One thing Fennec struggles with somewhat, especially on pr0nimage-heavy websites is that we can easily be overwhelmed on devices with limited memory by loading lots of large images, including images that aren’t even visible on your screen yet. Bug 622470 addresses this issue by adding some tunable parameters, which are still turned off for Fennec, but which you can experiment with on your own, to see if they help (or hurt) you in your day-to-day usage.

To enable decode-on-draw in Fennec, set the following config parameters in about:config:

image.mem.decodeondraw = true
content.image.allow_locking = false
image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms = 20000

The final setting determines how long we will hold on to decoded images in memory if they are unused.

These preferences probably won’t be enabled until after beta 5 ships, so to see results, you’ll have to hand edit them as suggested here.

It turns out gmail and extended headers, such as those bugzilla delivers, don’t quite work together well, and the massive flood of emails I get from bugzilla is too firehose-like to be managed without those headers, so I quickly retreated to the safer ground of a Thunderbird nightly.

BUT, I have also become addicted to being able to use Google Sync (ala ActiveSync) with my phone for contacts, email, and calendar (no tasks! *pout*). So I need to be able to check bugmail from my phone, but having extensive filtering there isn’t really necessary. Having it at my desktop is critical. But I still don’t want my phone to think I’ve got email every time bugzilla spams me. So I set up a gmail filter to kick bugzilla mail off to my bugzilla folder.

Thunderbird, though, in its default configuration, does not perform additional filtering on any folder other than “Inbox”. I wanted priority highlighting to work in Thunderbird without having to “Run Filters on Folder” every time I switched. Here’s the trick:

In about:config for Tbird (Tools -> Options -> General -> Config Editor), add the following key:

mail.server.default.applyIncomingFilters = “true”

(It’s important that the key be a string), and you’ll get filtration in all of your IMAP folders.

John Resig and others involved in the standardization process for the new ECMAScript language proposals have been going back and forth lately over the design of a new language library feature, to facilitate copying properties of one object to another. Object.extend() — essentially you pass an object (the one you mean to extend), and a series of objects (from which you want properties copied), and you get a new object with all the goodness of the others:

From the spidermonkey JS shell:
js> var a = { get x () { print("foo"); return 3 } }
js> var b = [ 1, 2, 3 ]
js> var c = { foo: "bar" }
js> var result = Object.extend({}, a, b, c)
js> result.toSource()
({get x () {print("foo");return 3;}, 0:1, 1:2, 2:3, foo:"bar"})
Notice the getter itself is copied, not the result of its evaluation.

I hope this feature makes it into the standard(s), I think it’s a very powerful, useful, and flexible one. So much so that many of the existing AJAX libraries already have a 5-or-10 line version of it included, under any of a number of names, and with a few variations in semantics. In my opinion, a number of the other features being discussed in lieu of it (like Object.clone) can be implemented trivially in terms of it). A good, consistent semantic for a feature this convenient seems like a great thing for the “library” side of JS, to me. I’d love to land this for 1.9.1, it seems like it would, at least, be handy for extension authors. I hope it survives the committees!

Also, thanks to John for writing a nice test-suite for the feature.

Today, I exported my feeds, created a new RSS account, imported my feeds to that, and then deleted my old RSS account. This works brilliantly and I was able to add new feeds immediately to the new account. (Including a feed that required HTTP Basic Authentication, which I hadn’t been able to use at all previously)

It’s worth mentioning that I had tried out ThunderBrowse as a way to work around the HTTP Auth problem I was having, but it seems not to handle HTTP Auth requests at all. Too bad; ThunderBrowse could be really neat with a little bit of massaging; I hope it gets it.

The high comes (or at least, the best hits are) when two conditions are met: 1) something you do benefits someone else, and 2) you know about it.  Today, for me, it happened to hit me when a random comment I made in a random bug more than a year old helped someone else fix the bug.  Yeah, that’s right:  I didn’t even actually fix the bug.  But I helped someone else do it.  And yeah, it’s not a bug the fixing of which will protect anyone’s credit-card numbers or identity, but somehow it’s still a pretty good high.