I found out today that Mozilla doesn’t serve up the latest version of “experimental” addons automatically to Firefox users. And until I can get them to get around to approving my addon, mine remains marked “experimental”. So you have to grab updates from the official download page. Get the latest news on the homepage.
I’ve always been extremely irritated by the simplicity of google’s search results. They require a lot more manual work to navigate than I can tolerate, browsing forward and backward, spawning a new tab to save interesting result, clicking between tabs, etc. Way too much clicking and jumping and tabbing and loss of context!
My lack of tolerance fuels my attempts to engineer workarounds. There’s no way you can live without google’s results any more, so the workarounds have centered on re-engineering the results page. The old perl scraper that I’ve used for the past 4-5 years has required an update every six months or so, but I’ve kept with it until the recent past (it no longer works). This weekend, I hammered out a better way (please insert trumpet blare):
The Google Results Walker Firefox addonI’ve posted it to the Mozilla Addons site (aka AMO), and I’m learning the hoops through which you have to jump to get “published” there. Looks like I’ll need lots of good reviews. If you want to help me out, sign in to the Mozilla addons site and post a review at the public page. NOTE that you have to actually provide a relevant full-sentence comment with the review, or, according to the Addon Reviewing Guide, it will just be deleted! Geesh!
There is a huge backlog of requests for new addons to be published. In the end, I may have to sign up to be an addon editor to get the job done. :>
It’s still a little rough and there’s a lot more I want to do with it. Check the wiki page for the current todo list.
OK, I’m not sure of the protocol on this, but since it’s now released into wild I guess I can brag a little. I’ve done a bit of work on the side for Intense Debate and the first fruits are showing up:
- the announcement of the beta release of my plugins
- the Firefox addons showing a couple dozen downloads and 5 5-star reviews (as of today)
I have newer versions and I’m working on a bloglines beta addon now. Fun fun!
UPDATE: Looks like the beta release of the first two addons is official now.
Lots of people have been doing this style of web mashup for a long time. Things are now stable enough, even in FF3, that you can jump in and get ramped up super-fast.
- Install Firefox, along with Greasemonkey and Firebug addons.
- Grab a starter script from here, save it as [myscript].user.js, and open it in Firefox (Ctrl-O) to install it.
- Bang on it! Change the script to do your bidding…
- change the target website
- browse around for DOM objects to mangle with Firebug’s Inspect
- you can do cross-site xmlhttprequests, whoop!
- reload by simply reopening the file and refreshing the page
- Compile the script into a FF addon in one easy step, here.
Bring all your honed software development skillz, or things will get messy fast. Get mashing!
Also check out chickenfoot for another way to go.
Here are mine, at the moment. These seem to be 3.0-friendly. I’ll update this as more plugins become available/improved.
- Adblock Plus
- SiteBar client (links to a prerelease 3.0 version)
- Colorful Tabs
- FireGestures
- IE View Lite
- Xippee search term management
Everybody loves Tab Mix Plus (including me), but… it’s really just a theft-and-scrub of many other extensions, and the authors haven’t been able to pull it all together for FF3 yet. At least not officially, I’m using this prerelease and it seems OK so far:
And for developing, these speak for themselves. Ready to go for FF3…
