I released FireBible 1 late this Sunday; I was really keen to get this out alongside the Firefox 3.5 release, but missed by a few weeks due to small issues discovered at the last minute every weekend. In fact, this version of FireBible is 1.0.1; 1.0.0 was out for about 30 minutes when I found an inconvenient bug in the Ubiquity support and decided to pull the release and go back to 0.8.5 until I could fix it. FireBible 1 is compatible with Firefox 3.0 – 3.6, support for Firefox 1.5 & 2 has been dropped.
The key new features in this release are:
- Centralized, categorized history & bookmarks access.
- Commentary support.
- Ubiquity support.
An earlier blog post I made already covers the bookmark and history enhancements.
What I am most excited about, is the Ubiquity support; this is only available if you have the Ubiquity extension installed, something I highly recommend even beyond FireBible use. You need Ubiquity 0.5 or higher, 0.1.x versions are not supported. With Ubiquity, looking up verses is easy and devotedly fast. Just type in the verse reference and you will see the verse in the preview area. If you want to see content from a different Bible, add the from BibleName modifier and the preview changes accordingly. If you want to study this further in Firefox, just press enter to open the passage in Firefox. Want to place the contents in a blog post or another text area? Invoke Ubiquity from within the intended passage destination, type in your reference and press enter. If you want to copy the content into an external application, just add the to clipboard modifier and the passage will be copied into your clipboard, ready for pasting anywhere. Detailed preferences allow you to customize exactly what you would like inserted or copied. I have plans to add more Ubiquity support in the future, perhaps support for looking up definitions and searches to start with, so please let me know what you think!
Commentary support allows you to view commentaries directly from the FireBible toolbar just like a Bible, or you can have one selected in the sidebar and it will automatically synchronize itself with the passage you are reading. Commentaries will even be available for search results. Having commentary support means that FireBible now supports almost all SWORD module types. It still does not support user commentaries or locked modules, but that will arrive soon enough. Combined with the Ubiquity support, I decided to change the intended version for this release from 0.9 to 1.0.
Other relatively minor changes in this release were:
- Visual refresh, favicons now used for pages so they can be easily identified in history / bookmarks / address bar.
- Daily devotionals will be initialized with the current date preselected.
- Bible list now alphabetized.
- Pages can link to bible:// or sword:// URIs without causing security exceptions.
For more details and the actual download, head on over to the FireBible page. If you already have FireBible installed, it may have updated to this version already. If not, just go to Tools > Add-ons and hit the Find Updates button. This version will also be the first version of FireBible to be submitted to AMO so please let me know if you run into any issues as the audience for this extension will now grow manyfold and I’d like it to be a smooth experience. As always, feedback appreciated!
