“The agreement, which the companies are set to announce Monday, is the first browser distribution deal with a major PC maker since the end of the browser wars in the 1990s, according to Netscape.” – c|net

It certainly won’t be the last ;-)

As many of you know, I’ve been working on a new product with Joe for the past 6 months. Joe was another of the original Firefox engineers, and as we meet people who enjoy Firefox, it’s been difficult not to talk about the new project. However, there’s little point in talking about something you can’t yet use, so it seems our time is best spent developing.

That said, I often meet people who want to know how they can find out when we release. So here you go:

If you enter your e-mail address, we’ll send you a letter when we release. This is not a newsletter, and I promise I won’t be selling you any Viagra. We won’t use the address for anything else.

Of course, you can also feel free to e-mail me directly. While you’re at it, tell me what you hate about computers so we can better focus our efforts.

I’m looking to finish up Firefox for Dummies this week and I need your help ensuring that it’s a valuable resource for our users. I’m looking for two kinds of submissions:

• Problems to address in a “Troubleshooting” section. Both common and obscure are great. It would save me time if you could include the solution, but it’s not necessary.
• Tips and tricks. I want the book to reveal the little gems that make Firefox unique. This includes both intentional features and clever ways of combining features to make common tasks easier. The basic criteria here is that tricks should be difficult to discover but easy to accomplish. Middle clicking on the Back button meets this criteria, hand-editing configuration files doesn’t, and about:config is borderline. People shouldn’t have to leave the Firefox interface.

Thanks everyone! Writing a Dummies book on a product I helped build has been eye-opening. I’ll write a post-mortem when I finish.

ZDnet reports that the FBI is having trouble with Mork, the god-awful database we use to store history in Firefox 1.0:

“Firefox and Opera store information on typed URLs in a different file than IE does and the files are somewhat tough to decipher, Lewis said. He showed his students–mostly law enforcement agents and private investigators–how to do it.”

Hey, we’ve had to deal with it for years! Oh, and as Vlad says: “they’re going to be unhappy when we replace it with encrypted sqlite.”

When I tell people I lost my innocence at 14, they think I’m talking dirty. Really, I just lost it to Mork.

I’m headed off to Sebastopol for the weekend with Asa. I realize this site is starting to show its age (yes, I know random pages are black-on-black in Firefox), and that means it’s the perfect time for the redesign I’ve had in mind. I’ll start working on that when I return.

Anyone who knows me knows that this whole software engineering thing is just filler while I pursue my real goal in life: being the Jared of Togo’s. I’ve been known to eat their sandwiches at every meal—Dinner, After Dinner Snack, and Midnight Feeding for engineers—and it is widely known that my future wife will need to accept our firstborn, Togo von Firefox de la Schmutz. Ross.

Unfortunately, a wrench was thrown into my plans today. Except instead of a wrench, it was a dirty quarter. And instead of my plans, it was my sandwich. That’s right: I was eating the second half of my #24, Avocado and Turkey, at Togo’s in Mountain View when a rusty quarter fell out of what was to be my very next bite.

To its credit, the restaurant staff kindly refunded my money and offered to make me another sandwich. Unfortunately, just about the last thing I wanted was another sandwich made with the same meat and vegetables that had been chilling with George all day. Actually, I can’t imagine ever eating at Togo’s again—I won’t soon forget the “thud” of the quarter hitting the table as I turned my sandwich to take a bite—nor can I imagine what a Togo’s could or should do to win back a lifelong customer. Free sandwiches for life?

Free quarters for life?

Steve, Seth: what would you guys do? I don’t want to have to rename my firstborn. Quiznos von Firefox just sounds ridiculous.

You know the times are changing when HBO is trying to ride a web browser wave. On Wednesday, the network will unveil a new campaign centering on a custom theme it developed to support its new drama series, Rome. The theme will be splashed in The New York Times and other high-profile media outlets.

I’m surprised it took this long for companies to notice that we’ve baked such a viral feature right into the browser. Steve, tell them to get with it! Now who’s going to make a slick Harry Potter theme?

Update: Asa Dotzler says Warner Bros. made a theme for Batman Begins.

I’m now #1 on Google for “schmutz.” Thanks, Grandpa! This is a major driver of traffic to my site, with an average of 1 visit a week, and nearly double that over the Jewish holidays.

Let me take this opportunity to clear something up. After I posted that story, I had some people come up to me and say “I loved the smuts!", to which I generally responded, “That’s wonderful, but shouldn’t you keep that to yourself?” Only later did I realize that they’re mispronouncing schmutz, which is like “pudding” in the sense that the “u” makes the same sound. (It is like pudding in no other way.)

Be sure to come back next week; we’ll be discuss schlepping latkes.

Yesterday I wrote about the tangible holes in airport security, but omitted the singular flaw that plagues all systems: human nature.

Two weeks ago, I arrived at SFO early enough that the gate attendant hadn’t arrived yet—the uniformed one, I mean. I soon noticed a man in plain clothes sidling up to the attendant’s computer. He unlocked it and accessed what appeared to be the first-class cabin list. After pressing a couple of keys, he slowly backed away, pulled out his phone, and began text messaging. About ten minutes later, he did it again.

I’m making this all sound very shady, and quite frankly, it was. Shifty eyes. Calculated movements. The works. Other people who were gathered in front of the counter noticed, too. Two couples said it was “probably nothing.” The last couple felt otherwise and told the attendant for the adjacent flight, who then went up to the man and said—I am not making this up—"Sir, if you are not an employee, please don’t touch the computers.”

In the same way Bush might say, “Now now Kim Jong, no nukes before dinnertime.”

Needless to say, this didn’t appease the worried couple, and it didn’t appease me. We marched right up to the most senior looking official in the area and demanded an explanation, but it was just someone selling egg salad. So we went to the lady at the front desk of the Admirals Club and spoke with her between salad bites. She listened to the story and concluded that it was “probably nothing,” but promised to have an official look into it. Fair enough.

This official, bless his federally subsidized heart, must have searched the entire airport, because when we left the Club, we realized she hadn’t asked what our gate number was, or what the man looked like.

See, here’s the problem: when we read about incidents later on, we smack our foreheads and wonder how the people involved could miss all the clues. When we’re in front of our computers at home, we make bold, swift statements like: “If it were me, I would have said something!” But the truth is that, in the here and now, and when the chips are down, we think and hope and want to believe that it’s “probably nothing.” Security systems need to make it easy and socially encouraged to bring the “probably nothing” stuff to light in a low-key way; nobody wants to be the one to make a mountain out of a mole hill.

And the guy? Just a flight attendant from another airport bumping himself to the top of the first-class upgrade waiting list against airline rules. He wasn’t trying to harm the other passengers, just screw them over. My faith in humanity is restored.

CNN is reporting a newly discovered “weak link” in airport security. The sad thing is that this is going to shock most of the people I know, who don’t seem to realize that the only weapon you need to take down airport security is, criministically speaking, an inkjet printer. If you say anything that threatens their confidence, they mumble something about how many cameras airports have—so at least if something goes wrong, the news will have footage.

Today I asked myself, as I have so many times before, what does airport security look like through the rose-colored glasses of these blindly optimistic?

This will only be interesting to about 7 of you, but while doing some work for the startup tonight, I came across some new MSDN documentation that indicates that Longhorn will support symbolic links which function exactly like those offered by Unix. My understanding is that NTFS already offers limited support, but it looks like Longhorn will introduce a very simple API.

(Oh, and regular posting will resume shortly.)