favicon service in firefox

That's the places thing everybody talked so much about when announcing firefox 3. What we actually see in bookmarks or history is just a top of the iceberg. Had I read the places documentation before I started working on seoprofesional toolbar, I would probably just use the places tagging system or something to select the sites to remember...

Anyway, at the first attempt I just used favicon service as follows:

The trouble was, the icon was really the favicon from the site. The original size (whatever it was) and possibly animated. That I didn't like. So the second attempt looked like this:

The resulting icon is 16x16 and not animated. Only remember to put try...catch in the right places because you must close the container at the end (result.root.containerOpen = false)

(The last example was updated on the 7th of Feb 2010 to incorporate changes in FF3.6)

flot and flotr

I promised a few words about flot. I thought a lot about it and instead of writing how good and easy to use it is, I will just point you to it. I must also mention flotr, which is a similar library, but uses prototype instead of jquery. Now the links:

• flot
• flotr

2 small notes: I like flotr better. It's output seems to me to be a bit more polished. But I picked flot for seoprofesional toolbar, because flotr didn't like interrupted series (a line from 1 to 3, then nothing from 3 to 4, and then a line from 4 to 5 again). On the other hand, flotr does support value labels, for which I had to write my own plugin.

ff3sudoku now for google chrome

I have just finished and released ff3sudoku for google chrome. It should be roughly the same as the good old ff3sudoku for firefox but thanks to the firefox system of approval of add-ons by editors you have to wait for the firefox version even though I released it about a week ago, while you can have it instantly for chrome. Good work google!

Now, if there is anybody actually reading this who has installed the extension, please give me your feedback. The extension has it's rough edges and I need to know whether I should be polishing them or not...

firefox personas disappointment

I finally got down to getting personas installed on my machine. Honestly, I do not understand what the hype was about. It's nice, alright, but is that all? Just an image to display on top of the window and another one to display on the bottom? I sort of expected something like skins we all know from X-Window System widget sets, where at least all window backgrounds are changed.

Yet, skinning the red panda opens one interesting possibility, that as far as I know hasn't been researched much yet. How about making your web-page follow the mood of your browser? Or the other way round, your browser, following the mood of your webpage? As far as I can say, none of these are implemented in personas. I expect the second one might be considered a security threat, because if I understand correctly the header and the footer image can actually be html with some javascript in it. Or am I wrong?

Anyway, I can see personas firing a DOM event to a freshly loaded web-page, telling the page what the currently selected persona is, allowing the page to react. The only problem is that there are too many personas for a web-page to implement. Perhaps there might be a way how to allow a web-page use a local resource - a persona-related background image. Web-page will thus indirectly access the viewer's hard-drive. Here we are back to security threats.

(...might be continued...)

ff3sudoku 1.2.0

I have just released a new version of the sudoku firefox add-on. It finally let's you remove the tooltips some find so annoying. This version hasn't been approved by editors yet, so it is still marked experimental. You must go directly here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/8036#version-1.2.0 to install it.

I have got some ideas what to do next, but to be honest, I would like to see some interest. I mean, if everybody is pretty much satisfied with the status of sudoku, there is probably no need for me to waste time on it.

Meanwhile, I will look a bit more into turning the bloody thing into a Google Chrome extension.