New Surfulater Firefox Extension available

Unfortunately the Firefox Extension we wrote for Surfulater stopped working in Firefox V1.5. After a bit of digging around and head scratching it seems that the Firefox developers have changed some code in Firefox which broke our extension, and I imagine others as well.

I happened to mention this to Stephane Grenier and he replied about similar problems he’s had:

That’s actually one of the issues we’ve encountered too with LandlordMax with open source software, they have a tendency to make more drastic changes in their code base with less attention given to who may be using it.

I tend to steer away from using open source software for a range of reasons, and this will be just another one. Backwards compatibility is extremely important in software development, it is a burden we simply have to carry.

The good news is that I’ve been able to update the code to use alternate methods and now have a new release of the extension which works with the latest Firefox 1.5 RC1 release as well as earlier releases. I’ve also updated the Surfulater images the extension uses, to the latest ones.

To install the new Surfulater Firefox Extension go to the Download page and install the extension as per the instructions there. This will replace your current extension with the new one. Remember to restart Firefox after installing. The new Surfulater Extension is V1.5. You can check this using Tools|Extensions in Firefox.

Hopefully the extension will continue to work as future releases of Firefox come out.