This brings to mind a question that I have: Is Firefox the best place to experiment with issues of this gravity?
If by "Firefox" you mean the core browser product downloaded and used by tens of millions of people, then I think the question pretty much answers itself :-) I think we are willing to consider incremental changes to the current way of handling SSL, CAs, etc., but a radical rework is out of the question, at least in the short term. (Short term here meaning Firefox 1.x.)
The "mainstream" approach to changing the Firefox SSL UI will likely be whatever grows out of the proposals that Gerv has promised to create. Of course, you, Ian, and everyone else will be able to comment on and contribute to those proposals, once Gerv gets around to finishing them (nudge, nudge :-)
I would not expect Gerv to propose anything truly radical, and even incremental changes I suspect would not be doable until Firefox 1.2, given how far along Firefox 1.1 is at this point.
Is there a development tree available for experimentation, akin to the odd-numbered variants of Linux and Apache?
Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Mozilla project in general don't follow the even/odd convention. (Let's leave aside for the moment whether this is a good or bad idea; it's just the way it is.) Typically new stuff goes onto the main Mozilla/FF/TB trunk and shows up in alpha and beta releases for the next version. I'm not aware of any long-lived development branches that exist apart from the trunk.
There are at least three ways that people experiment with Firefox (and Thunderbird):
1. Create a Firefox (or Thunderbird) extension. This has the advantage of making the experimental code available to any FF/TB user, as are the trustbar and petnames extension, without having to create custom versions of FF/TB themselves.
2. Check out a private copy of the Mozilla code base, make some custom changes to do whatever you want, build your very own custom version of Firefox (or Thunderbird), and distribute it as an experimental version. This has the advantage that you can make more extensive changes. The disadvantage is that the Mozilla trademark policy prevents you from distributing your version under the Firefox or Thunderbird names.
3. Get changes into the official Mozilla code base, but not built as part of the standard Firefox/Thunderbird builds. This is how SVG support is getting into Firefox; it's checked into the trunk (AFAIK) but is not built by default. The advantage is that the changes are on a track to potentially be part of the standard product. The disadvantage is that to do this you need consensus from the Mozilla project lead developers that your changes are something that they might actually want to include in FF/TB.
MY opinion is that if your changes could be done using an extension I'd do that, otherwise I'd advise you to learn how to build FF from source and try creating and distributing your own custom version under your own (non-Firefox) name.
Frank
P.S. The new devmo site-in-progress at
http://developer-test.mozilla.org/docs/Main_Page
is a good place to start learning about experimenting with Mozilla/FF/TB.
-- Frank Hecker [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ mozilla-crypto mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-crypto
