Simon Willison’s Weblog

Firefox 3’s password remembering. I’m loving Firefox 3, and the way it does password remembering (with a non-modal toolbar so you can tell if your password worked before deciding to save it) is just one of the major improvements. Opera gets this right as well. 2nd April 2008, 8:24 pm

Major Update to Prism (via) Mozilla’s site-specific browser tool can now use separate profiles (and hence separate cookie jars) for each instance, making it an excellent tool for protecting yourself against CSRF vulnerabilities in the web applications you rely on. 10th March 2008, 2:03 pm

<META HTTP-EQUIV=“X-BALL-CHAIN”>. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan discusses the technical implications of freezing copies of older rendering engines, including the increased footprint and the terrifying prospect of documents in different rendering modes communicating through iframes and the DOM. 22nd January 2008, 6:55 pm

Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction. 9th January 2008, 11:57 pm

Prism Prototype Now Available on Mac and Linux. Prism is the new name for Mozilla Webrunner, a toolkit for building native desktop applications on top of the Mozilla technology stack. 11th November 2007, 10:21 pm

Tabula Fracta. Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan offers advice for anyone aiming to create a new rendering engine from scratch. The WHATWG’s work on specifying real-world browser behaviour and error models gets a well deserved mention. 9th October 2007, 1:20 am

Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google. Stories like this crop up every now and then, but no one ever seems to mention that the Google Toolbar has been doing this since it was released (more than five years ago) provided you have PageRank display turned on. 25th September 2007, 11:04 pm

Hello JS-CTYPES, Goodbye Binary Components. Mark Finkle is porting Python’s ctypes functionality to the Mozilla platform, to allow binary XPCOM components to be defined in pure JavaScript. 22nd September 2007, 11:57 pm

HTTPOnly cookie support in Firefox. Five years after the bug was filed, HTTPOnly cookie support has gone in to the Mozilla 1.8 branch. This is a defence in depth feature that has been in IE for years—it lets you set cookies that aren’t available to JavaScript, and hence can’t be hijacked in the event of an XSS flaw. 6th September 2007, 6:27 am

Why Tamarin instead of... Justification for Tamarin in Mozilla over Mono and the JVM. It mainly comes down to license compatibility and overall size. 9th August 2007, 12:43 pm

Mozilla and IronPython: IronMonkey. Interesting to note that all three new Mozilla projects are being lead by experienced Python developers. 26th July 2007, 8:07 pm

Brendan Eich: New Projects. Exciting new projects from Mozilla. ActionMonkey is joined by IronMonkey (IronPython/IronRuby on Tamarin) and ScreamingMonkey (Tamarin for IE). Upgrading IE’s JavaScript using the Flash Player as a vector is a game-changing idea. 26th July 2007, 8:05 pm

ActionMonkey (via) SpiderMonkey + Tamarin = ActionMonkey. New JavaScript engine for Mozilla 2, incorporating code from Adobe’s Open Source ActionScript VM. 24th July 2007, 3:29 pm

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released. Includes Iceweasel (Firefox), Icedove (Thunderbird), Iceape (Seamonkey) and Python 2.4.4 as standard. 8th April 2007, 6:25 pm

Mozilla Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 Release Notes. New features include animated PNGs, <link rel=“offline-resource”> and the HttpOnly cookie flag which indicates that a cookie should not be accessible to script (borrowed from IE). 25th March 2007, 9:37 pm

opensource @ Joost. Joost is built on top of Mozilla, Redland, SQLite and a bunch of other bits and pieces of Open Source infrastructure. 12th March 2007, 1:29 pm

VCS Migration: The Hare and the Tortoise. Bazaar and Mercurial compared from the point of view of importing 1 million diffs from Mozilla CVS. Bazaar’s import is more robust but will take more than a month to complete. 26th January 2007, 11:44 pm

Correo. New open-source OS X mail client, based on Thunderbird but with a Camino-style native interface. 12th January 2007, 11:36 am

Introducing Operator. New microformat detecting Firefox extension, developed at IBM and released by Mozilla Labs. Examples are from Yahoo! Local, Upcoming and Flickr. 18th December 2006, 4:36 pm

Better Metrics for Security—Understanding the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report. Mozilla defends against yet more spurious bug count reports. 27th September 2006, 9:54 am

Mozilla causing XSS in Livejournal. Their recent worm attack was caused by the -moz-binding CSS property. 22nd January 2006, 9:37 pm