I've updated the Slashdotter Firefox extension to make it compatible with Slashdot's latest decision changes. "Hide/Show Replies" is working again, the BSD section has been added to the "Styles" options panel, and most of the code has been rewritten due to the fact that we're no longer living in a Firefox 1.0 world. Thanks to Michael Bunzel for the patches!

YouTube Comment Snob is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that allows you to filter YouTube comments based on spelling, capitalization, and punctuation usage.

I've updated YouTube Comment Snob to work with YouTube's latest redesign, as well as to add compatibility for Firefox 3. It's available for download from the Mozilla Add-ons sandbox until it is approved by an AMO editor for mass consumption.

Fred Wilson is blogging about Firefox extensions today, specifically on the benefits of adding features to the content (the actual webpages) versus adding functionality to the chrome (new toolbars, sidebars, etc.).

He uses Mahalo Follow as an example to make the case for in-content data being more valuable than in-chrome, making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Of course, that feeling might also be due to the microwaved kiwifruit I just ate.

I've just released an update to the Feed Sidebar Firefox extension that adds essentially every major feature request that I've gotten since version 1.2 came out:

• Biggest improvement: Feed Sidebar now has its own history for tracking which items are read, rather than using the browser history. This means that you can clear your browsing history without clearing your feed reading history.
• Feed Sidebar now uses Firefox's native feed parser. This slims down the code in the extension and (probably) the number of bugs.
• The sidebar now remembers which feeds you collapse, and the next time those feeds load, they'll still be collapsed. This has been requested ever since the first version came out, so I feel good about getting it done.
• You can unsubscribe from a feed directly from the sidebar by right-clicking on it and choosing "Unsubscribe."
• You can choose to display all items from all feeds, not just new items. If you enable this (in the Feed Sidebar preferences dialog), items you've read will be light gray; new items will appear as they always have.
• I moved the update status ("Next update: 11:00 PM", "Checking 123 of 456 feeds...") to a status bar inside the sidebar. This clears up room in the toolbar for more buttons, if necessary.
• The first time you run Firefox after installing the extension, the sidebar will open automatically, and the Feeds button will be added to the toolbar. (I had gotten lots of comments along the lines of "I installed it; now what do I do?" Hopefully, this will mitigate that problem.)

Overall, I thinks this version is much sleeker and much more usable than the last, which is pretty much all that matters. You can download the latest version of Feed Sidebar from Mozilla Add-ons.

If you've written an extension for Firefox and you want it to work correctly in Firefox 3, read this right now. The ID of the navigational toolbox has been changed from "navigator-toolbox" to "browser-toolbox," and you'll need to update your code to reflect this change. Basically, if any part of your extension adds a toolbar button or a new toolbar to the top part of the browser, you've got some changes to make.

Update: Never mind; they worked out a new fix that doesn't involve chaning the toolbox id.

One of the latest things I've been working on at Mahalo is Mahalo Share. It's a utility that automatically posts links that you want to share to 11 different services: del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Ma.gnolia, Faves, Pownce, Mahalo, StumbleUpon, and/or Google Bookmarks.

All of this cross-posting is done behind the scenes using various APIs, so there aren't additional popup windows to fill out for each service. We'll be adding more services as they're requested.

I've updated Facebook Scavenger (a Firefox extension that saves a backup your Facebook friends' profile data) to add vCard export support. You can download this new version (1.1) from the Facebok Scavenger homepage, and you might want to hurry. A little birdie told me that this handy tool might not be available for too much longer.

Earlier today, I mentioned that it wouldn't be out of the question to write a Firefox extension that would grab profile data about your Facebook friends as you view their profiles so that you could take that data to another service.

Given that, allow me to introduce Facebook Scavenger. It's a Firefox extension that saves data (including e-mail addresses) from Facebook profiles that you view and then allows you to export that data in CSV format.

Note that this extension does not violate Facebook's TOS since it does not automatically load pages to retrieve profile data; rather, it reformats data that you have already seen on pages that you yourself loaded. Robert Scoble could have saved himself a lot of trouble (and avoided a lot of that nasty publicity that I'm sure he hates ;-) had he just used this extension for a few days.

A while back I mentioned that Facebook Image-to-Email (a Firefox extension that converts Facebook's e-mail address images to plain-text) was broken after some unknown change was made by Facebook. I am happy to announce that it is working again, after I re-tooled it with a different method for accessing the image data of those e-mail address images.

You can download this new release from the Facebook Image-to-Email homepage. If you don't care to know more about the technical details, stop reading now.

Technical wrap-up: In previous versions, I was injecting JavaScript into the document and doing all of the processing of the images there. This is a pain, but because webpage JavaScript is not allowed to access the data of images from a different domain (and JavaScript running in the chrome couldn't seem to do it either), there wasn't much choice. At some point, Facebook made a change to their pages or the server that their images come from, and this method of parsing the images broke.

What I've done is this: instead of accessing the images directly, the extension now takes a screenshot of the entire page (allowed under the browser's security policies), locates the portions of the page that contain the e-mail address images, and parses them out entirely from the browser's chrome, a beautiful place with much looser security restrictions than a webpage. (I've also added character maps for "-" (hyphen) and the "r." sequence that wasn't being parsed properly.)

(Sidenote with relevance to current events: this extension is now a hop, skip, and a jump away from being able to be used to parse and download all of your friends' information, including e-mail addresses. If Scoble had only waited, he could have avoided this whole mess.)

I am aware that the Facebook Image-to-Email Firefox extension is (once again) broken, and given that version 1.1 installed on Firefox 2.0.0.8 was working, and now version 1.1 installed on Firefox 2.0.0.8 is not working, it has to be due to a change that Facebook made. The problem is that I can't discern any relevant changes in Facebook's profile pages that would cause a problem.

The crux is this: I'm getting an NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR error when trying to run context.getImageData(). From what I've read, this implies that the JavaScript is not in the same domain as the image that was fed into the canvas and/or does not have permission to know the image's contents, but as far as I can tell, Facebook didn't change where the e-mail images are coming from, so that would seem to be a strange problem to have.

Any insight into this is appreciated.