development corrupts

Have finally redownloaded Google Chrome because I need it for some troubleshooting. Before doing so, I looked up how to disable auto-update, and discovered that it's now a matter of changing a setting via the Terminal, rather than deleting the auto-update program. This seemed a lot less virus-like creepy, so I have Google Chrome on my system right now, and feel okay about it.

While moving over settings, I discovered I'd have to restart Firefox -- shutting down Firefox took over an hour! And ate up all my CPU! I had to force-quit it after all; luckily didn't lose any data.

As a bit of amusement, I decided to see what it would take to get me to switch over to use Google Chrome regularly. At a minimum, I'd need:

• Adblock and/or JS blocker (I went with Adblock, but I'll try to retain all my casual browsing on Firefox with NoScript on)
  
• Something to keep count of open tabs (settled on TabGlutton)
  
• Ability to quickly edit and preview CSS (probably somewhere, but I haven't looked for it; just the current hacky ways are enough for now)
  
• Firebug or equivalent (built-in)
  
• Greasemonkey script support (built-in)
  
• ReadItLater (Found ChromeItLater; slightly clumsier than the official extension Firefox, but workable)
  
• A JS shell (I have a bookmarklet, but I eventually decided to go with the jsshell extension)
  
• a JSON prettifier (JSONView for chrome)
  
• The ability to copy just the link text instead of the link address

I found what I needed, or a good-enough equivalent, for everything but the last one. Searching through the extensions site and through the greater web turned up nothing. So.... I ended up writing my own.

( screenshot )

It didn't take long; however, figuring out the difference between the content_scripts side (which lets you manipulate the webpage) and the main extension body in background_html (which lets you manipulate the browser behavior) took some doing.

The basic "hello world" example shows you how to create a regular extension, one which interacts with the browser. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out there was something beyond that.

After I figured out that the reason my extension wasn't doing anything was because it was running once when the extension loaded, when it needed to be running once per page, I slowly came to the realization that I'd need something like body.onload. Unfortunately, even after going through all the links from the getting started portion of the tutorial, I had still overlooked the other part of the API which would enable me to interact on a per-page basis (hello content_scripts!). I tried to force it by using chrome.tabs.onUpdated.AddListener... if ( changeInfo.status == "complete" ) as a poor extension writer's body.onload and that worked, but wow was it ugly :D

I can't remember how I found the link, but after finding that section in the documentation, I was more than halfway there.

In my initial version, I tried to programmatically create a range (document.createRange()) to select the text in the content scripts portion of the page. Right after that, I'd rely on some timing hackery to run document.execCommand("copy") (yeah I didn't know this function existed until now either) in the extension trusted area. It worked, ish, but was ugly and hacky and brittle.

Reason I had to put document.execCommand in the extensions area: it seems to need to be run with higher privileges. If it were available to the website, any website could see your clipboard, and that could potentially leak information. Since extensions are more trustworthy -- you choose whether to install them, and I believe they're vetted to some extent by reviewers before they are distributed in the gallery, they are allowed to execute with higher privileges than Joe Random Website.


On the second version, I figured out I could send just the relevant information (the link text) to the main extension body via a communication pipe, and have the copying take place there. That took away all the worst of the brittleness and most of the hackishness (there still is some ;-)), as well as gave me some flexibility for being able to output in multiple formats should I choose to code that in in the future, and I am quite happy with the results.

I can't take credit for it though: I had the glimmerings of the idea on my own, but I didn't actually get it to work until I peeked into the source code of Auto Copy.

So anyway, there it goes. Have made a Google Chrome extension, it wasn't very painful once I managed to wrap my mind around how everything fit together, and I'm happy with the results.


Ohh one final thing: for a long time, I thought that console.log() didn't work in extensions, and struggled with that. It turns out:

a.) console.dir in Google Chrome is the equivalent of console.log in Firebug; and
b.) If your console.log calls are in your main extension body, you need to open the background.html view from the extensions tab, as the console log output is put there. If your console.log calls are in a content_scripts js file, then they'll show up in the webpage

And there! :D

Really simple script for you guys today: Support: Summary in Title.

That appends the the request summary into the window title which lets you the request summary show up in your browser history. Meaning, you can just type in a partially remembered request summary in your browser address bar, and it'll (hopefully) pop up the URL to the request you're thinking of.

Works on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal. (Note that it may be conflicting with some other scripts? I had to drag it to the beginning of my list in the Greasemonkey settings for it to work on LiveJournal)

I'm playing around with Jetpack. Probably won't have time to write any scripts, but one demo, in particular, caught my eye.

Tab Grapher: it shows you a graph of the number of tabs you have open in your browser over time.

I WANT. I NEED.

I HAVE.

ETA: They also have an ad-blocker, written in approximately 100 lines. I'm trying it out of curiosity (I've never used an ad-blocker before, though). Hmmm, now I'm fighting the urge to extend it to store the number of times that I block an ad on any site.

(What's stopping me is that I can't decide between counting the number of times a particular ad is blocked, or the number of ads on a particular site)

So after switching to Firefox 3 beta, I found that a lot of my extensions no longer worked, which I expected. What I didn't expect was how much I'd miss the invisible extensions. These are the extensions that don't require any configuration, don't have to be triggered by any buttons, don't show up in the interface; they just work.

I could get used to losing "Colorful Tabs", and have my tab bar be a dull monochromatic gray. It was losing Tabs Open Relative (and Submit to Tab) that I've found really irritating, because there are no visual indicators that they no longer work. I only find out/remember when I try to open a new tab, and find myself at the end of the tab bar, not beside my current tab. Just a few minutes ago, I restarted Firefox (because I keep forgetting that the RTE pop-up windows won't work with Firefox 3 and I can't close that pop-up otherwise), clicked on a link... and it opened beside my current tab.

I feel so incredibly happy! This is almost better than if the Web Developer toolbar had been updated -- almost.

Oh interesting. If I add "&client=firefox" to the parameters in a Google search, it redirects me from http://www.google.com to http://www.google.com.ph. The navigation links at the top left hand side are different, as are the order of the search results.

Any value that starts with "firefox" will do. For example, these URLs pass me back to google.com.ph:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=firefox
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=firefox-a
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=firefoxgibberish

However, taking out the &client, or giving it a value that does not start with "firefox" does not perform the redirect. For instance:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=gibberish
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=opera

Finally, the redirect doesn't work if I specify the country:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=aveleh&client=firefox


I wonder how it affects people in other countries? I'm guessing it will probably redirect to your country-specific Google domain.

(This all started because a search for "arno tom ponnixry" returned only results for my journal. And then we found out that searching for "aveleh" returned my journal as the fourth result in aveleh's Google search, but as the first result of mine. From there, it was a short step to me comparing both URLs for differences, and accidentally stumbling upon the auto-redirect.)

It turns out I can only live without Tabs Open Relative and SubmitTo(New)Tab for one day. Without Greasemonkey for two.

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OH MY GOD I thought today was going to be a lazy day, but now I'm wide awake.