I feel many things today. I’m deeply proud and humbled to be a part of the Mozilla community and contribute in my own small way to what I honestly believe is a fantastic product and the best choice in web browsers right now.

I’m filled with joy at seeing a product so many people have worked so hard on finally get released to everyone.

And I’m a little bit sad that I’m not in Mountain View for the release.

Finally, I’m excited, because just in the time I’ve been at Mozilla, the web has gotten so much better.

• All the modern browsers are fast.
• Browsers quickly getting more secure.
• Modern browsers are so much more capable.

The future of the web is bright. There are challenges—not just for Firefox but for the web itself—but I’m confident we have the ingenuity and passion to overcome them.

So if you haven’t tried it yet, go get Firefox 4, and experience a better web!

Here are my favorite parts:

• App tabs.
• Panorama.
• WebGL.
• Developer console.
• Fast, fast, fast!
• Tabs on top.
• Switch to Tab.
• Sync.
• Restartless Add-ons.

Features

(New features in bold.)

• Optional default value.
• Optional, custom widget title.
• Optional onfocus and onblur listeners.
• Optional, customizable focus and blur colors.
• Custom button value.
• Custom field size.

The built-in search widget has only one of these features, the optional, custom title.

Onfocus and Onblur

In order to use the blur and focus colors, you must enable the onfocus and onblur event listeners. In order to use the listeners, you must specify a default value (otherwise none of this makes sense). Here’s an example:

Bug Fixes

A pretty serious typo meant that none of the internationalization code worked correctly. This has been fixed, and en_US, en_GB, and fr_FR localizations are available. de_DE is coming. If you’d like to translate, there is a .pot file included in the languages directory.

License

Better Search Widget is released under the MIT License. If you use it, or have suggestions for new features or bug fixes, let me know!

Getting It

You can download Better Search Widget 1.1 now in a Zip file. Or, to save yourself some trouble,  you can check it out of Subversion from

svn co svn://jamessocol.com/better-search-widget/tags/1.1.0 ./better-search-widget

(Run that in your wp-content/plugins directory.) Subversion will make it easiest to upgrade later.

Roadmap

Soon, though probably not today, I will be releasing Better Search Widget 2, which will take advantage of the new Widget API in WordPress 2.8. This will add support for multiple instances of the widget, but will require at least WordPress 2.8. You should upgrade, anyway.