Wizard's Blog

Google Web History Updater extension icon

I’ve created my first extension for Google Chrome – Google Web History Updater!

One of my favorite features of the Google Toolbar is that it records your browsing history in Google Web History.  If you don’t like that feature or are paranoid about Google keeping information about you then you might as well stop reading now.

The benefits of Google Web History are that Google uses your history to personalize your search results, and that you can track down a site you visited while on another computer.

Unfortunately Google Toolbar isn’t available in Chrome.  The reasons for this are fairly clear (Chrome doesn’t do toolbars at all because of its minimalist aesthetic) but I still missed my Google Web History.

Several people entered bug reports for adding Toolbar’s features to the browser, but I got tired of waiting and decided to try and make an extension that would update Web History.  I quickly hit a dead end and contacted the Chrome developers to ask them for help.  They said there was no published API for updating Web History and suggested I reverse engineer the way Toolbar does it.  I couldn’t work out how to do it, and the developers said that the Toolbar team were thinking about making an official extension to do it, so I waited some more.

Then I read an article that reminded me that some browsers (Opera) have had this problem for a long time, and there was a solution available for them – the UseGoogleWebHistory userscript.  This is a small javascript file that runs whenever a page loads, and sends the URL to Web History.  I could have converted the userscript to an extension pretty easily or even had the conversion done for me automatically using a new feature of Chrome but although the userscript worked, it didn’t work for every URL.  I couldn’t work out what was wrong with it, so I went looking for another solution.

It turns out that sending a URL to Web History is actually done as a side effect of asking Google for the PageRank of the URL.  This means that PageRank extensions like this one actually do exactly what I want, except that they also take up space on the screen.

I ended up just modifying that extension (mostly just removing the UI) so I can’t take much credit, but the majority of the code is lifted from the Toolbar anyway.

In the end I got what I wanted – Chrome updating Web History.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Google Uses the Toolbar Data (googlesystem.blogspot.com)
• Google Toolbar Fail; Doesn’t Work On Chrome (techcrunch.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Google have published a design document for adding extensions to Google Chrome.

It’s pretty comprehensive, and even exceeds Firefox‘s extension system in a few areas:

We should not need to disable deployed extensions when we release new versions of Chromium.

Unfortunately it’s fairly obvious that the extension feature is at a very early stage, so we probably won’t see it for a long time – at least months away.

EDIT: Google have published a new Extension Process Model document with some more details about how it’s going to work – interesting reading

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Google Chrome with Extensions Your Tipping Point? [Snap Judgment]
• Greasemetal – Google Chrome Greasemonkey
• How to Block Ads in Google Chrome [Google Chrome]

Remember The Milk logo

I think GMail has a big piece of missing functionality – todo’s.  Most of the emails in my inbox are things I’ve left there to remind myself to do something.

I signed up for Remember The Milk quite a while ago when they released a Firefox extension that integrated RTM with GMail.  I didn’t end up using it for very long because I didn’t like the way the integration slowed GMail down.

RTM just released a new GMail gadget that works with the recently released GMail labs “Add any gadget by URL” feature.  This integration works a lot better than the Firefox extension but it still has its issues.

I’d prefer to be able to shrink the box vertically because it takes up a lot of space if you only have a few todo’s.  Also it doesn’t wrap the text in the todo’s, which because of the limited horizontal space means that you can only read the first few words.  There also isn’t any integration between emails and todo’s like there was with the Firefox extension.

All problems aside, I think I’ll keep using the Remember The Milk gadget – it beats sending myself emails to remind myself to do things.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Remember the Milk Gadget Puts Tasks in Gmail’s Sidebar
• Gmail’s New Gadget Support Lets You Remember The Milk
• Tech: Remember the Milk Firefox Extension for Gmail

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

A couple days ago, Mozilla Labs released a preview of a Firefox extension called Ubiquity. The blog post and video do a very good job of explaining what and why it is, but basically it lets you easily combine information from different web pages and services.

For example you can select an address on a web page, look up a map for it and put that into an email in one step.

It works like Quicksilver (Mac) or SkyLight (Windows) – you press a hotkey (default ctrl+space, which is reminiscent of SkyLight’s alt+space) and then type a few letters.  It shows you matching commands, and you keep typing until you find the one you want (e.g. just pressing “g” is enough to select “google search”).  Then you either type some data for the command to use (in “natural” language) or type “this” to insert the current selection and hit enter.

Additional commands for Ubiquity are easily written, so it can be extended very simply.

The preview is obviously not release quality yet – the UI is pretty basic and if you put the wrong input in you get a floating error message that you can’t get rid of.  Nevertheless it is extremely impressive, and I can’t wait for the final version.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The ‘Ubiquitous’ web
• Mozilla extension would tap into typed commands
• Ubiquity: Mash-ups for the masses
• Ubiquity by Mozilla
• The most important “New” thing since AJAX
• Ubiquity prototype lets users take command of Firefox
• Natural Language in your Browser
• Mozilla offers do-it-yourself mashups for all
• If You Want To Create a Mashup, Just Ask Your Browser. Mozilla Labs Launches Ubiquity.
• Mozilla Labs’ Aza Raskin talks about the big picture for Ubiquity
• Ubiquity brings the command line to Firefox
• Mozilla Introduces Language-Based Add On Ubiquity
• Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On
• Ubiquity is My New Personal Assistant in Firefox
• Build your own mashups with Mozilla’s Ubiquity
• Mozilla: The browser as operating system

Image via WikipediaI’ve been using the late betas and release candidates of Firefox v3 for a few weeks now. I would naturally have started playing with it earlier (as I have a blind spot that says a higher version number is always better) but the inevitable lack of support for my extensions held me back.

Continue reading ‘Firefox v3’ »