Author Archives: Christopher Finke

Mozilla Firefox, Programming

Firefox development productivity tip

Since I always use Firefox as a single window with many tabs (and have become quite adept at switching quickly between tabs, but not so fast at switching between windows), having the Error Console open in a separate window always slows me down. What I’ve done is created a bookmark on my toolbar (right-click, select “New Bookmark”) that points to chrome://global/content/console.xul. This way, I can control where it opens.

Firefox's Error Console in a tab

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Feed Sidebar, RSS

Feed Sidebar 2.0pre

If anyone who has been using Feed Sidebar is interested in testing out the next version, you can install this nightly build of Feed Sidebar 2.0pre. Besides massive improvements in performance and compatibility for various feed types, it sports a nifty new search bar that you can use to filter your feeds:

Screenshot of Feed Sidebar

Filter your feeds with the search bar.

(Clicking the magnifying glass hides the search bar.)

Please send any bug reports to chris@efinke.com or leave them as comments on this post.

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Facebook, Facebook Image-to-Email, Facebook Scavenger

Takedown’d

I received this lovely letter from Facebook’s lawyers earlier today. The key points are transcribed below:

“Dear Mr. Finke:

I am writing you concerning the Firefox extensions you posted at:

  1. www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-image-to-email and
  2. www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger

These plug-ins are deeply concerning to Facebook because, among other things, they violate Facebook’s trademark rights, its Terms of Service, the security of the site and Facebook user privacy. For example, the facebook-image-to-email extensions permits people to circumvent Facebook security measures that protect user privacy and the scavenger extension allows people to harvest data off the site in contravention of the Terms of Service and also infringes upon user privacy. […]

I insist that you immediately take down the extensions listed above. […]

Sincerely,

Mark Howitson
Deputy General Counsel”

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Mozilla Add-ons, TubeStop

TubeStop reviews requested

TubeStop was discontinued on December 25, 2012, and Firefox’s newly-introduced controls for managing auto-playing videos have since made it obsolete.

I’ve finally uploaded TubeStop to Mozilla Add-ons, but it can’t be brought out of the sandbox (protected area for untrusted extensions) until it has some reviews and undergoes an editor approval process. If you use TubeStop and find it useful, I’d appreciate it if you’d write a quick review of it over at the Mozilla Addons page for TubeStop so that I can get that process started.

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Digg

Giving up on Digg

I won’t be reading Digg any more. I’ve visited it almost daily for the past 2 years or so, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen something on Digg that I haven’t already seen at another site (except for stories about Digg itself). The front-page news is always at least a day old, and there are far too few real news stories and way too many “LOL FUNNY PIC” and “OBAMA CAN HAZ ELEKSHUN” stories.

Oh, and where is that OpenID support that was promised to be added “sometime this year” in early 2007? Here is what I wrote in an e-mail to Tom Drapeau after hearing that:

I’m not normally a betting man, but I’d put a week’s pay against Digg actually rolling that out before December 31, 2007. Their ratio of features promised to features delivered is, how you say, crappy.

I’d say that I won that bet quite handily.

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Browser Add-ons, Feed Sidebar

Feed Sidebar updated with everything you wanted

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.

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Extend Firefox, URL Fixer

URL Fixer places in Extend Firefox 2

Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/

The Extend Firefox 2 winners were announced today, and while I didn’t win one of the 3 awesome grand prizes, my submission, URL Fixer, rounded out the list of runner-ups (runners-up?).

First place was taken by Minimap Sidebar Extension by Tony Farndon, which intends to make map/traffic management in the browser less painful; I have to admit, it looks very cool. I’ll be installing it as soon as it supports the latest Firefox beta.

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