Cool! It’s All Text! made it into Network World in 10 Firefox add-ons for better browsing.
I’ve had software in magazines before (actually shipped on CDs) but this is the first time in an english magazine.
IAT made Network World
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14 Comments
Hey, one of the reasons I use ItsAllText is because the browser is
unreliable. It might crash, it might lose my session and throw my text
away.
Unfortunately, ItsAllText doesn’t really clean this up all the way. If
ItsAllText hands the text back to the browser, and then the browser crashes,
ItSAllText has already deleted the data.
Can I disable the delete? I’m perfectly capable of cronning a cleanup.
-josh
Hi Josh!
Actually, it isn’t deleted. All the files are marked as “temporary” by firefox. If it crashes, temporary files aren’t cleaned up.
You should be able to right click on the “edit” button and select “Edit using previous ‘.txt’ content” (obviously .txt will be whatever extension you edited it as).
If something has changed so that temporary files are being deleted even after a crash, then I’ll take a look at it.
Ciao!
That isn’t the issue.
Here is the timeline.
1 – User hits edit.
2 – gvim session appears
3 – user edits file in gvim session, and writes the file out, exiting the editor
4 – the addon somehow causes the edit area to flash yellow, indicating the edit is received.
5 – something dumb happens like the browser crashes, or goes to a new page automatically and crashes without submitting the text, or the session is lost and some javascript causes the page to change.
Maybe I misunderstand and there’s really a step 6 where I restart the
browser following the Dumb Thing, and that causes it to delete all the temporary files? I don’t know what the timespan of these files is,
but I’d prefer it to be infinite.
You know, I should just configure vi to make backup files based on the path with an aucommand for my unusual feature request.
I’ve been using IAT at work religiously for at least 2 years now. I’ve got a problem with firefox 3, and the 3.1/3.5 betas on windows. It seems that when IAT is enabled, my browser experiences a lot of latency – 1-2 seconds to focus on click, the same to get focus for text entry, to respond to entering info into text entry boxes (even after the text entry box has focus and as I’m typing), etc. At the same time, other windows apps (editors, outlook, VNC session, etc.) are steady and don’t experience the delay. This happens whether or not I’m editing anything with IAT, but it goes away when IAT is disabled in the add-ons menu and firefox is re-started.
Please let me know if there’s anything I can provide to further troubleshoot this.
Currently I’m using FF 3.5b4, and IAT 1.3.1.
Thanks,
-Peter
@Peter:
Interesting. I’m using the 3.5b4 and I haven’t really noticed this.
Some questions:
The performance has improved with 3.5pre.
The main performance hit is when I focus on the window, though focusing on any text dialog seems to also have a delay before the browser is ready to let me type.
Since you mention tabs… I am also using the TreeStyleTab extension, could this interact with IAT?
Thanks,
-Peter
I’m not entirely sure. I think there is still something that takes too much time. :-/
I have been told that IAT also causes bing.com to pause 5 seconds or so every load.
Ciao!
I like itsalltext a lot, but it delivers a nasty performance hit to facebook (see ticket 74 — http://trac.gerf.org/itsalltext/ticket/74). My browser seems considerably more responsive, and consumes much less CPU when nothing is otherwise going on, once I disabled it, and profiles generated with XUL Profiler look a lot cleaner, too.
As best as I can figure, it has something aggressively looking for text areas, but I haven’t tried really diving into it.
That would explain my performance issues. I use a lot of tabs, and have a lot of textareas active.
Would it be possible to have an feature that would turn off IAT without having to to disable it, and which would allow re-enabling it as well.
Unfortunately, I’m not an expert at FF internals. I’m sure I’m still doing this less than ideally.
Even worse, IAT doesn’t work with FF 3.6 and I don’t understand how to troubleshoot and fix what’s wrong. *sigh*
I’d love to port this to Jetpack or Google Chrome, but I’d need to write an NSPlugin to do the actual editor invoking — There are no ways to call out to the editor from within these environments that I can see.
And I really don’t want to write and maintain an NSPlugin.
Can you explain a bit about what it’s supposed to be doing? I’d be happy to take a look at it (I’m not an expert on this, but I have some knowledge of JavaScript and rather more than a little experience with optimization), but if you could give a primer on what’s going on it would help.
You can look at the source code.
I’m pretty savvy with JS. But Firefox has it’s own rules when writing things that can access the “chrome” parts. I *think* that the main problems are in cache.js, which is what adds the button, writes out the md5-hash, etc.
I suspect the code just needs to be looked at more carefully — there are other addons like Ad-Block and NoScript that also have to watch pages dynamically that don’t exact this kind of performance hit.
I’d settle for a status bar icon that let me search for text areas on the current page. But as useful as IAT is, I simply can’t abide the performance hit.