Everyone who uses Firefox regularly has a core of extensions that they have grown to use so much as to make them necessary to browsing.  One of the most tedious parts of browsing and then posting material is the saving and organizing of large amounts of pictures.  I fully use 4 extensions every day for this task, and have several others that I use at least weekly.

One of the most useful of these extensions was Bazzacuda Image Saver.  I loved this app because it could detect images in tabs, save them to a predefined folder, and close those tabs, all in one step.  Plus it has the separate ability to find the largest image on a page opened in the current tab, and will save that image and close the tab.

Upgrading to new Firefox versions takes a little bit of finding, updating,  and re-installing of extensions.  For the most part, everything works at least the same as before, but with each new version, we all lose a few extensions that were orphaned by their developers.  I lost Bazzacuda when I upgraded to Firefox 3.0.  The extension would work every so often, but for the most part gave a very generic error and did nothing.  I tried to find other extensions to replace it, hoping that eventually the developer would fix the extension.  I was let down on both counts.  No other extension (or combination thereof) would replace it, and the developer website is now redirected to something completely unrelated.  Despite many comments asking for updates, the developer has been silent on the Mozilla Addons page.

So, a few days ago, I set out to see if it would be a simple change to fix it.  I had already overriden the version number to allow it to install, and unpacked the code to take a look.  Unfortunately it wasn’t something simple to find, but I eventually found it and fixed the problem and the little cascade of other problems it caused.

So, since it wasn’t something superficial, I am releasing the modified code.  I changed the name to be generic, just in case the original developer decides to release more versions of his own program.  This updated for Firefox version 3.0.2 extension is called simply Image Saver. Both the original extension and my updated version are under MPL/GPL licensing, so it should be no problem.

I also wish to add-on functionality in the future, such as more folders and more hotkeys.  So renaming it now seemed best.

Download it from the Image Saver Project Page.

update 10/9/08: If you are one of the people that downloaded this yesterday, please redownload it and install again.  A bug not allowing the default folder location to be saved has been fixed. Eventually I’ll put automatic updates in.

Being bored around summertime allows me to toy with the idea of writing snippets of code to help me out. The number one hardest thing about coding and developing is finding an idea… especially an idea that someone hasn’t already done.

I’ve wanted to tackle a Firefox Extension for awhile now, mainly just to know I could do it. So far I’ve only messed with it and had it say text in the taskbar, obviously not too useful.

Today I was fed up with the fact that the only time I get my anti-virus to scan downloads automatically is if I have them go through my download manager. The problem is, so many sites have download redirecting that download managers won’t work. So I need to remember to trigger the anti-virus manually after it is downloaded. So I finally went looking for a Firefox extension to do it for any download.

I went to the add-ons site, and browser around and didn’t see anything. Then I tried the search for “virus” and still nothing. Well, could this be a new project for me? Surely someone has done this before?

And yes, they have, a Google search turned up an old extension called DownloadScan, and further searching revealed SafeDownload.

Automatically scan downloaded files for viruses. You can choose to scan immediately after the file has downloaded or wait until Firefox exits. Works well with NOD32 anti-virus.

This one is simple, you plugin your virus scanner location and any arguments you want in the options. You can actually have up to four things scan your files, so you can run a spyware checker, or whatever, along with your virus scan. One nice feature, as I do indeed use NOD32, is that it shows all the arguments for NOD32 in a popup window, along with their descriptions. I already knew these, but I remember the initial setting up of command-line NOD32 took some learning, and this will definitely help other people.