The difference seems obvious but you can discover very strange behavior when applied to Mozilla platform.

Consider the cyrillic charset, Firefox is translated (ie localized) in Russian but when developers need to interact with underlying operative file system with file paths containing native language characters the life becomes tough.

Recently an user left a post on ViewSourceWith (VSW) extension forum about a bug with cyrillic file names, so I thought the problem was on VSW but after some test I realized the problem is related to Mozilla XPCOM implementation.

The UTF-8 format usage is sometime inconsistent under the hood expecially when must read, write or simply use file names containing non-ASCII characters.

I was very surprised to discover the APIs that run processes don’t work properly especially under the planet-most-used operating system Microsoft Windows.

There are many open bugs on bugzilla (172817, 409796, 408923) but nobody cares so I’ve decided to write myself a working (I hope) component for Microsoft Windows.

The lesson learned is: Localizing software is important but making software locale compliant is important too!

Do you agree?

Do you remember Marilyn Monroe when sang “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friends”?

Well, girls prefer diamonds but they don’t develop extensions for Mozilla products, or at least girls programming extensions aren’t so much (sob!!)

OK, now I’ll try to be “serious”: I love also Fantastic Four, probably not exactly the same who you love, but they are however special friends with who I’ve built solid friendship during the period of programming extensions (a long time)!

I know some extension developer losses much time to find information that can be easily (???) found using my best friends.

The first I encountered was DOM Inspector.

This one help me to dig inside DOM nodes for chrome (and normal pages!!) in a user friendly way, it simply speedup my XPCOM learning curve.

Many developers simply ignore DOM Inspector value; they should write thousand times on blackboard:

I will use DOM Inspector before ask to anyone
I will use DOM Inspector before ask to anyone
…

My second friend is Mozilla lxr, the source cross reference.

For many years I used “find in files” utilities to browse source code but now I have a hyperlinked way to find snippets of code.

Why lxr is so magic for me?

I can search source code and navigate using links to functions, variables, classes and any type of source code.

Try it and you will discover a new way to study source code for complex applications!

My friend (and I hope your) XUL planet is the well know APIs and tutorials site about XUL.

Nothing to say, writing extensions without xul planet is equivalent to drive a car in dark of the night without lights.

Last but not least: Bugzilla.

Have you never read “In case of emergency, break glass”?

Well in case of emergency Bugzilla is a valuable tool, you can search if someone has already encountered your problem and if it’s a bug or simply your mind is bugged .

Honestly I don’t know how to really use Bugzilla, I’m unable to use the incredible powerful search engine but this is related to my stupidity .

Mr. Fantastic: lxr
Invisible Woman: DOM Inspector
The Thing: XUL planet
The Human Torch: Bugzilla

Who are your Mozilla devel best friends?

Tell me so they can became my new best friends

My name is Davide aka dafi, I live in South Italy, I’m a 36 years old and I can’t imagine my life without programming!
I program anything, washing machines, videorecorders and … computers.
At ten years old I had my first computer the Sinclair ZX80 with one kilobyte of RAM!!
I had been so stupid to sell it to buy a Commodore 64.
I was falling in love for Commodore Amiga and I loved to program using assembly on Motorola 68000 series processors.
I’m an open source evangelist and my idol is Richard Stallman. Now I work as senior Java programmer and technical coordinator, and I’m also a volunteer at Mozilla Foundation as extension reviewer.
I’ve discovered BabelZilla project and I’m currently sharing my works with BZ team as new WTS Developer.

Mainly I pass my free time to learn new programming languages and share my little know-how with other people.
I love books and movies; my preferred books are Being Digital and Flatland, my preferred movies are Bladerunner and Tron and obviously Matrix 1.
And last but not least, I’m waiting for the woman of my life! She is a bit in later but I can wait some other time.

Davide