Gregory Koberger - Mozilla

BugzillaJS Updates

April 24, 2012 14:30:01 PST

BugzillaJS 3.0 is out! It comes with a bunch of new features aimed at helping Bugzilla power users get around Bugzilla as quick as possible.

Download BugzillaJS 3.0

Keyboard Navigation

Keyboard shortcuts save you time by allowing you to navigate Bugzilla without having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the moouse. Anyone who uses the keyboard shortcuts in GMail or GitHub knows how nice this is.

To enable keyboard shortcuts and view the various commands, just hit the "?" key on any Bugzilla page. When in a list of bugs, you'll now see an arrow to the left of the bug number. You can move it up and down using j and k, and go to the selected row by hitting <enter>. Once in a bug, skip to the next or previous bug with J or K, respectively.

There are a bunch of shortcuts, so make sure you hit ? to see what's possible. If you have an idea for a new shortcut, let me know.

File It

A few weeks ago, my coworker Heather Arthur created a simple shortcut called File It. It makes filing a bug in the proper product and component much simplier. I shamelessly ported it over to BugzillaJS. When you go to the "New Bug" page, there's now a box at the top of the page that you can start typing into. Or you can simply hit n on any Bugzilla page, and a File It box will pop up (requires Keyboard Shortcuts; hit "?" to enable them).

New Feature Notification

In order for people to take advantage of the new features, I added a notification when important new features were added to BugzillaJS. A little bubble with a number in it shows up when there are new features. If you open up the preferences, new features will be marked. You can dismiss the notification by saving the preferences.

Redone Preferences

Preferences have been organized by category, rather than the jumbled mess they were before. It should make it easier to find what feature you're looking for.

Works on any Bugzilla

This feature actually came out in the previous version, however I didn't mention it here. BugzillaJS now works for any Bugzilla installation — not just Mozilla's. You can add additional Bugzilla URLs in the add-on settings. To get to it, go to Ctrl+Shift+A > Extensions > BugzillaJS > Preferences.

Download BugzillaJS 3.0

Firefoxes

March 7, 2012 14:38:01 PST

Quite often, I find myself wanting to run multiple versions of Firefox: to test out a new feature in Nightly, make sure my add-ons work in Aurora or maybe track down a bug in an earlier version. Using the Profile Manager, it's possible to have numerous versions of Firefox running side by side.

I started writing a tutorial, but it quickly got too complicated. So, I decided to write a script that would download, install and set up profiles for any version of Firefox. About halfway through, I stumbled upon a script called "install-all-firefox" by Max Glenister. It did a lot of what I wanted, so I forked it and worked from there.

How To Use It

Note: Currently this is OSX only


curl -L -O https://github.com/omgmog/install-all-firefox/raw/master/firefoxes.sh
chmod +x firefoxes.sh
./firefoxes.sh [version] [locale] [no_prompt]

Version and locale are option. If you don't use a locale, it will try to figure out your locale. If you don't have a version, it will install all available versions of Firefox.

If you want to see what's available (and what you have installed):

./firefoxes.sh

What It Does

Figures out your locale (or allows you to specify it).
Finds the file on the FTP server, and then downloads and installs it.
Sets up a new profile and modifies the launcher to open the Firefox version with that profile.
For versions using the same icon (Firefox 4 and Firefox Beta use the same icon, for example), it adds the version to the icon and name.
Changes the settings so future versions (Nightly, Aurora, etc) check for updates regularly while numbered versions (4.0, 5.0, etc) stay where they are.

Usable Context Menus

November 8, 2011 11:15:01 PST

Today, Mozilla released a version of Firefox that includes the ability for a website to add options to the context menu (bug 617528). It has awesome potential, however I had trouble getting it to do what I wanted.

I found a demo by Paul Rouget, however it assumes that there’s only one image on the page. The way context menu has been implemented means there’s no good way to figure out what element has been right clicked. The this binded to the callback is for the menuitem, not the element that was right clicked. This works fine if you don’t plan on making more than one element right-clickable. Imagine you have a list of, say, emails. You want the user to be able to right click and delete/archive/star each email separately. With the current implementation, each email would need it’s own <menu> — and that’s a lot of excess code.

So, I threw together a quick jQuery plugin prototype [demo • github]. It lets you add menu items using a familiar syntax, and most importantly binds the this in the callback to the element that was right clicked (as opposed to the menuitem that is selected).

It’s very buggy and missing important features (such as sub menus, separators, control over ordering and control over events and bubbling). Consider it version 0.1, if you will. However, it makes it very easy to add menu items.

One thing I didn’t want to do is make a polyfill. This will only work in Firefox 8. I didn’t want to override the menu bar in browsers that don’t support it. If you’re looking for that, a polyfill already exists.

Check it out »

BugzillaJS

August 23, 2011 00:00:01 PST

This morning, BMO (Mozilla’s installation of Bugzilla) finally added inline history — a feature that was sorely needed for the past few years. A few Firefox extensions (such as Bugzilla Tweaks and my add-on, BugzillaJS) popped up to fill this void, however it’s great that BMO is finally getting it natively.

This is a huge step forward for Bugzilla, however it doesn’t mean Bugzilla-related Firefox extensions are obsolete. Most Mozillians spend a good part of their day in Bugzilla, and BugzillaJS adds a number of helpful features that make it a much more plesant experience. Here’s a list of features BugzillaJS has that Bugzilla still doesn’t. (Note: All features are optional, and can be turned off from the preferences.)

Image attachments or links to images are shown inline as thumbnails.
View images as a lightbox.
Turn timestamps into relative dates (“Three hours ago”).
Styled comments that make the text easier to read.
Github commits are shown inline if linked to in the comment.
Gravatars next to comments.
Add a scroll bar if the text in the comment is too wide.
Remove flags, status and blocking options (off by default).
Remove access keys (off by default).
Automatically select component and product for “Clone Bug” link.
Add “new” link to depends and blocks fields
Don’t guess OS or Hardware (off by default).
Hide the first comment if there’s nothing in it.
Option to hide “nobody@” bugs from bug lists.
Remove “Bug” from the title, so it’s easier to see the bug number with a lot of tabs.

Download BugzillaJS Now!

BugzillaJS is open source, so I’d love to have you contribute. Currently it only works on BMO (bugzilla.mozilla.org), however I have plans to support any version of Bugzilla as soon as the Jetpack SDK will support it.