the Mozilla Suite was shipped with a completely unprofessional splash screen, designed to scare end-users away:

Mozilla splash screen

The community tried to fight-back, the Bugzilla item for about the splash screen was the most active, some submitted new and beautiful images as patches, nothing worked, the issue was controlled by Netscape engineers (and the application has a slow start, needing the splash screen).
Of course, the Open Source development made it customizable, after a while it became possible to use your own splash by just dropping a PNG file in the same directory with the main binary, there were sites and forums offering alternate splashes and so. But the default matters, and after huge wars the image was "upgraded" to an orange rectangle with black "Mozilla" text:

"Improved" Mozilla splash

In the meantime, the splash screen for the "user-oriented" Netscape was more polished:

Early Netscape splash

And it really evolved in time:

Improved Netscape splash

Yet another example was the design of the mozilla.org website, it was also kept "scary" for end-users and with a lot of disorganized information, even the experienced FOSS hackers had troubles finding it:

Mozilla.org website

Of course the strategy backfired and both the Mozilla Suite and the Netscape Suite were almost wiped out of the map, reaching, IIRC, a marketshare low of about 2%.

Then a reborn happened: a couple of engineers started the Phoenix project, it was an alternate browser based on the Mozilla technology but free of the Netscape management and user-oriented.

The Phoenix/Firebird logo

At first Phoenix was Windows-only, as there were the users, but later other FOSS developers ported it to Linux and other operating systems. The interface was heavily targeted at bringing back Internet Explorer emigrants, with changes in menu layout,shotcuts, icons and dropping features and components (it was only a browser, with no email composer or chat). The Internet Explorer targeting was aggressive, with bugs tracking the progress towards this goal.
Another characteristic of this project was its decisional structure, which was more "cathedral", with less developers being allowed to make changes (in the Suite, Netscape engineers had pretty much free reign).

Phoenix 0.1

While the first release, Phoenix 0.1, was small and humble, its design took many cues from the existing competing browsers, Opera and (the infamous) Internet Explorer 6 (there may be influences from Safari, but I have no direct experience with it, so can't talk about that):

Opera look at the time

Internet Explorer at the time (version 6)

After two change in names (the Phoenix name was already used by a BIOS maker, they moved to Firebird, which was already used by a FOSS database so they had to change again to Firefox) and many intermediary release, Firefox 1.0 came to light. By the time it was governed by the Mozilla Foundation who took over Netscape and was targeting at last end-users (just as the browser). The increase in user-base followed.

Firefox 1.0

The model of Firefox was followed by the email client, Thunderbird (which started as project Minotaur) and the HTML editor BlueGriffon (which followed KompoZer and Nvu).

For many of you the relatively recent design and development of Firefox may be familiar, it didn't get earthshaking advancements, it had small modification, new icons set and the most, and somewhat controversial feature (fortunately, it happened only on Windows, not touching yet us, Linux users) was the "keyhole" modification of the navigation buttons.

Firefox "keyhole"

Then Chrome happened. Powered and heavily promoted by Google, fast, sporting a minimal and simple interface, it gained a lot of market share, overtaking Firefox and closing into Internet Explorer. Modern Firefox get its share of criticism for copying much of the Chrome design (and also the release numbering).

Early Chrome release

Modern Internet Explorer design also has its influence on the Firefox design, which from the beginning was intended as a Internet Explorer replacement:

Internet Explorer 8

This bring us back to the current Firefox, which had recently yet another release, Firefox 12:

Current Firefox (version 12)

But I still didn't finish my story, Mozilla Suite has yet another child, a brother of Firefox: with the Netscape Suite demise, after being stagnant for a while, the code was reborn as the Seamoney suite, a direct follower, sharing the old look and feel of the suite but bringing also some new features from Firefox and Thunderbird. Even its "Classic" theme, despite the new and pretty icons, has cues of the old theme.

Recent Seamonkey suite with the "Classic" theme

For nostalgics, it also has the "Modern" theme, just the same as the old "Modern" from the Mozilla/Netscape suite (grace to the advanced hardware of today, it not slow any more, just ugly).

Recent Seamonkey suite with the "Modern" theme