joewalker's comments

joewalker | 8 months ago | on: XMLUI

It's used for things like pop-up menus, (i.e. things that can't be done with HTML) and was recently used in some obscure parts of the UI e.g. certificate viewer (however I'm not even sure that's still XUL any more)

I think it's safer to say: It's almost all HTML these days. XUL is very much deprecated.

As we killed XBL, our XUL components because web components. https://briangrinstead.com/blog/firefox-webcomponents/

joewalker | 2 years ago | on: Firefox Development Is Moving from Mercurial to Git

When the decision was made to use Mercurial, Git for Windows wasn't a viable option. If you wanted to develop on Windows, the choices were Mercurial or SVN.

Edit: I work for Mozilla, although I didn't in 2006 when I think the decision was made.

joewalker | 3 years ago | on: You can hook your MIDI keyboard up to a website with Firefox 108

Firefox, Chrome and Safari all dropped support for FTP. I suspect the Register is referring to the domain name of the server rather than the protocol:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/108.0/

Clearly the domain name is there for historical reasons.

joewalker | 8 years ago | on: Rust's integer intrinsics are impressive

I don't know if http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/j... is representative of all the implementations of bitCount in Java, but it's probably obvious that it's not going to use the popcnt opcode instruction.

I think the point is that Rust makes it much easier to use that opcode instruction. It's possible but hard with GCC using __builtin_popcount(), but, I'd guess totally impossible in Java due to lack of a JVM instruction for the same.

joewalker | 10 years ago | on: Ephemerons

WeakReferences are elsewhere e.g. [1]

My understanding of SoftReferences is that they sound like they're going to be useful in implementing caches, but then cacheing is hard, and generic solutions like a SoftHashMap end up being toys. While they're are probably cases where SoftReferences are useful, they're not common, hence they're not elsewhere.

Phantom references are partly due to problems with the way finalize is implemented in Java, and partly due to difficulties writing low level code in a higher level language, hence they're slightly Java specific anyway.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

https://community.oracle.com/blogs/enicholas/2006/05/04/unde...

joewalker | 10 years ago | on: A Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism: The Details

In Our Time (BBC R4) did a recent episode called "P vs NP" [1] which talked about graph isomorphism, and might serve as an introduction to this.

There's an MP3 download at the link. I don't think it's UK only.

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06mtms8

joewalker | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Typedetail.com – featuring Apple's new typeface San Francisco

Copyright law with fonts is strange. 'Looking like' isn't a copyright vilation, but if you take copy a font and tweak it slightly then it probably is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Souther....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

There's a similar situation with clothing, IIRC, which explains the prevalence of brand logos.

IANAL, obviously.

joewalker | 11 years ago | on: Online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course

To be fair on NICE, from the same page:

"NICE currently does not recommend that homeopathy should be used in the treatment of any health condition"

"Some homeopathic remedies may contain substances that are not safe, or that interfere with the action of other medicines"

"there is no evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition"

"Some people who use homeopathy may see an improvement in their health condition due to a phenomenon known as the placebo effect"

I'm not sure what the phrase 'NHS homeopathic hospitals' means. Does it mean more than what is implied by the paragraph following the one you quoted, that some people that work for the NHS also work privately on alternative medicine like homoeopathy.

I'd also be interested to know more about the £4m per year.

The page on mindfulness has a very different tone [1] to the one on homeopathy.

[1]: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/pages...

joewalker | 11 years ago | on: Console.mihai();

I'm the author of the blog post. I've updated it to add that Mihai died recently.

joewalker | 11 years ago | on: Firebug 2.0

We moved the button and a number of the tabs in Firefox devtools to be more like the order in Firebug and Chrome devtools. Here's a screenshot from current Nightly: https://i.imgur.com/EmVIZYO.png

joewalker | 13 years ago | on: Future of Firefox DevTools

Can you explain how we're doing that? I'm not aware of any of our tools that are Mac only.

joewalker | 14 years ago | on: Firefox – tons of tools for web developers

I'm not sure that anyone has a definative answer to that question right now. The new tools are interesting because they do things in a different way, but there is a lot they don't do, so we're supporting both.

It's possible that one day Firebug will be totally superceeded. It's possible that both tools will have separate audiences for some time. It's possible that the new native tools will be a total flop (although I have a vested interest in making sure that doesn't happen!)

joewalker | 14 years ago | on: Firefox – tons of tools for web developers

Firebug isn't 'owned' by Mozilla, and hasn't ever been, however Mozilla has contributed financially to it's development for some years, and still is.

In addition to supporting Firebug, we're also experimenting with alternative developer tools.

It's my belief that most developer tools just present the user with the information that was given to the browser in the first place, and that we can do a lot to explain how the browser actually understands all that stuff. The native developer tools are a step in that direction.

I work on Mozilla developer tools.