Surf*Mind*Musings

It’s been a long time since my hyperactive extension building days of ‘01-02. My first extension to make out of basic prototyping stage in 6 years is now available, timed to coincide with the new Firefox 3: StomperNet Ranker.

The tool features:

1. An interactive SVG-based visualization of result overlap in the top 20 results for Google, Yahoo, and Live Search
   • “Brushing” feedback highlighting same domain results and displaying a info panel
   • Click to preview the result page
2. Tabs for the full result views from each engine
3. Access to the 7 search markets

It also integrates the Scrutinizer browser, which simulates foveal and peripheral vision for design inspection and more informative observation of use, with a “Scrutinize This Page” option.

We used the Komodo IDE (howto pdf) to build it. It makes getting started pretty simple and I roped in two members of our StomperNet dev team who had no experience with extension development more easily because of it.

Parsing search results with the DOM is a breeze compared to using regular expressions, no matter how good a PERL hacker you are. The tool also features interactive SVG, sharing CSS between the XUL and SVG layers. I’ve long been a proponent of SVG in Firefox, notably in my MS Thesis on menu mousing behavior. It’s an under appreciated part of the Firefox UI toolkit.

Go Get Firefox 3 and then get StomperNet Ranker. And, if you’re in Atlanta, join us for a celebration of the best browser on the planet tonight.