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.

In fact, I am posting from it now.

I was skeptical, and I wasn’t alone in that feeling, but I only had one day to be skeptical because they only announced this thing yesterday!  (Kudos for keeping it under wraps).

Google Chrome is a web browser built on WebKit, which powers other well known browsers such as Apple’s safari and KDE’s Konqueror.  Google included a cute online comic book to explain the technology here.  The gist being that the web browser uses entirely separate processes to load each separate tab.  This goes beyond simple multi-threading, and gets into OS territory.  They want to do this to eliminate browser hangups from ultiple tasks needing to use the same process.  While this can and will usitilize more memory and processor power, it also allows one to regulate it easier, especially memory-wise.  Plug-ins (when they appear) will also use separate processes.

The comic gets into computer science territory when they explain how they built their V8 from Webkit.  It streamlines object manipulization and pointer calls and other things you can read about there.

I’m impressed.  First off at the ease of slipping into it right from Firefox.  It handles the same keyboard commands I’m used to, and tabs behave much the same.  Two things it does not have that firefox has:

• Memory munching.  Yes, it uses a spearate process and memory space for each tab, but these are confined spaces, unlike Firefox which could eat all my memory if I let it.
• Addons. none. Zilch.  Yeah, it’s a beta, but man I need my add-ons.

The lack of add-ons will make me only piddle with Chrome when I feel like, not use it for a main browser.  For one, I have many that are hard to live without.  And two, Firefox is damn snappy without any add-ons, too, so it’s unfair to compare Chrome until it’s got the same capablities as a fully-loaded Firefox browser.

But the technology is impressive, and obviously since everything is open source, we are going to have a flood of add-ons coming very soon.

As the title says, not much more to say. This is a huge update with thousands of changes across the board, both on the frontend and backend… so pretty much a brand new browser. I’ve tested a few of the builds, but a couple of my extensions wouldn’t work with 3 (yet), so I haven’t used it for my main browsing.  But I love the auto-bookmark search addition, which was my favorite feature of the Flock browser.  Plus it seems alot more snappy, and less memory hogging than Firefox 2.

Mozilla is trying to get a world record for most downloads in a day off the thing. See more at SpreadFirefox.

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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.

Well, it’s out now. Although, most people already were using the highly stable public release candidates.

Nevertheless, if you want the final version of Firefox 2.0, you can grab it from the Mozilla now.

Highly recommended, and with some simple, but nice, new features.

Well, like I said yesterday, Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 has been released.

You can download it directly from Mozilla here.

Very few of my extensions work, but it looks pretty sharp so far.

Firefox 2.0 beta is due to be released tomorrow.

This sort-of feels like an answer shot to Microsoft’s release of IE7 beta. I’ll be honest and admit I did not try the IE7 beta, and I really don’t plan to.

I will try the Firefox 2.0 beta. I have been using Flock since they released the beta of it a few weeks ago, but it’s not perfect, and I do still hold a special place in my (cold, black) heart for Firefox.

New features include a “un-close” tab button, for times when you closed a tab you decide you want back. Also, Opensearch has been implemented into the in-line search. Which may let me get my 1.57…% discount at Amazon again.

The browser has been feature-complete since alpha 1, so don’t expect too many surprise announcements. Honestly, I just want all my extensions to work and for the pages to come up snappy-like.

New Firefox Installed!

Had a bit of a problem with my old profile after installing, but to be fair it was the same profile, preferences, and even some extensions that I had been using since Firefox wasn’t called Firefox! And it had caused glitches before, but I had (thought I had) fixed them.

So I saved off my bookmarks and user data and created a new profile, and everything is skippy. Still, a regular end-user would have a hard time figuring out how to do that, as there is no easy link to the profile manager.

Mozilla still needs to work on idiot-proofing this thing, but the new version is nice and snappy.

The web browser I have been using the past few months as my first replacement for IE in forever, has changed names and released a new version simultaneously.

Mozilla Firebird is now Mozilla Firefox.

As I was converting the site from tabled mess into CSS/No tables, I made sure it was Firebird compatible, and it seems to be running just fine under the fox as well.