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The Future Is Here

Browsers232 words2 minutes to read

Well, mostly…

Mozilla 1.4 was released June 30th, right along with Netscape 7.1. It’s a beautiful thing. Along with many other features, we got about:config, which allows you to tweak out a variety of hidden settings, as well as support for GeckoActiveXObject. about:config allows you to mess with all sorts of nifty things, like enabling general.smoothScrolling and timebomb.first_launch_time, whatever that is. Supposedly, Gecko 1.4’s ability to understand ActiveX objects is limited to Windows Media Player. I haven’t had any time to test yet, but I’m hoping it supports other plug-ins as well. I’m sure it doesn’t support Windows Scripting Host, but who says it never will?

In my spare time, I’ve been working on a wholesale produce accounting/inventory program written in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Windows Script, tied together with Microsoft HTA technology. The only problem with this Windows-only solution is that it’s a Windows-only solution. What about MacOS, Linux, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, Irix, and other systems? I believe Gecko is the answer. I either need to learn JS/IO or Gecko needs to try to support WSH. We’ll see what happens.

On the other end, 1.4 is replacing 1.0 as the stable branch for Gecko. This is great, as much has changed in the last year since Mozilla 1.0 came out. 1.4 also marks the end of the SeaMonkey project in favor of the Firebird project focused around the former “Phoenix” project.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.