MozillaZine

Independent Status Reports (7 February, 2005)

Tuesday February 8th, 2005

By Brian King

Mozilla, and in particular Firefox, continues to get good press coverage. The vast majority has been positive. Following hot on the heels of the New York Times ad in December, comes a cover story in Wired's February issue. This story focuses on the project leads, Ben Goodger and Blake Ross, who have undoubtedly done great work. Yet there are many unsung heroes in the Mozilla world, and that might include you. These are the people who use cutting-edge Mozilla products, and extension authors that adopt the platform and make available a wide variety of tools to make it more attractive to others. PC Magazine recently reviewed 15 Firefox Extensions. Great choices one and all, but these are just a drop in the ocean. Below are some more great extensions in the big wave that is causing ripples throughout the world.

Note: If anyone has an update that they would like included in the next report, go here, or have any feedback on the reports in general, feel free to contact us.

Previous Reports

Journal — 0.1

(A place to write, to keep, to read)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird
  • Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Alpha release 0.1 of Journal is now available.

This is a demo version. It implements some basic features, but many other features do not work yet.

Download this alpha release to get an idea of how you will be able to use Journal when development is more complete.

Notable Highlights

  • XPI installer for all platforms and base applications
  • Create and work with journals
  • Create and work with plain text journal entries, indexed by subject

LinkVisitor — 1.1

(Mark links as visited or unvisited.)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox
  • Platform: All

Now it has keyboard shortcuts and menu item access keys.

Link Visitor is a simple extension to the context menu in your browser. With this extension, you can:

  • Mark a link as visited or unvisited
  • Mark all selected links as visited or unvisited
  • Mark all links as visited or unvisited
  • Always mark bookmarked links as visited

Spurlbar — v0.3

(Use the spurl.net bookmarking service easily)

  • For: Firefox
  • Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, (add / delete as appropriate)

Highly anticipated toolbar buttons and preferences are the latest noticable improvements.

Notable Highlights

  • Preferences (Options) window in order to change extension behaviour. Including disabling static width for those using different sidebars than spurlbar.
  • Localization support. Currently supported languages are Hungarian (Thanks to Koszo Jozsef), Turkish and of course English. To translate spurlbar to your language please contact me.
  • Spurlbar toolbar buttons. Now you can use spurlbar buttons to spurl a page or open/close sidebar.
  • 'Spurl this frame...' menuitem to context menu. By the help of this item you can spurl frame urls instead of whole page. That thing is exclusive which can't be done normally, I hope it'll make it into IE plugin as well.

biobar — 1.2.3

(A power browsing toolbar for bioinformatics database searches)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape 7+
  • Platform: All platforms

The present version has added more biological resources that are searchable from the browser. These include

  • aMAZE
  • KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes)

bringing the total number of Databases accessible to a biologist/biochemist/bioinformatician to 34.

Notable Highlights

  • KEGG and aMAZE now searchable
  • The bioinformatics tools updated to include more Functional Analysis Tools
  • Code cleaned up and optimized

cuneAform — 0.3.1

(The community built editor anyone can use!)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox
  • Platform: Any

cuneAform's internet home has be redesigned to be even more user friendly and give users a better sneak preview of the editor. We are also looking for some developers with experience in XUL and Composer/Nvu/Mozile to enhance cuneAform even more.

Notable Highlights

  • No more messy forums, we now use the Mailing List
  • Online Demo works, even with popup blocker
  • New Roadmap to show where we hope to go

Figaro — v0.1.1

(Opera features for Firefox)

  • For: Firefox
  • Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Version 0.1.1 released. If you ever enjoyed using Opera but had to move to Firefox due to its superiority and extensibility, please give this extension a try.

Research Buddy — v1.01

(a Firefox plugin to assist with web research: bibliographies!)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox
  • Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Research Buddy is awesome! Still some problems with people's installations just plain not working (citations not being added), but overall the project is pretty stable. New developments on the horizon include internationalization, and some presets for format strings.

Notable Highlights

  • Viewing a bibliography opens in a new tab in Firefox, rather than a separate window
  • Problems with format string were fixed
  • But additional development still needs to be done.

Abacus MathML Editor — 0.1.2

(Abacus 0.1.2 has been released)

  • For: Mozilla
  • Platform: All

Abacus 0.1.2, a MathML editor for Mozilla, had a maintenance release on January 31, 2005. The previous version had been non-operational in recent Mozilla builds. No new features have been added in the new release.

IE View — v0.86

(View nonstandard pages in Internet Explorer with a click)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox
  • Platform: Windows

Added Russian, Polish, Traditional Chinese, French, Spanish, German and Italian translations.

ConQuery — 1.5.2

(28 Dec 2004)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird
  • Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Few usability and interface improvements makes your search experience more natural and pleasant in everyday tasks.

Notable Highlights for versions from 28 Dec 2004

  • Manual search plugins reordering
  • Search plugins in main context menu
  • More options for context menu entries manipulating
  • Many bugs fixed — especially for Mac OS X platform

Launchy — 3.9.0

(Launch links from Mozilla Clients in external applications)

  • For: Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape 7.x, Nvu
  • Platform: All

Better, faster, cooler.

Changes

  • Fixed locales
  • Added EditPlus detection
  • Fixed temp files cleanup
  • Fixed parameters
  • Fixed WS_FTP detection
  • Fixed Servant Salamander beta 7 detection
  • Fixed background image bug

viewbgplus — v0.9

(Opens/saves all kinds of background images, not only those in BODY-tag)

  • For: Firefox, Mozillla (untested)
  • Platform: Any

Initial public release, not very widely tested, some bugs and incompatibilities, but main functionality works

Notable Highlights

  • Open possible in new window/tab or same tab
  • Quicksave option, also for "normal" images
  • Very customizable (no GUI yet)

Searchsidebar — v0.1.4

(Bringing advanced searching capability back to life for Firefox users)

  • For: Firefox
  • Platform: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX

This is our first new release in almost a year. Version 0.1.4 is more than an overlay, it is a rebuild of the Searchsidebar extension. Help is wanted with testing and bug fixes.

Notable Highlights

  • Works with Firefox 1.0
  • Inludes locale files for en, es, de and fr.
  • Multi-search does provide sidebar results.
  • Single-search does not provide sidebar results.

Flashblock — 1.2.8

(Blocks flash content from showing on webpages)

  • For: Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, K-Meleon
  • Platform: All

Version 1.3.0alpha now has experimental support for Mozilla Suite.

Other Developments

  • Site Whitelisting.
  • All strings localised and multiple locales and languages now supported.
  • Improved compatibility with other extensions (e.g. TextZoom, ForecastFox).

Previous Reports

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