This is a Fennec fox.

I got some great feedback after I updated URL Fixer to be compatible with Fennec, Mozilla's mobile browser, and I'm happy to announce that I've been able to add Fennec compatibility to four more add-ons:

• TwitterBar: Post to Twitter from Firefox's address bar
• AutoAuth: Automatically submits authentication dialogs
• YouTube Comment Snob (still in the sandbox): Filter out lame comments on YouTube
• Slashdotter (still in the sandbox): Adds features to the Slashdot website

So far, I've found it pretty easy to port add-ons to Fennec, with the following caveats:

• You can't install add-ons in Fennec by opening them from your computer; I wrote a script to copy the add-on directly into the Fennec profile, much like an add-on IV drip - straight into the bloodstream!
• There's no easy access to the error console , but you can open it manually if you grab the address from Firefox.
• No DOM Inspector. For now, just browse the source.

It seems that all of these issues could be solved with a "Fennec Add-on Development" extension; maybe that will be my next project, unless easier solutions already exist.

Fennec is the codename for Mozilla's work-in-progress mobile browser for phones and smaller computing devices, and since it supports extensions just like Firefox, I've started adding Fennec compatibility to the extensions I've written (when it makes sense).

URL Fixer version 1.5 is fully Fennec-compatible. I think it's even more useful in Fennec than in Firefox, given the ease with which one can fat-finger a touch-screen or mini-qwerty keyboard versus on a full-size computer keyboard.

(The screenshot above is from Fennec running on Mac OSX, so your visual results may vary depending on your device.)

Links Like This is a Firefox extension I wrote last year that allows you to automatically open multiple links from a webpage. I released the first version in May of 2007 but never really went back to update or improve it; that's about to change.

During a recent conversation about Links Like This, I realized how poorly I designed the interface. For example, after right-clicking on a link and selecting "Open Links Like This...", you used to see this confirmation dialog:

It's a modal dialog, meaning that you can't interact with the page until you've closed the dialog. The problem with this is that, oftentimes, you can't see all of the links that have been chosen as "links like this" until the dialog is closed. This problem becomes even more severe when the dialog reads "Open these 143 links?" and you can only see two or three of the highlighted links.

With the latest update, selecting "Open Links Like This..." from the context menu yields this dialog:

It's not modal, meaning that you can still scroll up and down the webpage when the dialog is visible, but it will stay on top of the webpage until you deal with it. Additionally, selected links are no longer marked with an ugly red border:

Now, they have a pleasant yellow background.

Much better, no? This small upgrade is the first of several I have planned for the next few weeks.

You can install this update at Mozilla Add-ons; if you find Links Like This useful, please consider writing a quick review on the right side of this page. Once a couple of users have given it positive reviews, I can ask Mozilla to make it a public add-on, which would make it available to all users, not just those logged in to Mozilla Add-ons.

Yammer is a service designed to help co-workers keep each other up-to-date on their work progress by answering the question "What are you working on?"

Yammer Time is a Firefox extension that reminds you to use Yammer. By default, every 4 hours between 9AM and 5PM on weekdays, it will pop up this obtrusive prompt:

Just tell it what you're working on (you are working, aren't you?), and it will go away for the next 4 hours. You can change how often it asks (and on what days) in the Preferences dialog. You can also manually update Yammer by clicking on the Yammer Time toolbar button.

You can install Yammer Time from Mozilla Add-ons.

I had been told that after upgrading to Firefox 3, it would only need 15 terabytes of RAM...

Feed Sidebar is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that displays the items from your newsfeeds in a sidebar. It can be downloaded for free from Mozilla Add-ons.

I just uploaded an update for Feed Sidebar to Mozilla Add-ons. Changes since version 3.0.1 include:

New Features

• Added an option to always have new items open in tabs
• Added a button to the search bar to quickly show all items, both read and unread
• Removed "Mark All as Read" and "Mark All as Unread" from feed and item context menus

Bug Fixes

• Sidebar now shows the name you gave the feed, not the feed's default title.
• Marking a feed (or all items) as read is now much faster. In my tests, it only took about 5% of the time it used to.
• Clicking on a feed name in the preview pane now opens the homepage, not a useless blank page.

The update can be installed from Mozilla Add-ons, or you can wait for Firefox to notify you of the available update. If you're not using Feed Sidebar, give it a try; it has seen a lot of improvements in the past few months.

Firefox 3 introduced many new features for extension developers, and I decided to take advantage of some of them in order to update my Feed Sidebar extension. Version 3.0 of Feed Sidebar is now out, and these are the main features and changes I added:

1. Look and feel: I updated all of the icons for the extension to blend in with Firefox 3's new OS-specific look and feel. The sidebar's toolbar uses the native theme icons, and the toolbar button is specifically designed to fit in on each of Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows. (The toolbar buttons for Windows, Mac, and Linux are shown respectively below.)

   

2. Continuous updating: Feed Sidebar used to only check for feed updates when the sidebar was open; now it checks whether the sidebar is open or not (and notifies you when it finds updates). Big improvements in memory usage and performance were necessary to make this possible.
3. Offline capabilities: the extension now caches all of your feeds, so if you go offline, you still have access to all of the data that was in the feeds, and you can read it while offline. When you go offline, Feed Sidebar goes into "Offline Mode", and automatically opens the stored summary from the feed when you click on an item rather than trying to open the webpage the item references. This features makes use of the new online/offline events in Firefox 3.

   Here is a screenshot of what offline reading looks like:

   

4. Places integration: when you add or delete a live bookmark in Firefox 3, Feed Sidebar will detect that via Firefox 3's nsINavBookmarksService interface. When you add a new feed, it will instantly appear in the sidebar, and the reverse is true for deleting a feed.
5. Caching: as soon as you start Firefox, Feed Sidebar will fill the sidebar with the feeds you were reading the last time Firefox shut down, even if you are now offline. This is made possible via the new JSON libraries that shipped with Firefox 3.

Feed Sidebar 3.0 is now available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Today marks the release of Firefox 3. It's free. It's fast. It's the best Web browser ever created. (Yes, even better than Netscape Navigator 9, if you can believe it.) Did I mention that it's free?

Do yourself a favor and upgrade from whatever steaming pile of garbage you're using to browse the Web. Because that's what Firefox 3 makes the competition look like: steaming piles of garbage.

In this episode of "Bug Evangelism," Chris highlights a 4-year-old bug in Firefox concerning bookmark keywords.

Mozilla Firefox lets you assign "keywords" (or "shortcuts") to bookmarks by entering a word or phrase in the bookmark's "keywords" field. The advantage to setting a keyword for a bookmark is that you can load the page more quickly by typing the keyword in the location bar than by finding the bookmark in your bookmarks menu or toolbar.

However, if you assign the same keyword to multiple bookmarks (for example, assigning "tech" to both Slashdot and TechMeme), Firefox will only open one of your bookmarks when you type the keyword in the location bar. This mis-behavior is documented in bug #237180, which was submitted in March of 2004. Some argue that you shouldn't be able to assign the same keyword to multiple URLs, and others (like me), argue that you should be able to, and Firefox should open all bookmarks that have been assigned a given keyword. After all, isn't that what tabs in a browser are for?

So, if, like me, you would like the ability to quickly open a set of bookmarks by typing a single word (think "stats" for a set of pages showing various statistics about your website traffic, or "news" to pop open your three favorite news sites), vote for bug #237180, and leave a comment indicating how you'd like the multiple keyword problem to be resolved.

Firefox 3 is coming this Tuesday, and it's bringing awesome artwork with it.

More information about this poster is available at John Slater's blog, Into the Fuzz.