Rant against Firefox version checks (and solution)

I'm not particularly fond of Firefox's XUL+js architecture, but I'm more than willing to live with this unusual choice if it allows people to easily write Firefox extensions to customize their experience.

But did you ever notice that most of the plugins break every time you update Firefox? I thought that APIs which change this fast must reflect a development model where refactoring is frequent. I'm glad when teams decide that code quality is more important that backward compatibility, but my enthusiasm doesn't seem to be widely shared.

As a side-note, I think that the developers of the Linux kernel have found a great way to please everyone. They maintain backward compatibility for their external interface, the system calls which all Linux applications use, while allowing themselves to refactor their internal interface at will. This is unfortunately not enough since drivers depend on this internal interface, just like Firefox plugins depend on the browser's internal XUL interface. But instead of requiring driver developers to update their code at every release, the kernel team encourages driver developers to commit their code to the kernel tree and to let the kernel developers update the drivers themselves.

Today, I've upgraded Firefox from version 3 beta 5 to version 3 RC1, and as usual it broke many of my plugins. Now, the shocking part is that there isn't supposed to be any change at all between those two versions! So if the internal API didn't change... Could it be that the plugins were broken by something bogus?

What happened is that Firefox's extension mechanism requires each plugin to specify a range of versions on which it is supposed to work, and they're not supposed to pretend that they work on versions which haven't been released yet. What a bad idea! This means that every single Firefox release will break every single plugin except those that cheat and pretend to know the future. This in turn means that every single plugin needs a maintainer to diligently follow Firefox's release schedule and to bump the range of his plugin every time. How boring! I'd rather have those people working on new extensions.

So in case your favorite plugin's maintainer is too bored to do this, here's how to do it yourself.

First, find the install.rdf file associated with your plugin:

bash grep 'em:name' ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions/*/install.rdf output ~/.mozilla/firefox/5edzcuns.default/extensions/{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}/install.rdf: em:name="Greasemonkey"

Inside the file, just increase the value of em:maxVersion to your current Firefox version, or to some absurdly large version number if you're bold enough not to fear the future.

Gmail's fullscreen mode (and solution)

Gmail has a so-called "fullscreen mode" which ought to please me: it dedicates all of the browser's screen real estate to the message I'm reading. No pesky sidebars at all. Ain't it great? Well, it turns out I'm rather difficult to please.

What should I do once I'm done with the message? I will either want to delete it, to archive it, or to read my next message. But I can't do any of those in fullscreen mode! How come there's no button to come back to my inbox?

Okay, so this is a trivial problem with a trivial solution: just bookmark Gmail's inbox and be done with it! But of course, I wouldn't be telling you about this if I had settled for the trivial solution.

Here is my solution: widest gmail. It's a bookmarklet, so don't bother clicking on it now, it won't lead you anywhere. But if you put it in your toolbar, and click it once you're in Gmail's conversation mode, it will toggle the fullscreen mode on and off.

Rant against sidebars (and solution)

I don't browse fullscreen.

Let me repeat that, in case it isn't absolutely clear. My internet browser is never maximized. I have a few windows sprinkled about my screen, the more the merrier, until I run out of space to put them. Thanks to you, web designers (but do continue reading even if you're not a web designer as I have a goodie for you at the end), this occurs as soon as I launch firefox.

But it's not your fault. I know how deeply you care about your audience. I know you are worried about the resolution of your website, that's why you gather statistics about our screen resolutions before exclaiming: "thank god nobody runs at 640x480 anymore, but I still need to cater to those poor saps who are still stuck with 800x600". So you build a website spanning those entire 800 pixels and I need to maximize my browser to see it and I get unhappy and I double my resolution, possibly buying a new screen to accommodate the change. And now your statistics tell you that even less people are stuck at 800x600 and you build an even wider website and I buy an even wider screen and I want to slap you silly for misunderstanding my contribution to your statistics.

Your assumption that your audience is browsing fullscreen is wrong. But assume for a moment that you realized your awful mistake and began measuring the size of the browser window instead of measuring the resolution of the screen. Then your statistics would still confirm that browsers are usually larger than what your site needs, and you will still greedily increase its size. This is because I came to your website looking for a piece of information, which I will continue to desire despite the size of your website. Your statistics will report the sizes at which your audience was reluctantly browsing your site, not the sizes at which they would prefer to browse it.

Now suppose that, in your infinite kindness, you decided to redesign your site so that it would scale automatically to fit each viewer's browser size. Would this make me happy at last? I would have hoped so, but most websites today do scale to fit my browser's size, and I'm still not happy.

The source of my annoyance is sidebars. Their width is usually small and fixed, leaving the bulk of the space to the actual contents. The problem here is that "small" is measured according to the web designer's standards, and the web designer is browsing fullscreen on a very large screen. This means that in my browser, those annoying sidebars will take up two thirds of the space and the contents will be so squished that I will need to resize my browser despite the website's struggling efforts to accommodate my size choices. At least when the websites had a fixed width I could scroll those sidebars out of the way.

Anyway, Gmail uses two sidebars, and I wrote a script to get rid of the right-hand one. That's the "goodie", "solution", constructive part of this rant.

The sidebar I'm removing contains mostly text ads, but that's not the reason I'm removing it. In fact, if you came here looking for a way to remove those adds, I'd advise you not to. Well, sure, go ahead and remove the ads if they bother you, but if the sidebar doesn't bother you as well then don't get rid of an entire bar just to get rid of a few ads. The sidebar does contain a few useful things; I've never used its "New window", "Print all", nor "Expand all" buttons, but the bar does occasionally contain golden suggestions. It once parsed the text of the message I was reading, discovered that it was an invitation, and provided me with a button to add the event to my calendar. It even got the time, place, and event description right! I bet that Google will find more cool ways to understand our messages and provide us with smart buttons, but I'll miss out on them if I remove this sidebar. Oh well, I guess my hatred is greater than my enthusiasm.

Here is the script: wider gmail. It's a bookmarklet, so don't bother clicking on it now, it won't lead you anywhere. But if you put it in your toolbar, and click it once you're in Gmail's conversation mode, it will toggle the right-hand sidebar on and off. And if you'd rather have the bar hiden by default, here is a Greasemonkey script which should do the trick.