There’s been quite a delay between the new release and this one. We’ve been a little distracted by our side project Lazarus Form Recovery, which recently became our second Mozilla Recommended Add-on. We’ve also been doing a bit of consulting work, making some cool add-ons for some cool companies - more about that later perhaps.

But we finally have a new Interclue version almost ready to release. Please download the beta and check it out. If you spot a bug, please let us know ASAP.

Interclue 1.6 introduces a great new feature, which we are currently calling HoverClues. These clues occupy a useful middle ground between our Linkclue Icons and the full size ClueViewer. They take up more space than the icons, but they add a lot more information and appear at the bottom of the browser rather than right next to the link, so they don’t get in your way.

So far they are active for a couple dozen different kinds of link, and we’re working on more types, eventually even including short content previews of “ordinary” pages, which are the hardest to do because there are a bazillion different kinds of “ordinary” web page.

As with more or less everything in Interclue, they’re optional - see the HoverClues panel on the advanced options tab - but if you think “they’d be great if only X” then please contact us and let us know what X is! HoverClues are a work in progress and you should expect significant improvements in the months to come.

Interclue 1.6 drops support for Firefox 2.x. Mozilla is no longer releasing security updates for Firefox 2.x and everyone should have moved to 3.x by now. We encourage people to try the new Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate. The javascript engine in Firefox 3.5 is blazing fast and makes Interclue run better than ever.

New features:

• HoverClues: Hintboxes that appear at the bottom of the page when you hover over certain types of link. Check out the test page.
• ShortURL redirection information in HoverClues, via the LongUrl.org API (great for twitter!)
• Optional Search refinement links, powered by Surf Canyon [more information here]
• Interclue can now show Delicious Tags inline underneath search results on the 3 major search sites - see the Search Enhancements Panel in the advanced options tab.

Tweaks

• Increased max image size default to 256KB

Compatibility fixes:

• No longer overlaps Google SearchWiki icons.
• Improved icon positioning when Coolpreviews installed

Update: Just put a new version up that turns on the Delicious Tags under search result links by default. Still not sure if we’ll have this on by default in the final version but we’ve made it so easy to turn off it seems like it’s a reasonable thing to do. Many thanks to Les Orchard, Mozilla Hacker and author of Hacking del.icio.us for some timely tactical advice while implementing this feature.

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” - probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

We’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases we wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

We put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. It took a while longer to get right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, we’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it :-)

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because we haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

Some recent user feedback:

“I am about to remove this application… I feel that the level of engineering in
the solution far exceeds the problem the solution is trying to solve”

My reply:

“Interclue is trying to solve a lot of problems in the long run. But if all you want is to do is say, preview a bunch of links on Google searches, I would recommend Coolpreviews. I do not, however recommend turning on the Coolpreviews switches that prefetch all the links on the page, or activate the addon for all sites (it only works on about 50 sites by default), for if you do it’ll inevitably lead to mayhem - Interclue is designed to work on any page, so we built in a lot of precautions to prevent fetching the wrong links (some of which take actions that are unwanted), or taking up too much bandwidth (a killer if you pay by the meg as many do outside America), and built in a lot of logic to give a useful tooltip on a wide variety of links, and to create tooltips that don’t cover the entire page. This leads to the level of overengineering you’re concerned about. We are planning to make Interclue easier to use, and with a simpler core set of functionality, but previewing on it’s own is a very complicated problem, and simple solutions will never work outside of a narrow range of situations (eg, search engines and directory pages, which is what Coolpreviews works well on, when the user has a fast connection and is not paying by the meg)”

I probably should have also mentioned: If you want a “cleaner” Interclue experience, try opening up the options and turning off all the metaclues and any buttons you’re not using (and yes, you can even turn off the one that leads to the Interclue donation page).

In future builds we will certainly be cutting down the number of options that are turned on by default…many users do appear to be turned off by all the stuff we’ve got turned on ;-)

Interclue 1.5.7 Introduces some important improvements to stability and performance. We have some great new features on the way, but they’re not quite ready for prime-time and thought we should really get these issues sorted first.

Tweaks:

• Clueviewer can now be closed by hitting the [ESC] key
• Better layout for internal anchor clues when they contain PRE tags
• Removed minimize/maximize buttons from dialogs
• Better summary if large image is broken in image preview
• Added “Untitled” link for clues for non-HTML files with no filename
• Using Adblock Plus API rather than permently adding filters for the Amazon product preview

Bug/Performance Fixes:

• Fixed a clash between Interclue and Facebook’s new design
• Fixed an error with incorrect stats being sent if “Check for new versions on browser start”
  is selected
• Fixed a Linkclue positioning error
• Clueviewer no longer gets locked open and unable to be closed
• Interclue no longer burns so many CPU cycles on Mac OSX
• Fixed a bug where Interclue would cause an Unresponsive Script error when visiting certain pages

Things to do:

• If you like Interclue, please spread the word.
• If you really like it, please consider a donation.
• You may also wish to join our Interclue-User Google Group / Mailing List.

Just in time for Firefox 3 Download Day, Interclue Ltd releases version 1.5.6 of it’s flagship browser addon, with full Firefox 3 support, new warnings for links to malware and phishing sites, a more compact and usable status bar menu, and many other improvements over the previous release, which was installed by over 120,000 Firefox users, fully one third of them using pre-release versions of Firefox 3, thus ensuring that Interclue and Firefox 3 are a well proven combination for faster and more productive web-surfing.

New Features in 1.5.6

• Potential “Phishing” Site Warnings
• Potential Malware Distribution Site Warnings (Firefox 3 only)
• Auto-correction of (some) broken link URLs: (e.g. http://http://stuff.com is converted to http://stuff.com)

Tweaks:

• Interclue status bar menu is now more compact and easier to use.
• Further improvements in the Linkclue positioning logic. In Firefox 3, it’s almost perfect. In Firefox 2 there are still one or two sites where the Linkclue icons will appear somewhere odd after you mouseover the link.
• Reduced excess whitespace appearing in some summaries.
• The TurboNote+ button will now be enabled by default if TurboNote+ is installed.
• Improved summaries for links to video.google.com
• Pinned-mode activation hotkey now off by default - most people don’t use it and it was irritating when activated accidentaly.

Bug Fixes:

• The Zoom bug got fixed in Firefox 3rc2+. Users with Firefox 3rc2+ should be able to use previews on zoomed pages again.
• Fixed previews for washingtonpost.com (their server responds with unusual content-type, which we now look for)
• Fixed a problem with “403: Forbidden” error messages being cached.

Interclue 1.5.5 is an incremental release with only a few minor interface improvements and bug fixes.

New Feature:

• Interclue now makes a backup of known good preferences to avoid preference corruption.

Tweaks:

• Added links to the online tour at the end of the tutorial
• Made feedback dialog more user friendly for users with small screens
• Made some changes to the “Show Next Similar Link” algorithm

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where certain Clueviews would disable the bookmark and open-in-new-tab icons
• Corrected a spelling mistake in the tutorial
• (Hopefully) Fixes a bug several people reported in which the “Thank you for installing” page appeared many times over. (See here for details.)
• Fixed a bug where a link to a secure domain that didn’t exist shows no clues
• Fixed a compatibility issue with the latest FF3 Nightly version.

Known Issue:

• The clueviewer may break zoomed pages in Firefox 3. As a temporary workaround, on sites where you have used the page-zoom feature, we recommend that you left-click the Interclue icon in your statusbar and select “Disable Interclue for this Site”. This bug appears to be with Firefox rather than Interclue, we have reported it, and we hope that it will be resolved before the final FF3.0 release.