Well, I'm pleased with myself. I just wrote an actual useful feature for mozilla - or at least, an actual useful enhancement to someone else's feature.

The new link toolbar in bug 87428 is absolutely awesome (and not in any way written by me, all credit goes to what appears to be a pretty large group of people hacking on this patch). But I found it frustrating that a toolbar that's only useful a tiny fraction of the time (because essentially 0% of sites currently support it) should take up screen real-estate all the time.

I'm not the first person to have suggested that the toolbar auto-hide, but I am apparently the first person to do something about it. So the latest version of the link toolbar comes with a three-way visibility option: Show, Hide, or Show As Needed. And for the first time there will actually be some lines of code in mozilla written by me, which makes me extremely happy (I feel like a little kid running around to show everyone what I did - this feeling will probably pass, but I'm enjoying the thrill of it right now :) )

Oh, and in case anyone here wants to try it, the latest XPI in the bug works on windows (although you have to save the file to disk with an .xpi extension and *then* load it in mozilla) and there are linux instructions about 4/5ths of the way down the bug (from me dated 2001-07-09 10:28). Sites I've found that support the feature are w3.org/TR (if you actually go inside any of the recommendations) and surprisingly, the blackdown.org java-linux FAQ. Having a "Next" button is great for navigating these things.

Now if only lwn.net would reply to my letter asking them to support it... :)