I’ve somewhat collected my thoughts since getting hired last week, and I’ve had time to read through emails, comments, and blog posts concerning my employment. Most people have been very supportive, but there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about what I’ll be doing.

In layman’s terms…

First of all, lets just get this out of the way – Firefox and Camino will remain separate products with healthy futures. Neither one is going to replace the other. There are no plans for any sigificant changes in the way either product is developed in terms of each other, except perhaps a little more sharing of code. Camino and Firefox already share many components, so that won’t be much of a change. They are still and probably always will be fundamentally different, with both offering certain advantages over the other.

As you probably know, I’ve spent most of my time working on Camino-specific development in the past. There has been some concern about my abandoning Camino development for Firefox. I’m going to do my best now to explain how my employment with Mozilla Foundation changes that.

Firefox and Camino share a lot of code, but they also have a large amount of code that is specific to each application. Working on Camino-specific code obviously only helps Camino, and the same goes for Firefox. Working on code that they share helps both browsers. The easiest way to explain how things are going to change is to say that I will spend a lot more time on the code that the browsers share, and also more time on the Mac OS X Firefox-specific code. I will spend less time on Camino-specific code, that is true, but I will still be “working on Camino.”

If you’re a Camino user, here is what you can expect to see from my work on the code that Camino and Firefox share. One of the first things I’ll be doing is cleaning up form widgets (content-area buttons, text fields, etc.). Most widgets in Camino already have a native look and feel, but they aren’t great right now. I’ll also be working on making pages load faster, and Mac OS X rendering in general. This most likely includes making the gecko rendering engine use the Quartz API intead of Quickdraw. This will bring a lot of benefits, including making use of your graphics card to do a lot of the work that your CPU is doing right now because we use Quickdraw.

If you’re a Firefox on Mac OS X user, you will see all of the benefits described in the previous paragraph, but you should also be seeing some additional improvements. In general, my goal is to make using Firefox on Mac OS X a better experience in terms of its user interface. At the moment, Firefox does an acceptable job of looking and behaving like it has a native Mac OS X user interface, but it could be a lot better. I am going to do my best to improve the situation. Its a big job, but now I should have plenty of time to do it

Aside from Camino and Firefox on Mac OS X, I’ll be doing some work on Thunderbird on Mac OS X as well as the Mac OS X toolkit.

I know this is somewhat vague, but I’m just trying to give a general idea of the direction I have in mind. I don’t actually start working on this stuff full-time until I graduation in May, but I will be working on it part-time until then.

As I am now employed by Mozilla Foundation, I resigned from SGI on Saturday (a few months earlier than I had planned to leave). It was a quick transition – I’ve already cleaned out my office there and turned in my security badge.

My time at SGI was wonderful. The people, the work, and the environment there in general are superb. It felt great to work on products that I really believed were of the highest quality and very innovative. Most of the time I worked on core system software (the lower level stuff in SuSE and Red Hat Linux) and the Linux kernel, and I will miss working on those things. Hopefully I’ll have enough spare time to continue working on some of it. Fascinating stuff.

Two days before I left there was a round of layoffs at SGI, and that is always tough. It was especially tough to have it happen to my coworkers. Its feels even worse to hear about it when it hits so close to home. I am incredibly fortunate to have a great new job, and I wish the best to the amazing people that were laid off.

I’m really happy to announce that as of tonight I am a Mozilla Foundation employee. I don’t have much more to say at the moment, but I’m really excited about this. Mozilla Foundation is making more of a commitment to Mac OS X, so hopefully there will be some really good things happening on the platform in the near future.

There are a lot of people that helped me along this path, and I’m very thankful to all of them. I’m not even going to try to make a list here. I’ll write more when I have had time to collect my thoughts!

Macalester College has a pretty good radio station, WMCN. I helped them put it online a month ago – you can click here to listen. Pretty diverse programming with a lean towards indie rock.

I just ordered a new PowerBook to replace my aging 15-inch 667MHz/512Mb PowerBook. This is what I got:

- 15 inch screen
- 1.5GHz G4
- 1GB RAM
- 80GB 5400RPM hard drive
- ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 w/64MB VRAM
- SuperDrive
- Airport

I haven’t had much time to work on Mozilla stuff lately, but this will help me take advantage of what time I do have. Its sad that this nearly-top-of-the-line Apple setup will probably have way worse compile times for Mozilla products than top-of-the-line PC laptop offerings, but oh well. I’ve found Apple hardware to be wonderfully designed and reliable, and when I need something other than Linux (which should run fine on my PowerBook) I’d much prefer Mac OS X over Windows.

I’ve had a car for most of the time since I turned 16, which is about 5 years. I am guilty of unecessarily driving it quite often, wasting gas and polluting the air much more than is necessary. Tonight I spent some time thinking about that problem, and I’ve made reminders to ride my bike whenever possible. I’m also going to do some more research on the public transportation available in my area so I can use that as another alternative to driving my own car. I hope I can do better, and I hope you’ll consider making an effort to do the same! It’ll be good for all of us.

Don’t use Camino nightly builds from 2005-02-09 to (hopefully) 2005-02-16. Bug 281732 describes a major problem with our popup form control code that basically makes forms unusable. A patch that fixes the problem exists, but it has not been checked in yet. Hopefully it will make it into the nightly builds within the next couple of days.

I use two email clients regularly – one for my normal email accounts, and one for my work email because it goes through SSH port forwarding and receives tons of messages. It is a pain to have the two email setups set up in the same email client.

I use Mac OS X machines at home, and I really like Apple’s Mail.app. I use it for my normal email accounts. The UI is superb, it’s fast, stable, and has excellent junk mail filtering.

For accessing my work email account from home on Mac OS X, I have been using Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird extensively at work on Linux and it works great. However, using Thunderbird at home on Mac OS X has been surprisingly displeasing. The UI is somewhat flakey and unpolished, it’s slow, and it doesn’t look or behave in a convincinly native way. Most irritatingly, keyboard navigation of email lists is really quirky – sometimes hitting buttons doesn’t work and using key modifiers doesn’t have dependable results. Also, the UI doesn’t always update correctly – sometimes I select an email and the display pane just goes blank or stays on the previously selected email. Because of this, I have switched to using Microsoft Office’s Entourage email client for accessing my work email from home. I almost hate to say it, but its been a very pleasant switching experience. MS did a pretty good job on Entourage (though it’s no Mail.app).

Thunderbird on Linux and (from what I hear) Windows rocks, but it really needs some work on Mac OS X. I’d love to fix my problems with Thunderbird on Mac OS X, but I just don’t have the time. There is a lot of potential there though, and I have no doubt it will be realized sooner or later.