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.

Interclue 1.5.4 is now available from addons.mozilla.org

This is primarily a maintenance release to address issues arising from significant interface changes in Interclue 1.5.3. It also improves general usability, and adds compatibility with FireFox 3 beta5.

New Feature:

• New “Send to TurboNote” button for users with TurboNote+ installed.
  Turbonote is a superb shareware “sticky notes” program made by some friends of ours here in Christchurch, New Zealand. We highly recommend giving it a try if you are a Windows user.

Tweaks:

• Updated maxVersion to FF3.0b5
• Per domain security rules now apply to all pages in a domain *and* its subdomains
• The Clueviewer is no longer shown when hovering over Javascript Linkclue icons
• Added mimetype information for non HTML previews
• Changed defaults to no longer show warnings for all internal query strings, only “danger word” links
• Moved Note about internal navigation links to Linkscent menu rather than a first-use popup message

Bug Fixes:

• Images now resize back to normal when clicked
• Bookmarking now works with FF3.0b5
• Added some missing default preferences
• Workaround for 301/302 xmlHttpRequest redirect failure in 3b5
• Clicking the tutorial links before the tutorial was initalised broke the tutorial pages

You can download and read all about our latest beta version here. We hope to get this one into a full release state ASAP so that we will be Firefox 3 compatible again! We’re also trying to make Interclue a lot more intuitive by removing the Linkclue Cursors and replacing them with smaller Linkclue Icons that work more or less like the ordinary Linkclue Icons but are less likely to be visually distracting or activated by accident. This allows us to eliminate the “Linkclue Mode” concept that tended to confuse a lot of people. I’m currently running the beta under Firefox 3beta4 and it’s pretty sweet once you get used to it. Most of what we have left to do now is documentation, screenshots and help text. The tutorial also definitely needs an update. We should be good to go live by early next week, but we’d definitely appreciate as much feedback as you can give us on the beta at this point.