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.

As mentioned, our latest release came out a bit ahead of schedule because we needed to fix the problem with Firefox 2.0.0.12. This meant we didn’t get to give it as much testing as we normally give to new releases. So there have been a couple of small issues that have been causing small amounts of grief.

Sporadic Problems when running under Firefox 3b3

We’ve had several reports now of sporadic freezes when Interclue is installed under Firefox 3 beta 3. We launched Interclue 1.5.2 around the same time Firefox 3b3 was released, and hadn’t done a lot of testing with it, so hadn’t seem this particular issue. It only seems to show up sporadically, and we’re not really sure Interclue is to blame, but if you unexpectedly see all the browser “chrome” lock up while the current page is still scrollable, that’s the bug we’re interested in, please email us at supportATinterclueDOTcom, or use the Interclue Feedback Reporter. We’re investigating the situation and will get back to you as soon as we’ve confirmed the real issue.

New Tutorial Doesn’t Explain Linkclue Modes Very Well

Also, we’ve noticed that in our desire to streamline the tutorial, we left out two important points about Linkclue Modes, and that has been causing a little confusion.

Firstly, the default mode for secure (https) sites is disabled , and you will need to change the Linkclue Mode using the Interclue Icon in the status bar to show Linkclues on secure sites (eg https://addons.mozilla.org).

Secondly, when the mode is”No Linkclues on Navigation Links” (gold icon), which is the default for non-secure sites, or “No Linkclues on Internal Links” (blue icon), you will often see the same yellow and blue Interclue icons appear next to the mouse cursor instead of next to the link. These special icons are not meant to be clickable, they are only there to tell you that the link in question is either a site navigation link (gold) or an internal link (blue).

“Internal” in this case means “any link on the same domain”, while “Navigation” links are Internal Links inside menues, where Linkclue Icons tend to get in the way. This is a pretty technical point, but in general it’s useful to have Linkclues on Internal links inside articles, but not on menus. So by default, Interclue is in “No Linkclues on Navigation Links” mode for non-secure sites.

This can be a bit confusing for many users, and we’re thinking about ways to streamline it and make it more intuitive in the next release.