AutoAuth is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that automatically submits HTTP authentication dialogs when you've chosen to have the browser save your login information. (If you've already told the browser what your username and password are, and you've told it to remember that username and password, why not just have it automatically submit it instead of asking you each time?)

The extension is pretty simple right now (very simple, actually), but I think it has the potential to become a very useful base for enhancing the HTTP authentication process in the browser. For example, a future feature might add the ability to specify login credentials for wildcard subdomains, so that once you've entered a password for foo.com, you don't have to manually re-enter that password for a.foo.com, b.foo.com, c.foo.com, if they all take the same username/password pair. Just tell AutoAuth the username and password to use for *.foo.com, and let it do the work.

You can install AutoAuth from the AutoAuth homepage. (AutoAuth is compatible with Firefox 1.5 and 2, Netscape Navigator 9, and Flock.)

Version 1.4 of Performancing for Firefox has been released, and in the process, it has been rebranded as ScribeFire. The homepage has moved as well, from Performancing.com to ScribeFire.com.

Besides the name change, this release includes the following changes:

• Support for Blogger blogs has been improved (now you can even post with ampersands!)
• We've added support for the new Wordpress API. What does this mean? If you have a Wordpress blog that supports the new API (currently any blog at wordpress.com), you will be able to add, edit, and delete pages directly from ScribeFire, as well as create new categories. (The API will be included in the next major Wordpress release, for all non-wordpress.com blogs.)
• General bug fixes and code optimization.

I'm new to this project, having been asked to pick up where the previous developer left off, so I'm not completely up-to-speed on what the most-requested fixes and features are. So in the spirit of catching me up, feel free to comment below with any feedback until the new ScribeFire.com site is up and running.

You can download ScribeFire from the Mozilla Addons preview site.

While I was reading over the comments at Lifehacker's post on URL Fixer, I came across this critique:

[...] I've run into one little problem with this sucker. I avoid bookmarks like the plague and, instead, create keywords to jump to sites by typing in one word or a short phrase. Anyway, one of my keywords was the term "intranet" which linked to my office's internal database pages. This extension would always turn that into intra.net which would send me out into the web for a site that I didn't actually want to visit. [...]

This situation hadn't occurred to me before, but now that I'm aware of it, I've updated URL Fixer to check first if the text in the URL bar is a shortcut URL, and if so, to leave it alone. Thanks, dashifen!

URL Fixer will now correct ".ku" to ".uk", but I've made no decision on colour, metre, or encyclopaedia.

Cheerio!

I've updated URL Fixer to version 1.2.12. In addition to including a Catalan translation, there are two main changes to the correction algorithm:

1. ";//" will now be corrected to "://" (http;// => http://).
2. All commas and other semicolons will be changed to dots (www,google;co,uk => www.google.co.uk).

You can install or upgrade URL Fixer from its homepage.

I've updated URL Fixer to version 1.2.11. A bug was causing the Chinese translation to be displayed for English-speaking users, so if you were seeing "?? (R)" or Chinese characters instead of "Confirm corrections" in the context menu for the URL bar, go ahead and upgrade. (You can always download the newest version of URL Fixer from the addon's homepage.)

This version also includes 4 new locales: Hebrew, Korean, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Thanks to the translators over at Babelzilla for all their hard work.

I've updated Slashdotter to accommodate the changes that Slashdot made to their HTML. Thanks to all who brought bugs to my attention.

Slashdotter has been updated to fix a bug introduced in version 1.8.5. Comments that were condensed (i.e., only showing title, author, score) in threaded mode could not be retrieved via AJAX as Slashdotter was supposed to allow. That bug has been fixed, and the implementation has been made better than it was before it was broken.