Don't Back Down

It's official. The IPO of the millenium is done. The strange thing is that no one quite seems to agree on the results. At least one publication thinks that the IPO was a failure, yet in the same article, they mention that the company made around $1.67 billion in the auction. I don't know about you, but most companies seem to reap far less than that when they go public. Many earn only amounts in the hundreds of millions. Still a lot by my measure, but they leave a whole lot more on the table.

Meanwhile, while Google didn't hit the peak that the stock found on opening day, they pulled in a whole lot more than if they had gone through an investment bank and priced it at $15 each. A sale at that price would have instead found the company with only $300 million. I think they did pretty well. Did it revolutionize trading? Probably not. But they did figure out how they could get the rewards of the initial sale. I don't see how anyone can see that as a failure.

Update: There are some people who agree that the process was a success. The only thing I question in this commentary is the final conclusion. I agree that the price of Google is probably unsustainable, but the current price (just shy of $110 at this writing) is what people will pay. Aside from a few morons who apparently bid the price up near $140 on opening day, that price has been remarkably stable. You can't fault Google for trying to collect as much of that money that they can. I think that they did a remarkable job of it.

I'm trying to build a toolbar icon for Firefox. The strange thing is that I can create the toolbar icon itself (ie, when I drag it out of the pallete of potential toolbar items to put it on the toolbar), in both small and large varieties, but I can't seem to get the icon in the toolbar palette display to work. It just shows a jumble of icons - looks like the default icons for the browser (arrows, print, etc, but all in one image).

I've looked at a handful of other extensions, and I don't think I'm missing anything, but I've got to be overlooking something stupid. How can I create the toolbar icons, but the one in the palette doesn't work? If anyone has any ideas, please drop me a line. I'm going to pull the rest of my hair out, and that means that I'd have to redo my avatar down there in the corner. That's just something that I don't have time to do.

Update: Got it. The final step was to make sure that the XUL was being registered with the CustomizeToolbar XUL. The CSS alone may work as well, but I used the XUL, which contains the reference to the CSS. Something like this should work:

<RDF:Seq about="urn:mozilla:overlays">
  <RDF:li resource="chrome://global/content/customizeToolbar.xul"/>
</RDF:Seq>

Along with this...

<RDF:Seq about="chrome://global/content/customizeToolbar.xul">
  <RDF:li>chrome://btoolkit/content/btoolkitOverlay.xul</RDF:li>
</RDF:Seq>

Added to the appropriate contents.rdf, and packaged back up - and then installed again - does the trick. Phew. For those who like reading into things, this does mean that the Bloglines Toolkit will have a toolbar icon in the near future. I just need to figure out some more code, and then hit up Mark for some new icons, and it'll be ready.