We at Mahalo have had quite a few reports of Firefox 3 crashing when visiting Mahalo.com. (Here's a video of it happening.) We'd love to get this fixed, but we are unable to duplicate the problem on our own machines.

If this happens to you, here is some information that you could send us to help us out:

1. Your Operating System and Firefox versions. Example: Mac OSX 10.4.11, Firefox 3.0RC1.
2. Whether you're logged into Mahalo when it happens.
3. prefs.js. This file is found in your Firefox profile directory, and it contains any changes you've made to Firefox's default settings. It doesn't contain any especially private or personally identifiable information. (Where is my Firefox profile directory?)
4. If you can get Mahalo to crash Firefox in a clean profile (one without any personal information like passwords or an extensive browsing history), then sending us a ZIP of your entire profile directory would be extremely helpful. If the crashing happens in your regular, every-day browsing profile, please don't send this to us if there's any chance that it includes information that you don't want anyone else to know, like usernames, passwords, or browsing history.

So if you'd like to help us fix this problem, send as much of this information as you can to finke@mahalo.com. Just remember: We're all in this together. We don't want Firefox to crash any more than you do.

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.

Mozilla updated their recommended add-ons list today (see this blog post by Basil Hashem for the full story), but the main change I'd like to draw your attention to is that both Mahalo Share and Feed Sidebar were added to the list. Hurray!

If you've maintained a Firefox extension for any amount of time, you know that you can accumulate unused entities as you change the UI or add/remove features. They just pile up in your .dtd and .properties files, taking up space. Here's a bash script that will list out any entities or entries in .properties files in your extension that is no longer being used so that you can prune them out.

Usage: $ ./unused-entities.sh path/to/locale-directory/ path/to/content-directory/

#!/bin/bash

echo "Unused entities:"

for dtdfile in `ls $1*.dtd`
do
	awk '/<!ENTITY/ {print $2}' < $dtdfile | while read line
	do
		search=`grep -R "${line}" "$2"`
		if [ "$search" == "" ]
		then
			echo "${line}";
		fi
	done;
done;

echo ""
echo "Unused properties:"

for propfile in `ls $1*.properties`
do
	awk -F "=" '{if (!($2 == "")) { print $1 }}' < $propfile | while read line
	do
		search=`grep -R "${line}" "$2"`
		if [ "$search" == "" ]
		then
			echo "${line}";
		fi
	done;
done;