Behold, the power of Blogger
Mozilla has a had a problem with textareas and javascript since the dawn of time (or at least since the bug I track was opened, in June 2001): you can’t find out what text is selected in a textarea, so you can’t do handy-but-not-needed buttons that will do things like wrap <em>…</em> around selected text. After the bug sat around for ten months, Pete Collins wanted it fixed badly enough to do it himself, starting what’s been a eight month odyssey of patches, review, comments, changes, repatches and rereview. Every couple of weeks I go check out the bug page to see if there’s been any movement.
Then today Ev emailed and posted about how Mozilla wouldn’t be the preferred browser for Blogger’s next version if there isn’t any way to do the bold/italic/link buttons. Now there’s a sudden flurry of activity, as the bug gets keywords that basically say “this sucks, it bothers important people, fix it,” and the major reviewer has “in the interest of expediency” spent some time rewriting the patch to suit him, and arranged for immediate review as soon as he posts his patch, so that “we should have something for checkin by some time tomorrow.”
Damn! Ev, could you mention something about how the way that forms autocomplete constantly crashes Phoenix for me, I mean for you, is also a dealbreaker?
You mean it does that to you too? I thought I was the only one.
Nope, it’s a real bug. I saw that you mentioned it, and I was going to advise you to use the chrome:// url that lets you get to the full Mozilla prefs page to turn off autocomplete so you aren’t tempted to reach down and grab that perfect autocomplete (*crash!*), but then it doesn’t seem to stick, so I was going to go looking for what you need to put in user.js in your profile to turn it off more thoroughly, but got, ah, distracted. I should probably be searching in the Phoenix forums rather than Bugzilla anyway. Todo.
It’s funny people are jumping on this bug, when a bug keeping Mozilla from working behind MS Proxy is over three years old. I guess it’s more fun getting bold and underline to work in a text box than getting a browser to work behind a corporate firewall. Sorry to be snarky, but it’s irritating to see these little things get fixed.
Whoo. A wealth of data in that bug for someone’s psychology/sociology of Open Source thesis.
It would be interesting to know whether it’s really been delayed this long just because Netscape had other fish they were more eager to fry, or because they know damn well that as soon as they put something out and announce that Mozilla/Netscape now works behind MS Proxy, then MS will release a hotfix that breaks Mozilla.
Phil, do you know if there’s a way to turn off or reset autocomplete in Phoenix? My autocomplete list is a mile long and I can’t find any way to reset it! Thanks.
As long as you mean the forms autocomplete (the one that pops up a list of everything you’ve ever typed in a form input named ”name” when you start to type your name in a comment), then yes: turning it off is just a matter of adding
user_pref("wallet.crypto.autocompleteoverride", "");to your user.js file. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing that so long now that I don’t have any forms data to check, but I think that it’s stored in your profile directory, in the same file named XXXXXXXX.s (or bunchonumbers.s as I think of it) that also holds remembered logins. If so, that’s roughly plain text, and editable, so you could try saving a backup copy of it and then editing out the bits you don’t want. Or possibly it’s in formhistory.dat, which is completely uneditable, but, rumor has it deleteable (save a backup first).
Nope, not bunchonumbers.s, which is just passwords, or bunchonumbers.w, which looks to be the result of saying ”yes, I’d like to remember everything I filled out in that form,” so it must be what’s in formhistory.dat. I think.
Yup, it’s in formhistory.dat. I added that line at the top of the file and no more long autocomplete dropdowns. Thanks!