This initial release seemed to work fine with the Windows version of Chrome, but were failing for Chromium on Mac, as Aadith reported. The error was in the manifest file where absolute URLs were used to identify resources. This bug is now fixed and the extension works on Mac also. I also managed to sneak in a couple of more features over the weekend with the latest version.
If there are more than one flash movies on the page, the popup was not always showing exact flash movie. A visual indication is now in place to "find" which flash is shown in the popup.
The JQuery version was also upgraded to 1.4, with some changes.
The extension file is also smaller as I realized that the initial version was packing unnecessary demo and .svn folders. Those removed, the extension is a lot smaller now.
The final change in this release was to move from Subversion to Mercurial, specially because there would be a lot of branching and I would also be doing a lot of offline development.
About the next release, I am looking at four major features, in order or priority.
- Add options to download a Flash. This is a tricky feature as streaming videos are different from simple .swf files. However, most people have asked for downloading Videos and it may make sense to show the download link from flash video download sites selectively. I have created a branch and am working on it.
- Block or hide Flash Movies to save CPU/Memory usage. I am not really sure how much memory can hiding a flash save, but from the looks of this feature, it sound like it could help. This is easy to do.
- Configuring the flash parameters. This is not a big ask as it is an advanced feature that lets you change the way SWF files behave.
- Blocking Flash as soon as it loads. This feature aims to bring FlashBlock under its hood, and should not be very hard to do. The question however is, do I need to replicate the FlashBlock functionality?
Watch out this space for updates.
