• Fixes the RGB to HSL color code conversion.
• Adds a new mode for the zooming panel to zoom anything which is beneath the panel.
• Turns the gridlines off by default as they became very computation heavy in around Firefox 18. This was causing new users to have very bad performance while using the add-on.

This was rather an essential update as it puts up a base for the upcoming changes to the add-on. The rough plan is to:

• Deeply integrate the add-on with the in-built Firefox developer tool Inspector.
• Add pixel rulers on sides of the page.
• Better performance while rendering and moving the panel.
• Sleek UI with minimal things except the zooming area.
• Better color picking and palette support.

As always, post any issues on this github page.

Rotten Tomatoes API handles fuzzy matching the search query and gives the best possible movie. You can also restrict the search by year and IMDB. More information can be found about that from the add-on’s home page.

To make searching easier, I added movie suggestions in the search box. As you start typing any movie name, suggestions keep appearing in a drop down popup. You can continue typing your movie, or choose one from the suggestions. See the screenshot below.

I created this add-on for a friend and it was meant to be private only. But it turned out so good that I had to publish it .

Speaking of search suggestions, I am working on bug 831693 which brings search suggestions support to the search box in Inspector Developer Tool (which I introduced in bug 650804) . So what does it suggests ? In short – CSS Selectors. As you try to find the right node using the searchbox, many a times you will not be well versed with the DOM of the page. That is where suggestions will help you choose the correct node. There are a number of use cases for the feature. It shows the number of matching nodes to the selector, makes searching faster and easier and mostly it will help both developers and designers. See the screenshot of the suggestion panel below.

Fingers crossed for getting this in before merge (18th Feb) (sadly it will have to wait till Firefox 22).

In other news, I updated my another add-on Graphical Timeline of Events, bringing support for Developer Toolbox. More interesting stuff to come and I am very close to my 50 first bugs

• Bookmarks enhancer is no longer shipped with this add-on. That means you cannot bring up your bookmarks toolbar just next to the location bar using this add-on. Any other way should still be possible (like customizing and putting it on top yourself)
• Default settings have been modified and Status in Location bar is no longer a default. It can still be turned on from the options window.
• Better first time experience, the add-on tells you that you can modify many features of this add-on and gives you a small walk-through of the options window.
• The submenu of the last breadcrumb also displays few links from the current webpage, making it easier to navigate further.
• Last breadcrumb can now be clicked to refresh the page. The add-on will ask you to enable this feature the first time you click the last part.
• The url’s in breadcrumb’s submenu are cached, so that it can be quickly reopened.
• Full list of fixed issues can be found here.

More good stuff to come in future releases including more prediction based features. Auto adapting to user behavior, etc.

I recently moved to the beta version of Babelzilla. Even though it still has many issues, it is much better than normal babelzilla. So please give it a try and add/update the locales for my add-on through its project page.

As always, issues and feature requests are accepted on the github page. Later.

Some other work that I have been doing through this week is regarding my new add-on Custom Standalone Image Backgrounds. I recently updated it to version 0.5 which removes any chrome-content references and adds a color picker to pick any color from the image to be used as the background. I am also working on a feature to figure out the background color of the image dynamically and use it to provide a streamlined image viewing experience. Here is a quick implementation that I came up with:

Try it out by opening any image in Firefox and running the code using Scratchpad.
It is still a work in progress and the most annoying part of the function is that it can take a lot of time in the getMatchingGroupIndex for loop if the image contains very random colors. I have some ideas to improve the depth of the avg by introducing dynamic color range limit rather than using hard coded 15. You can also improve the code by forking the gist.

I have also been busy implementing a sync engine for my add-on User Style Manager by using Mozilla’s inbuilt Sync Service. MDN has a very good documentation on how to create your own simple sync server. You can find my own implementation here in the repo. This will be a very good addition to the add-on as it will remove the tedious process of installing/writing/copying your favorite styles again and again on each new device you add.

While the structure of this site is good for a normal laptop or desktop, as soon as it comes to even tablets, the double column post hierarchy + one sidebar becomes out of the place. Not to mention the sliding posts.

Thus I finally took some time to write some custom media queries to properly support and handle screen sizes of different resolutions. All of this became easy due to the built-in Developer Tool in Firefox “Responsive Design Mode” in which I can easily mimic various kinds of screen sizes.

You can test the home page of this site yourself, by changing the window size, opening it using Responsive design developer tool or directly opening it on different devices.

Just for a quick preview, below are the various screenshots on different screen resolutions

1600×900 screen resolution.

At 1280×720, the site is still normal.

Everything is normal till now. But if you decrease the width further, the size is suited for a normal tablet.

At 800×600, the sliding posts is gone, and the double column layout is adopted

When width is decreased even further, it might indicated the portrait mode of a tablet, or a high screen size phone.

At 640 width, the sidebar is dropped to the bottom of the posts and the menubar pane is split into 2 rows.

Reducing the resolutions even further, we reach the screen size of a normal touch device.

At even lower widths, (below 450) font size is inflated, and all the menus are in their separate row now, with center alignment everywhere.

Right now, only the home page is optimized, though other pages should also work. Also, I have only considered the resolution of screen for now. There might be ways to properly separate out mobiles from computers also, which I will look into later.

Then came along some awesome mockups by Stephen which introduced options to choose the background of your image. Sadly, there is no tentative plan for that to land into Firefox.

And then I thought, “Hey!, it’s an add-on thing”, and created an add-on that brings the feature as depicted in the mockups into Firefox.

Thus “Custom Standalone Image Backgrounds” add-on was born. Yeah, the name is a bit long. Anyways, give it a try by installing the add-on from the AMO homepage, or via this direct link. It is still a work in progress, but should work for most of the cases. I will update it as and when I get time

PS: For now, this works only on Firefox Aurora and Nightly (18 and 19)

PPS: I have updated the add-on on AMO to version 0.3, which works with Firefox 15 and above, and also fixes some of the issues mentioned in comments. (most probably the NoScript and lesser distractive in unpinned state)

Here are the main and important changes from version 0.9:

1. Styles installed from userstyles.org are now automatically updated in the background with full control to whether overwrite any local changes or completely disable auto updating.
2. Styles installed from userstyles.org are now synced betweed your synced Firefox’s.
   1.  That means that when you install this add-on to a new machine (lets say work) that is synced with your home machine’s Firefox, then all the styles would automatically be ported to your new machine within seconds.
   2. You can even choose to keep the styles that you deleted on your other Firefox.
3. Style Editor window is now a proper window. That means that it can remember positions, sizes and what not.
4. You can now install/write even more variety of Styles that effect the internal UI parts of Firefox, like scrollbars, etc.
5. Visit this page on github for a full list of solved issues in this release.

Visit the features list page to see all the features of User Style Manager.

Many thanks to Drugoy and Alepopeo who helped in testing the features and finding out bugs. Alepopeo also made some nice UI changes and feature requests that we will work on and have a major User Interface revamp in version 1.1.

Thank you all for using my Add-on. As always, post any issues or feature requests on the github page here : https://github.com/scrapmac/User-Style-Manager/issues

Leave a comment below if you like my add-on and spread the word

My Add-ons

Auto Complete

• Properly handle IP addresses
• Control what gets deleted on backspace
• Add your own regular expressions to be treated as normal addresses instead of search keywords.

Location Bar Enhancer

• More customization support. All shortcuts can be changed.
• Better handling of some non http protocol addresses.
• Fixed some edge case bugs.

Timeline

• Version 0.9.3 on AMO.
• Better first run Experience, Interactive tips and indications to the user.
• Faster resizing of timeline window.
• Brainstorming in future ideas.
• Saving and playing saved sessions support coming next.

Magnifier

• Complete visual redesign : https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3250186/scroll.jpg
• Option to smooth out zoomed images.
• More work in progress. Planning for weekend AMO push.

the most important update …

User Style Manager

• Bazillion fixes to improve user experience.
• Support Auto Updating of styles installed from userstyle.org (with total control).
• Support Syncing of styles installed from a valid source (like userstyles.org).
• Targeting to push to AMO today itself.

and a new Add-on …

Sort Tabs Command

• Waiting for review on AMO.
• Command for the GCLI on the Developer Toolbar : sorttabs
• Sort tabs in the current tab group based on their address.
• Sorting can also be done specifically to certain tabs whose address is matching the specified regular expression : sorttabs /bug/
• Can also reverse sort : sorttabs --reverse

Devtools

• Various small to big fixes and features getting ready for Firefox 18 release (9 landed, two waiting to land, and 1 waiting for review and one in progress)
• Complete list of bugs that will land in Firefox 18
• Overall list of bugs that I have fixed

I am trying to keep myself as much occupied as I can be .

This version brings about many bug fixes, some related to race conditions causing hangs, some related to username and password displayed in the breadcrumbs and some related to instantaneous update of the breadcrumb. The most important one was the proper handling of file:/// and chrome:// type urls which were completely broken earlier.

There are a few new feature updates also:

1. You can now customize every shortcut used in the add-on via the preferences. They are named accordingly so that you know what you are changing.
2. The default shortcut for launching the add-on’s Options window has been changed to Ctrl + Alt + L as the previous one is now being used internally by Firefox.
3. You can now choose whether to break the breadcrumbs inside of a query string’s value or not like for url’s like “http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?92190-New-Memory-Tweaker-for-Intel-Chipsets/page2″ at the “/page2″ position. This is controlled via a hidden preference named splitQueryStrings.

As always keep spreading my add-on to your friends and sharing the link on your Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.

PS: I will be soon starting on a big feature for this add-on that will allow people to push and promote links etc. on relevant pages using the breadcrumb menus.

UPDATE: The feature that I would be working on is not advertisement, nor it will track any data from users. It is still in my mind, and trust me, it will still be a feature, and not spam/ads/tracking/etc kind of malaware.

There have been many things bothering me from long time, but I did not get any time to make the changes. Now that I did, I updated this add-on to be even more user-friendly. Here is the change log from version 3.1:

• IP addresses are treated as normal web addresses and no longer open search page.
• Ability to toggle the option to delete last entered character along with the auto-completed text on pressing Backspace key.
• Ability to define regular expressions which will white-list the input to be treated as web addresses instead of a search query.

Update: Version 3.2 had a serious bug which has been fixed in a minor update, version 3.3