Cédric Bosdonnat - Mozilla

Windows 7, Office 2010 and user freedom

2010-05-07T11:49:00+02:00

As I needed to perform some tests on Windows 7 and Office 2010 these days and I had two interesting surprises.

Office 2010 asks the user to choose between ODF and OOXML as default storing format.
Windows 7 asks which Web browser to use / install

Here are two screenshots to show these choices... they may be biased but at least they are existing.

Office 2010 format choice

Windows 7 browser choice

I hope more people will then install Firefox on Windows and make it their default web browser.... but the most interesting point is about Office 2010: OpenOffice.org marketing centered on ODF support won't make the difference by now. We need to focus much more on:

innovating features. Copying what Office 2010 does is good to ensure compatibility, but we need to keep adding some useful features that aren't yet in Office 2010 for users to find something interesting in the OpenOffice.org product.
the values of open source and community as that's our main differenciator. How could we as a community show to the users that they have something to gain to contact us and be part of the adventure?

Using Firefox 3.0 beta 5

2008-05-22T09:29:00+02:00

As I have updated to the Ubuntu 8.04 I now have firefox 3.0 Beta 5 installed on my computer. Some of my extensions where not updated for Firefox 3.0 but I have found some betas of these extensions or replacements. Here are the extensions I've found: I hope these links can be useful to someone else.

Firebug - Use the 1.2 beta version which could be fetched on firebug's website
Del.icio.us bookmarks - Use the beta provided on del.icio.us blog
Document map - This extension shows the document headings as a tree: this is really handy when reading huge pages. This extension has no version for Firefox 3.0 beta 5 but I have found another experimental extension doing the same job: HeadingsMap (es).

Now I can use Firefox 3.0 like I was using Firefox 2.x...

The Gecko and the Gull

2007-05-04T08:22:00+02:00

Is it a unknown fable from La Fontaine? Not really, in fact it has more to do about OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. I was trying to tamper with some web pages and I wanted to check whether we could integrate easily a small web-browser inside OpenOffice.org.

Hopefully, there is an interesting feature coming up with Eclipse 3.3 which helps a lot: SWT provides the ability to create a Browser composite which runs the xulrunner (downloads). This means that we could perfectly imagine a small Java extension to OpenOffice.org which provides a UNO service to show any XUL or HTML page.

Here is a small snippet I created to test this on windows:

Display display = Display.getDefault();
final Shell shell = new Shell(display);
shell.setText("My OOo Browser");
shell.setSize(400, 300);
shell.setLayout(new GridLayout());

System.setProperty("org.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath", 
    "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Cbosdonnat\\Mes documents\\xulrunner");

Browser browser = new Browser(shell, SWT.MOZILLA);
browser.setLayoutData(new GridData(GridData.FILL_BOTH));
browser.setUrl("http://fr.openoffice.org");

shell.open();

while (!shell.isDisposed ()) {
    if (!display.readAndDispatch ()) display.sleep ();
}
display.dispose ();

I let you imagine the kind of interesting applications we could do using this... Of course the same principle is working on Linux and I would like to test it on MacOS, but I let you translate the above code for it.