Ramblings of a Madman

I have been an avid Firefox user since 2000 (back then it was called Netscape). I love Mozilla and all that it stands for. 13 years back I even moved my family from Switzerland to the UK so that I could continue working for…

Before I begin let me just say that these instructions worked for me but if you break or lose anything then I am not responsible. I recently tried running a bunch of "Live" Linux distributions from USB but was shocked to…

After almost 9 years at Mozilla I have suddenly found myself in a place where I have plenty of time to experiment. One thing that I have wanted to do for a while is play around with the Chrome DevTools codebase and start…

Due to some recent changes in the way that we use eslint to check that our coding style linting Mozilla source code in Atom has been broken for a month or two. I have recently spent some time working on Atom's linter-eslint…

To stop people snooping on what we are doing on the internet or when restrictive governments prevent people from accessing popular websites you can use a VPN to protect your privacy and allow you to access the internet without…

A little while back we landed a feature that made it possible to interact with events from the markup panel of Firefox developer tools. A lot of people were excited about this but we soon realized that jQuery wraps event…

I recently realized that support for inspection of DOM events is very poor in pretty much all developer tools. Having seen Opera Dragonflies implementation some time ago I liked the way you could very easily see the scope of an…

A lot of people would like to adopt but do not know what to do or what is involved. They are often scared of the process or have heard horror stories. Being at the end of the process and having met our kids we can say that you…

When it comes to the Firefox Developer Tools Inspector one of our most common requests is that our highlighter should support box model highlighting. We are working on implementing this but before we get into full swing we need…

I recently discovered that it is possible to use Firefox Developer Tools with Thunderbird. Philipp Kewisch has done a fantastic job of his Google Summer of Code 2013 Project to bring Firefox Developer Tools to Thunderbird…

When Joe Hewitt was seven years old his father wanted to become a computer programmer so he bought an IBM PCjr. Joe would often watch his father typing in programs from PC Magazine. He started learning himself and when he got…

Since my post about what it is like to work as an engineer at Mozilla lots of people have asked about why I chose to work for Mozilla. I had opportunities to work for Google or Facebook but I have always had a great respect for…

Even after a few years working for Mozilla I still occasionally come across a Bugzilla tip that I don't know about. This post is a attempt to gather Bugzilla tips from around the Internet whilst adding a few of my own to the…

At the beginning of April Alex Limi decided that we should remove the Enable JavaScript checkbox from Firefox's preferences dialog. His reasoning was that clearing that checkbox breaks a huge amount of websites and therefore…

If you have ever used the application cache you will probably be familiar with how easy it is to break offline functionality and how difficult it is to work out why things are broken. With a large offline web app finding the…

For the past few years I have used Google Contacts to store my contacts and Google Calendar to store my calendars. These services really are excellent, particularly because they allow me to keep my data synchronized between my…

If you search Google for "how to install Django on JustHost" you may be surprised to find tens of thousands of articles claiming that it can't be done and none claiming that it can. Well, it can and here's how: Log in using SSH…

Hopefully, most of you are familiar with Firefox Developer Tools by now, if not then now is the time to get familiar! The DevTools Team recently met up in London to talk about, and generally hack on, developer tools stuff and…

Having downsized my home a couple of times in the last year it is no understatement to say I have urgent space issues. I have power tools, large kitchen devices and surplus everything else. I looked online for a new shed…

This question popped up on Quora recently. I have been working on the Developer Tools Team at Mozilla for over a year now and would love to let you all know what is it like. To see this from my perspective I you will need to…

I have received a flood of emails today from people asking about what SOPA is and was surprised when I looked online and didn't see any places that explains why SOPA would be a very bad thing. The idea behind SOPA is to stop…

Preface Introduction The Browsers We Will Talk About The Browser's Main Functionality The Browser's High Level Structure Communication Between the Components The Rendering Engine Rendering Engines The Main Flow Main Flow…

Okay, I have had the job now for over 3 months but I have really been neglecting my blog... after all, you all deserve to know about what we Mozillians are up to and we are doing some awesome things at the moment. I have been…

So, it has been a long time coming, but I am sure that once you have experienced the awesome that the Mozilla developers have produced you will agree…. this is a download worth getting! We have come a long way since I started…

Almost a year since I last posted, I can't believe it. I am no longer spending time working on Firebug Lite, but am spending my spare time these days working on Firebug's inspector. There are three versions of the inspector's…

We have made a bunch of changes to Firebug Lite over the last few months and it is about time we shared them with you. For those that don't know what Firebug Lite is, it is basically a cross browser version of Firebug. It does…