New Tab JumpStart

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.3 Release

2011-01-22T12:01:58-08:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.3 has been released Still waiting approval.

This release updates compatibility so it is correctly recognized that Firefox 4.0 is supported (meaning all beta versions up to the final version whenever it is released).

There are several smaller fixes :

Fixed conflict with Net Video Hunter
Added background image support to Bookmarks View

And one new feature (Firefox 4.0 only):
Added support to open all tabs from bookmarks toolbar into separate Tab Group (Tab Candy/Panorama)

Big thank you for all donations I really feel appreciated.

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.2 Release

2010-12-07T12:53:48-08:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.2 has been released last night. It is already approved actually, so I’m a bit late with this announcement – great stuff by reviewers I have to say.

This release was about fixing some critical issues, one of them regarding Firefox 4 beta specifically.

Toolbars are now appearing properly in Firefox 4.0 beta. This turned out to be a simple fix at the end so that is why I decided to immediately do the release. This is the most important fix of the release.

Other fixes are around URL recognition – basically anything starting with http(s), ftp, or about: (like about:config) will be recognised as URL. This will thus allow using intranet addresses.
Another fix is for JumpStart toolbar button – it was causing toolbar buttons from other extensions not to be shown in customize toolbar dialog, it was reseting toolbar changes. That’s fixed now, the button and customization is now working as expected – you can drag button from Customize Toolbar dialog or add it through extension’s configuration.

Brazilian Portuguese is updated and Swedish is added too. Thanks to guys from babelzilla

As you can see, not all of the announced fixes are here, however they will be getting in hopefully by the end of the year. I’ll be announcing plans shortly. Enjoy.

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.2 Announcement

2010-11-26T14:04:22-08:00

This release is primarily focusing on getting the extension ready for upcoming Firefox 4 release. There will be some fixes, some internal changes and some features added. The plan is to release it before new year. There’s still time to hear some ideas though.

Critical

The bookmark toolbar doesn’t show in firefox 4 beta
Toolbars do not show on FF4 (this is duplicate of above – will merge them after fix)

Since in the latest beta of Firefox 4 issue with bookmark toolbars did not magically disappear I’ll aim to fix it in this release. Basically how toolbars are realized in this version is different than how it is done in 3.6 at the moment and my guess is it is not going to be changed for the final release so no options but fix it as soon as possible. This is critical issue and has to be fixed for the next release.

Intranet urls not working properly
Some addresses not recognized properly as urls

This issue is highly annoying, especially for intranet sites. The change will be to handle everything starting with http:// as an URL for now, but will leave the logic as is when there’s no http:// in front so it still recognizes URLs.

Toolbar button – preferences causing other changes to be lost on toolbar

Toolbar button is not implemented correctly and I have to fix it to conform to the best practices in that area.

High

Another notable change is how thumbnails and details about them are stored. By changing this it should become faster and some issues should be sorted out by it:
Save full sized thumbnails permanently
Ability to remember thumbnail/snapshot of the page even after clearing history

Drag tabs into the grid to add them manually
This one will be done partially – I’ll add context menu for this on tab or on thumb itself (or both), however drag/drop will be done if time permits.

Time permitting

Sites list differs from navigation bar’s one
Will try to update the list with details from navigation bar history instead of how it is done now. How it is done at the moment suffers from inability to refresh the list until Firefox is restarted.

Add a “Recently closed” toolbar to Jumpstart
This should be easy when I add my implementation of toolbars (see: The bookmark toolbar doesn’t show in firefox 4 beta above)

Allow drag from sidebar onto url bar or tab strip

Searches go through Yahoo! in Inquisitor extension is selected in Search Bar

Conflict with ‘TooManyTabs’ extension

Search visibility to be configurable

The ability to permanently pin tabs
Will look at this, however don’t know if this is still valid

Site preview in real size

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.1 Release

2010-09-19T13:23:22-07:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.1 has been released last night. It is still pending review but you can install it from the link on the right.

This is mostly service release, with issues fixed as announced.

Interesting new feature is ability to choose how many bookmarks/recently closed are displayed in the sidebar. Go to add-on’s preferences to configure that (hint: use slide menu).

Search box is getting focus by default but there is option in preferences to turn that off. It is auto-expanding now so it might be more useful, you should check it out before dismissing it. I’ll keep improving it with every new version, but will also add option to completely remove it so it doesn’t use space if you’re not using it.

There is one notable known issue and that is for Firefox 4.0, toolbars are not working. There was some change in Firefox around it, I was relying on existing places toolbar binding which seems to be gone now. If it’s not there in the final release I’ll have to do something about it. Lets hope 4.0 does not cause more trouble.

I also got reports that bookmarks page is slow to filter on tags (Firefox 4.0b6), so if anyone else is experiencing similar issues please let me know.

JumpStart 0.5a5.4.1 Announcement

2010-09-06T16:07:01-07:00

This is going to be a service release fixing some issues. I’m looking for fairly quick turnaround so this should be done by the end of the month, preferably until 20th September.

Here’s the list of planned fixes:

59 Allow user to choose if new-tab-jumpstart’s search bar or AwesomeBar is selected when new tab is created
62 Focus on search to be configurable
63 Make menu drop down faster
68 Support more items in the ‘Recently closed’.
72 Turn on toolbars by default + on adding new toolbar auto enable it
76 Mark URL as typed when typed in the search box
74 Number of thumbnails configuration – slider is moving while changing configuration
77 Text in search toolbar too short for url
78 Remove iframe after initial search results are shown
73 Number of thumbnails configuration is not properly determining maximum number of rows and columns

And I’ll try to fix them in that order. Now not all of them might be feasible to fix in this time frame so some of them might get dropped, however there are a few critical issues that will have to be released. The list is chosen by priority and time required to fix them. Here is the full list of outstanding issues.

JumpStart 0.5a5.4 Release

2010-09-02T03:11:56-07:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.4 has been released last night. It is still pending review but you can install it from the link on the right.

This release brings some interesting new features:

Slide menu on the right allows easier access to configuration:
- Preferences
- On-screen number of thumbnails configuration
- On-screen configuration of toolbars
Now you can change number of thumbnails directly on screen with live preview
More toolbars can be added – select any bookmarks folder to show it
JumpStart can be selected as homepage now – go to Firefox preferences for homepage and there’s a button to select JumpStart
Search is now working with following features:
- If URL is entered that URL is loaded
- keyword search is supported
- search by current selected search engine is done with access to results by other engines
On preferences dialog, info tab, you can copy/paste a list of URLs and pin or block them
New languages supported: Spanish (es and es-AR), Chinese (zh-CN) and Portuguese (pt)
Firefox 4.0 support
Status bar button is hidden by default

Known issues and workarounds:

Turn off Search textbox focus – go to about:config, find mlalevic.jumpstart.focus_on_search and change it to false
When configuring toolbars – Show toolbar preference is not set automatically, so if it was turned off, it will stay off and new toolbars won’t be shown on page refresh. Workaround is to turn it on on JumpStart preferences dialog
Number of thumbnails configuration is not properly determining maximum number of rows and columns – No workaround, needs to be fixed in the next release
Number of thumbnails configuration – slider is moving while changing configuration. Workaround is to click on it to select it and then use keyboard buttons Left and Right to change configuration
Toolbars do not show on FF4.0 – seems to be an issue with Firefox, I’ll check if FF 4.0b5 improves things a bit
When URL is typed in search text box, navigation happens but visit is not marked as user typed so it might affect history statistics – no workaround, needs to be fixed in next release

Features in pictures:
Coming soon.

JumpStart 0.5a5.4 Announcement

2010-07-26T13:55:05-07:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.4 is planned to be released by 1st September 2010.

Update: Release will be done on the 1st September later in the evening. Status of implemented items in green beside them.

Here’s the list of planned features/improvements:

Search functionality – search with default search engine + easy access to other search engines Done Some styling and visibility will be improved in the next release
Ability to add more toolbars to the page Done
Easier access to configuration of number of thumbnails on the screen Done
Performance improvements around thumbnail generation/saving Deferred
Support for upcoming Firefox 4.0 Done
Support for Portuguese (pt) and hopefully Chinese (zh-CN) Partial
Other fixes and feature requests:
- 22 Search with default search engine Done
- 54 Option to remove status bar icon Done
- 50 Show as a homepage Done
- 26 Tack/remove site list Done will be improved in later versions
- 51 Add websites of choice Done see 26
- 45 Configuration of number of thumbnails and better thumbnail generation Partial
- 16 Drag tabs into grid to add them manually Deferred
- 37 Show list of sites as they appear in awesomebar Deferred
- 49 Thumbnail image not centered Deferred

Finally support for Firefox 3.0 will be dropped, and as I said above support for Firefox 4.0 will be added. Firefox 3.0 represents under 2% of JumpStart users, and there are already more using Firefox 4.0.

That’s the plan, any suggestions or last minute requests drop a comment here, discuss it or start a new discussion if you have more specific comments.

JumpStart 0.5a5.3 Release

2010-02-09T14:46:54-08:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.3 has been just released (UPDATE Had to fix a bug for successful review so latest version is from 15. February). It is still pending review but you can install it from the link on the right.

This is a smaller release, mainly targeting fixes for Firefox 3.6, however there are a few new features. Next bigger release planned for end of March, will write about planned improvements in coming days.

Now off to the release notes:

New features:
Showing bookmarks toolbar on top or bottom
Status bar icon – show extension’s main window, or right click for options
Keyboard Shortcut – Ctrl+Shift+L
Improved thumbnail refresh

Fixes:
Fixed issue causing bookmarks toolbar to stop working after some time
Some FF 3.6 specific fixes – bookmarks toolbar, favicons etc.
Right button now works on bookmarks toolbar
All supported locales brought up to date

JumpStart 0.5a5.2 Release

2009-12-25T13:49:37-08:00

JumpStart 0.5a5.2 has been just released. It is still pending review but you can install it from the link on the right.

First of all thanks for comments and feedback (especially to Brad who gave very detailed comment with lots of suggestions). I am now adding feature requests and reported issues from comments on the add-on’s AMO details page. Basically I would appreciate if you have found an issue to report it by following link on the right: Report a Bug. That way I am immediately notified about it and you can follow the progress on it.

As you can see this is the new homepage for New Tab JumpStart. It is still work in progress and I am working on improving it so stay tuned. You can subscribe to the news feed – basically I will only post news on new releases and maybe announce major new features so I expect one or two posts per month.

And now off to the release notes:

New features:
Rearrange thumbnails – drag drop
Bookmarks tab
Added notification showing most notable changes and link to the release notes
Customization: Hide/Show side bar (bookmarks, search and closed), Hide/show bookmarks toolbar, Transparent background (options on Thumbs tab in preferences)
Blocked links can be now un-blocked – it’s in preferences on Info tab.

new locale:
vi-VN (Vietnamese) thanks to Nguyễn Hoàng Long at timelinelive.blogspot.com

Fixes:
Search textbox width
Alignment of favicon and link on thumbs
Favicon showing instead of thumb (when thumb image unavailable) is now set to be of its original size
Some FF3.6 fixes

Known issues:
- FF3.0.x bookmarks toolbar not showing drop down at the end (it’s only shown when sidebar is hidden), cannot drop new items to it
- right button does not work on bookmarks toolbar

Locales not updated:
-de , pt-BR, pl-PL

JumpStart reviewed by MakeUseOf.com

2009-12-22T17:30:46-08:00

New Tab JumpStart has been reviewed in one of the latest articles on MakeUseOf.com – How To Add 20 Best Features Of Other Browsers to Firefox.