01 May 2014

Status of AE Creations extensions and Firefox 29

Firefox 29 introduces the new Australis user interface, with the aim of drastically simplifying the browser "chrome" (the menus, toolbars and navigation bar).  Some work is needed for extensions that add a toolbar button to the browser -- which means that all extensions from AE Creations are impacted.

Here is a summary of the status on compatibility with the new Australis UI that was rolled out with the release of Firefox 29.

Clippings

Version 4.1 of Clippings included compatibility with the Australis UI, among a few other things.  I've already received a complaint that it doesn't work with the Classic Theme Restorer extension, which restores the old look of Firefox.  I've added an enhancement ticket to track this request (issue #12 in the Clippings repository on GitHub), but making Clippings compatible with Classic Theme Restorer is not a priority at this time.

Panic Button

Work is in progress; a beta release was launched a few days ago.  This is a good opportunity to address some long-standing issues: specifically, outdated toolbar button icons and lack of customization of the shortcut key.  The current version of Panic Button is still usable; however, the toolbar button icon will have a fuzzy appearance if placed on the menu panel in Firefox 29, because a 32×32 pixel size of the built-in icons do not currently exist.

Send Tab URLs

Work has not yet started, but is planned.  As is the case with Panic Button, it is still usable with the new Australis UI, but again the icon's appearance when the toolbar button is placed in Firefox's menu panel is an issue for the same reason.  This is a good opportunity to fix a bug and to officially turn on support for Google Apps, since functionality with it is now confirmed.

Delicious Post

Same situation with the appearance of the extension toolbar button icon in Firefox's menu panel.  But because there are no other enhancements being planned for this extension, and since this is the extension with the least number of active users, I'm not prepared to invest much time into it.

3 comments:

Maia said...

I really appreciate that you have done a lot of work for this and i have done none, but i am not knowledgeable to fix it myself: Delicious Post has stopped working for me (error message after posting, to the effect of not being able to contact the Delicious site, 'failure to post') is there anything obvious i could do? Have tried uninstalling and reinstalling. Obviously it is not urgent. Thanks a lotm maia hough

AE Creations said...

I've noticed a similar error when I tried posting my bookmarks as well (yes, I use my own extension too). Most likely the issue is coming from Delicious.com itself; if posting a URL fails, Delicious Post reports the error that it is getting back from Delicious.com.

I will need to look into this issue further.

AE Creations said...

@Maia - I just tried again and it seems to be working now. So perhaps this was a temporary issue on the Delicious site.