Projects

QuickProxy as a recommended addon

It’s been a long time since QuickProxy was first launched, and apart from some cosmetic and behavior changes the extension remains as minimal as I can get it. I’m happy to announce that on the 11th of September, QuickProxy became a Recommended addon in its category.

While I was having a look around the site to see what this had changed, when viewing the section for Privacy & Security addons, I saw that QuickProxy was also on top for the Top Rated addon.

When I first started on this project, I just wanted to get something as simple as possible out, as all I needed the extension for was for one purpose, to swap between the proxy and direct internet connection. After I had completed it, I decided that it was probably not that uncommon that people were in this situation, which is what pushed me to release this to the Mozilla addon site.

The original versions of QuickProxy looked very basic, with the preferences being just the proxy type that you wanted to select. Eventually requests came in about adding some behaviour on the browser launch, which seemed fair enough to me, as quite often I had fired up my browser, forgetting that I had the proxy enabled, and finding the sites I usually go to not working.

The next complaint was the icons, as I wasn’t the most artistic person. The icons have changed from the originals, which I had to admit were quite appalling, to the third icon set that you see in the preferences now. Some users wanted brigher icons, and this is when I introduced the option for different icon sets, to try and please as many people as possible.

As the extension is today, there are a few more things that I would like to change with how it works, but unfortunately my free time that I have to implement these is very limited. Currently I’m just focusing on keeping it up to date, and fixing any issues that come in (there is still one open issue, which involves the automatic proxy configuration, which is proving to be quite annoying to try and resolve).

I never imagined I’d get the number of users that I have today, and it is through your support and reviews that I have been able to achieve what QuickProxy is today. As always, I appreciate any feedback on the extension, and feel free to send any constructive criticism that you have, as the more people tell me the more I can try and adapt it to suit as many users as possible. As my current user base is averaging around 65,000 daily users, I know that not all changes will be welcome to everyone, which is why I will not be changing the base behaviour of the extension, and any future changes will be on an opt-in basis, with the options in the current preferences window.

Thank you all for your continued support to this addon, and hopefully I’ll be able to get some free time soon to work on the features some of you have requested.

Ozzie QuickProxy

The 3.5.* compatibile release of QuickProxy has finally been approved by the Mozilla editors, after 6 weeks from the initial release. I hope that the time that this took isn’t going to remain for any future versions that are submitted, specifically for versions that are required for future firefox releases. Those using the previous versions should now be able to auto-update to the latest version through Firefox, or you can get it manually by going here.

I wish to thank all my users for being patient while this process ensued, as I wish there was more that I could do to get it pushed through Mozilla’s approval process.

This does bring some good news, as since the release is now public I can begin development and submission of new versions of QuickProxy, allowing me to work on some of the features that I’ve wanted to implement. I held off development while waiting for this to be approved, as last time I went ahead with dev work the extension got knocked back due to the code structure, and I had to re-write and re-test what I had planned anyway.

I want to give a big thank you to all the people that have donated to the extension through the Mozilla website. I initially developed the extension with no expectations of anything in return for the work, so just the fact that some of the users have found value in this extension has made me feel that I’ve accomplished my initial goals with the extension.

Ozzie QuickProxy

With the change of hosts that underwent today, the game server’s that were previously hosted on the old host are now offline. I may eventually look at putting one or two servers up on this new server, but as I don’t use the servers anymore myself, and the servers just seemed to create more havoc than enjoyment, there isn’t much incentive to do so.

If you wish to run a server with the AusKreedz backend on it, then shoot me an email to admin@auskreedz.com (contact form is also available on the AusKreedz page), and I can look into helping you get this set up, but I will not run nor will I be responsible for what goes on in the servers.

I hope the users of AusKreedz enjoyed the time that they had their, it has been a pretty good two years, but unfortunately times change, and the costs for services I didn’t actually use became too prohibitive.

Ozzie AusKreedz

Apologies to any visitors who experienced the downtime that was caused by the changeover of hosts that QuickProxy and my other sites underwent earlier today. The site was down for several hours (sadly caused by a mistake on my part), but now should be back (or coming back, depending on DNS cache’s and the like), and better than ever.

Work on the addon has been slow due to the workload my job is currently giving, but hopefully that will be changing not too far off (either one way or another), and I can then get to actually updating the extension to include some of the many features people have been requesting.

Don’t worry if you like the simplicity of the current extension, it won’t be bulked up with useless stuff and force you to wade through the preferences actually finding what you want. The new features are mainly focused on improving the usability of the extension (ie keyboard shortcuts) and making it compatible with other products (ie Thunderbird).

As always, I’m open to ideas/constructive criticism, so let me know what you would like in QuickProxy most, and if it doesn’t alter the extension too much, maybe you’ll have it included in a release sometime down the track.

Ozzie QuickProxy, Update

I’ve submitted the latest version for QuickProxy to the Mozilla team, and it should be pending renewal shortly. I’ll update this post once I have a confirmed link to the latest version, as the all versions page hasn’t updated with the new submission.

This should make it compatible with the Firefox 3.5.1 release. Once again I do apologise for the release becoming outdated so quickly, which was caused by an oversight on my part when updating the latest version string to bring it in line with Firefox 3.5.

The release also includes a cosmetic fix for when the browser was first launched. This was caused by the re-code that took place for the 3.5 release, and was due to the update of the icon being done before the startup processing had completed. Now with the icon update occuring after the processing has completed, this problem should no longer occur.

One other problem that I’m aware of in the latest release is with automatic configuration URL’s, and the issue appears to be caused by the browser not correctly loading the configuration from these in the first launch. I’ll be checking further into this to see if I can resolve the issue, although a new version will have to wait until after this version is public, as I don’t want to push the release date back any further than it already is.

Edit:

The updated version is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/1557 (or click here).

Ozzie QuickProxy

I’ve submitted the latest version of QuickProxy to the Mozilla team for approval, and hopefully it wont take too long to go through, although there are ~200 odd extensions before mine in the queue =(. For those keen to get started you should be able to download the latest version by going to the QuickProxy page, and clicking on the See All Versions link (Or visit it directly here) .

There aren’t many changes visible in this release. The only noticeable changes are the removal of the (non-functional) open browser proxy settings button from the preferences page. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to correct this in the current release, but it is still in the pipeline, so if you liked the idea hopefully it will be returning in releases to come. The other minor change was a correction of the German tooltips over the icon, as these were the wrong way around for enabled/disabled.

Underneath there’s really been no major differences, and most of the work was testing in as many situations as possible to hopefully isolate the bugs described that resulted in the proxy always being switched on after a browser restart. During these we were unsuccessful in re-producing the issue, so if anyone does experience it in this version of QuickProxy please let me know with as much detail as possible in your setup.

That’s enough from me, and let’s hope for a smooth release =)

Ozzie QuickProxy

First I want to say thanks again for all the positive feedback I’ve receieved for this extension. Development is still active for QuickProxy, and I’m hoping to release a 3.5 compatible version soon. As the last version was rushed and contained bugs that could have been avoided, I didn’t want to repeat those steps with this release. We have almost completed testing the extension internally, and are hoping to have the last known issue corrected soon, with a new version being submitted to Mozilla for approval on Friday.

Ozzie QuickProxy

It appears in my haste to push out the new version, I overlooked an issue in the testing process with the “Open Browser Proxy Settings” button that was added. As this opens a Firefox preferences window, I glossed over this during testing, and assumed that it worked the same as it does in Firefox, although due to a few reports I’m getting from users, and testing done myself, it appears that editing information in the window created doesn’t get saved. I’m currently working on resolving this issue, and I hope to have a resolution to this quickly, but as it’s a native Firefox window I may need to just re-create the entire preferences screen.

Thank you all for the feedback I’ve received on the extension so far. Apart from these annoying bugs that somehow keep finding their way in it’s been a very positive experience for me.

Ozzie QuickProxy

I’ve now added contact forms to both QuickProxy and AusKreedz pages. This will allow users of either to easily get in touch with me directly, to provide either feedback or bug reports/issues. I much prefer this over advertising my email address (which is different for both projects, allowing me to differentiate between the issues), as no matter how much you try to obscure the address it always seems to get farmed using some method and then passed onto whichever mailing lists. Google does have a fantastic spam filter, which does filter most of this out, but anything that I can do to minimize this is great. =)

Ozzie Update

The latest version of QuickProxy has now been approved by the Mozilla addon editors, and is now available publically for download on their site here. This release will hopefully be well met by users, as the main reason why I pressed so hard for this to be released was due to a fix with the automatic behaviour of the extension.

The automatic behaviour used to fire on the creation or destruction of new firefox windows, instead of the initial instance, and after many hours spent trying to work around this I was finally able to find a solution. Now that it has been released I’ve been made aware of a nicer way to hook the browser launch ability, and I’ll be testing further to see if I can implement this, as the method I use at the moment is somewhat of a dirty hack, and counts the number of Firefox instances open when a browser instance is launched. If the browser count is 1, it assumes that it is a fresh launch and runs the automatic behaviour. As I’m now able to use this method to hook the window creation, I no longer need to do anything when a browser instance is destroyed, which also cleaned up some of the code.

Hopefully everything goes smoothly, but if you do have any issues with the extension, or any feedback (either positive or negative), feel free to either shoot me an email, or leave a comment on here, and I’ll get back to you about it.

Ozzie QuickProxy