web – Page 8 – Hand Coding

Smooth Scrolling in Mozilla

March 24, 2003 Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Smooth scrolling has been implemented in Mozilla. To see it in action, just download a recent nightly build and add this line to your prefs.js file (while Mozilla isn’t running).

user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true);

If you’re not familiar with the feature, smooth scrolling slides text up pixel-by-pixel during a scroll, instead of a chunk at a time (IE also has this feature). This didn’t initially sound very useful to me, either, but this thead on the gtk-devel-list (for GTK development with Linux) conveys that smooth scrolling allows for scrolling & reading the text at the same time.

Sure enough, smooth scrolling does make it easier to scroll and read text in quick succession. The physics of the current implementation isn’t perfect yet (gravity, velocity, and so on), but I still consider it an improvement over regular scrolling.

(New) Filters Broken in Mozilla

March 13, 2003 Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

If you’re running the Mozilla nightlies, you may have run into this one by now — you can only select filter-by-subject when creating new filters.

This first appeared in Saturday’s builds, and it’s not yet fixed. However, as more duplicate bugs are filed alongside it, I’m sure it’ll get some attention.

High CPU Usage & Typing in Mozilla

March 3, 2003 Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

If you’re finding that your PC creeps along after a moment of quick typing in Mozilla, then you’re running into bug 188318. As far as I know, this only affects the recent nightlies and not the regular releases.

All the same, I hope it’s fixed soon. Sometimes I’ll be typing a mail message and I’ll notice that the screen is updating really slowly. Luckily, Mozilla buffers all the keystrokes (so, they're not lost) but typing while the buffer is being processed can lead to 2-second delays before a typed character appears on the screen (I timed it).

Auto-Forwarding Tool for IMAP?

February 24, 2003August 13, 2005 Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I’m looking for a utility to scan an IMAP account and auto-forward any messages from person A to a another account. Of course, if Mozilla supported auto-forward, I wouldn’t have to seek this functionality elsewhere ;).

As a halfway measure, I think I could set a filter in Mozilla to copy messages from person A to an intermediary IMAP mailbox, but that doesn’t do me much good since the destination account is POP3.

Even if there were some utility that could foward e-mail from an IMAP account but could only forward the entire account, then I might still be able to make use of that in concert with Mozilla copying messages to that intermediary IMAP account.

And, yeah, I suppose this would be easy with Linux. Stop snickering ;).

Mozilla Validation Tool: Checky

February 23, 2003 Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

Looking over the Top 50 Projects list at Mozdev.org (sorted by number of hits), I came across Checky. Checky adds a menu item to Mozilla for validating pages:

Checky adds a submenu to Mozilla’s context menu that allows you to run whatever page you’re on through one of (currently) 18 different online validaton and analysis services. Checky-Agent can be activated from the Checky menu or by simply pressing the F10 key. So, for example, you could run your page against the W3C’s markup and CSS validators, the Web Design Group’s HTML Validator, and Watchfire's Bobby with a single keystroke and diesplay the results in a new browser window or tab.

I hadn’t heard about Checky before, but it could be quite handy for developing pages. As I strive for valid XHTML for client work (and otherwise), I’m sure I’ll be able to make use of it.