XML View in Mozilla

Here’s a lazy web question. Does anyone know how you can change Mozilla’s handling of XML back to the way it used to be? If I’m loading an XML page, 19 out of 20 times it’s because I am examining it for correctness or to extract information from it. I hate how it does that more human readable formatting by default now. It just requires me to go and view source on ever single one of them, when what I really want is the tree view it used to have, where you could expand or close individual elements in the XML tree. How can I get back there? I looked in the config settings at every XML thing I could find, but didn’t see a way to turn off this new behavior.

Update: Thanks to a link in the comments from Derek, now I understand that this is part of a holy war inside of the Mozilla project. The problem is that RSS feeds are handled as a special case and intercepted by the rendering engine. The XML toolkit doesn’t work with these, because by the time you have access to them they are now a specially styled page. Viewing source will still see the raw XML but the browser window knows it as the fugly transformed page. I agree with the people who hate this behavior or at least want the ability to disable it. It costs me an enormous amount of efficency when I am working behind the scenes on AmigoFish and and looking at RSS feeds. Now that I know this is the case, I will probably use a different browser for this work. Mozilla project, thanks for all the work but this is one decision you really took the wrong fork on.

Mozilla Upgrades for the Holidays

I love Mozilla, as an overall project, as a source of fine projects and as an exemplar of the FOSS movement. But, seriously guys, unless the house was really on fire did you absolutely have to roll out an upgrade on December 19th? We spent an ugly last half of the week, and until midday today weren’t sure if people were going to be canceling portions of their XMas vacations to fix the issues it caused for us.

Where I work we are encouraged to push these sorts of things out to the world, to help others who might be having the same kind of problems and to help push the ball down the field. Here’s an example of that. Even though this isn’t open source, learning lessons I’ve picked up hanging around that movement helped us out ultimately. Rather than just posting about the problem, when I came in this morning my highest priority was to get a test case that would help us define the boundaries of the problem. By having that and getting it to the Active Widgets guys, they were able to use it to debug the problem. We got a fix better than our workaround and on the same day to boot. I like how on Beast, every time someone reports a problem they basically refuse to listen unless you include tests. “Submit a failing unit test case” is the standard reply to all such posts.

Ultimately, the issues are solved and all is well. It was touch and go for a while, but now it’s back on track. But, seriously, couldn’t the Firefox 1.5.0.9 / 2.0.0.1 upgrade have waited until January 2nd?


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