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….