Firefox

For some time I was thinking about the post on how inconvenient Firefox is in comparison to Chrome. Actually there was only one small glitch, but it was driving me mad. In Chrome when you’re typing address the first suggestion is automatically filled in, so you just need to tap Enter. It’s very fast and intuitive. Unfortunately I also need to use Firefox, because it’s the only browser I know which has ability to use it’s own proxy settings, not the ones from system, and it’s really crucial to me. So it was driving me crazy that when I’ve typed part of address and hit Enter it navigated me to these three letters plus .com:) But today after update I can see that finally this functionality arrived also to good old fox, so I like this browser again.

Today I’ve received email from Mozilla that they’ve taken down my add-on. They did that by request from Facebook as trademark infringe claim, because my add-on had Facebook in its name. As to not let the same happen to my text hosting service I’ve changed its name to Text Hoster. I hope that it would be enough as linking to Facebook is really an option for my service, not the main feature.

Finally we have Firefox 4 here, it was delayed several times and I have a feeling that main reason that it was finally released was release of Internet Explorer 9. Why I think so? Because among many advantages new Firefox has few flaws. Let me list them here:

1. When I’m opening a site which has Facebook applet which shows you people who liked it, Firefox is opening this applet also in new tab. Only this applet. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s quite annoying when it does.
2. SiteAdvisor add-on is working on my Firefox at home, but at work it says that due to instability in Firefox 4 this add-on needs to be disabled. Both browsers are at the same version. It’s fixed now.
3. Sometimes Often when I’m clicking link on the page browser opens it, but “forgets” the previous one. So no go back one page functionality is available. It’s especially irritating when using Google.
4. FireFTP add-on crashes when transferring file using SFTP. Actually entire Firefox is crashing:( Fixed! Now this add-on works even faster than on FF 3.*:)
5. Home button on the right side, I’ve really got used to having it on the left, it’s hard to switch now.

I still love it and I’m using it every day, but they should first polish the product before releasing it. But I know that they didn’t want to be late. OK, to not be the grumbler here, I’ll list what I like in new Firefox:

Recently I’ve created three add-ons for Firefox. Two of them were submitted for preliminary review and they’ve passed it without problems. One was submitted for full review from the beginning. I was quite surprised when my add-on MovieSearch haven’t passed full review, because (let me quote Mozilla reviewer here):
It is unclear to us at this time if your add-on will be useful for a general audience so that it warrants public listing. We’re granting you preliminary review only, but encourage you to promote your listing so that it garners more active users and user reviews. You may re-nominate your add-on once there is more proof of its usefulness.

Lets call it a week of Firefox add-ons:) I’ve created new one, this time it’s working with my own site (Facebook Text Hoster). Usage is very simple. Select the text you want to post on Facebook, right click and select “Post on Facebook” from context menu. You’ll be navigated to Facebook Text Hoster site where you only need to click Share button. It’s as simple as my previous two add-ons, the only difference is that this time I’m passing the text through encodeURIComponent function. It encodes your text before sending, so even if you want to post special characters they would be properly displayed.

Since December I was planning to write my own add-on for Firefox. I’m often reading a site where people post movie titles with dots between words instead of space, it was quite annoying to me, however it’s not a big issue. But I also wanted to be able to search for a movie title on my favorite site (filmweb.pl) quicker. Previously I’ve needed to copy the title, navigate to site, paste title in search bar then hit enter. Uff, a lot things to do. Of course there is a search add-on to add FilmWeb to Firefox search bar, but then I must switch it when I want to find something in Google instead. That’s why my add-on has been developed. It works pretty simple, you select the text you want to search for, right click on it and click either “Find on filmweb.pl” or “Find on imdb.com” (yes, imdb.com is also supported:)). As it’s my first creation for Firefox, hopefully not last one, I’m pretty excited. Yeah, I’ve called it MovieSearch, very originally.

There is a little thunder on the net about add-on for Firefox called Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant 1.0 which was installed automatically via Windows Update. There are voices against as well as the ones which try to defend it. Some people even think that it’s some danger, like malware and stuff. Well, it isn’t. This new add-on will just let Firefox users install software using ClickOnce service, which basically lets you install apps directly from browser and provides you with more security as software is not interfering your operating system. Well this functionality is nice, but I’m still against this practice. Firefox is not MS application and shouldn’t be affected by their updates. If somebody would need ClickOnce he would install it. And very uncool from MS side was that they’ve not informed users about this installation, by at least some message window.