Changes in 1.3:

• Will automatically download and install JSword.
• Can automatically install books if none found.
• You can now type book names first in Ubiquity (don’t need to start with ‘sword’).
• Fixed Ubiquity command installation issues.
• Fixed issue with Sun’s Java 7 browser plugin.
• Raised compatibility to work with more recent Firefox versions.

For those of you having issues getting Ubiquity to work with recent Firefox releases, please download this file and open it (File > Open File…) using Firefox. This is a version of Ubiquity being maintained by satyr.

Next up:

• Getting FireBible working with OpenJDK / IcedTea browser plugin (still only works with Sun’s VM and plugin) but OpenJDK and IcedTea compatibility seems more possible than GCJ support.
• Integration of a newer version of JSword with av11n support (which is still being developed) so I can finally support Catholic Bibles.

• Support for selfcare.ndc.bsnl.co.in, thanks to Rohit Singh for the help. The “charged usage” is displayed as 0, (at least for his account) and this is the value DataFox uses to display the progress; so if your account has this same problem, you will not see a progress bar at all and the surplus calculations will be off. Hopefully BSNL fixes this problem soon. If you manually enter selfcare.wdc.bsnl.co.in in the domain field, DataFox might work for that too because they appear to use the same backend. Unfortunately, because nobody has sent me their credentials, I have been unable to test this or add support if required.
• Increased Firefox compatibility range to 15 – I don’t want to be forced to release a new version every couple of months with these monthly major version changes.

As always, if you want support for the selfcare portals, please send me your credentials or I have no way of implementing support and I will have to simply ignore and / or delete your comments.

I had been struggling with this problem for quite some time; every now and then Pidgin would refuse to connect to Google Talk and give me a Not Authorized failure message. All credentials, server details and network conditions were unchanged. I installed Trillian and found that when Pidgin failed in this way, Trillian wouldn’t connect either.A few forum threads would suggest updating to newer versions of Pidgin/Trillian or changing servers and re-checking credentials; most were dated threads which are irrelevant today. Pidgin would resume working as suddenly as it stopped, but sometimes after days of being unable to connect. All this time, the GMail based chat would work without issue, a veritable PIA!

I found, entirely by accident that my account had an Account Locked status if I logged in with the official Google Talk client. Unfortunately, I didn’t have their official client installed all this time, so I didn’t realize this earlier. Attempting to login to chat at this time would present you with a captha and after passing through this, you would be able to connect on Pidgin too. Apparently Pidgin and Trillian are foxed when the account is locked and don’t know how to proceed; I have no idea why my account gets locked either… I also don’t know what the platform independent solution is because AFAIK the official client is available only on Windows; logging in and out of chat in GMail didn’t help.

TL;DR If you get a Not Authorized message in Pidgin or Trillian, login using the official Google Talk client, pass the capthca test and you will now be able to connect again, even after quitting the official client.

Something I may not have mentioned earlier, for Firefox 4 (and up) users, if you are wondering where DataFox has gone, you need to enable the Add-on bar from the View > Toolbar menu (or press ‘Ctrl + /’).

I am aware that DataFox does not work with the new BSNL selfcare sites; if users from each zone would send me their usernames and passwords, that would help a great deal. If you want selfcare support, please send me your credentials.

Share and enjoy!

What’s next for FireBible:

• Easier installation – most users have trouble with the separate JSword installation that is required, future versions will have JSword integrated; this concern has also been raised by the Mozilla add-ons review team.
• Work towards support for Catholic Bibles by helping with deutrocanonical support in the JSword backend.
• Several bug fixes and user requested enhancements; these have unfortunately been ignored for 1.2 because I did not want to delay Firefox 4 support by trying to pack everything into a single release.

Supporting a major new Firefox release has, unfortunately, never been too easy and Firefox 4 was no different:

1. Protocol handling techniques changed and finding a solution that worked for both Firefox 3.x and 4.x was irritating.
2. This bug threatened to make Java inaccessible to extensions, would have knocked FireBible out of Firefox for good.
3. Bookmark / folder manipulation was made more difficult by removal of a method that I was actively using.
4. Annotations handling code (used internally to classify FireBible URLs) had to moved to keep it working.
5. Several other minor issues.

Ultimately, nothing required rocket science to fix, but the number of changes required to keep FireBible working was frustrating.

Unfortunately, there were two issues in DataFox 1.9.1 released to earlier today; there was a data unit problem where a gigabyte value was incorrectly assumed as a megabyte value (if only BSNL really did that when calculating usage ) and I accidentally removed the DataFox update URL from version 1.9.1. Any users who updated to 1.9.1 will not receive any update notifications . If you did not install 1.9.1, you should see an update for 1.9.2 via the regular update mechanism, if you did install 1.9.1, simply go to the DataFox page and manually install version 1.9.2 to fix the problem (you will see subsequent updates as well).

Also, for users clamoring for Chrome support, DataFox for Chrome has been available for a couple of months now and includes this fix.

FireBible Install Manager

This release also adds support for Strong’s words and word morphology. Simply enable them from the View > FireBible menu and load a module which contains this metadata, like the KJV to see the links inline with the text. Note: Please make sure you have the  Strong’s / Morphology modules installed and then select the modules you wish to use on the Display tab of the FireBible preference page.

Viewing Strong's Words in FireBible

Viewing Greek Word Morphology using FireBible

This version of FireBible was submitted as an entry to the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest and I had to create a few screencasts describing how it worked – you can check those out here: FireBible Screencasts I hope you like them, they took way too much time!

As always, if you have FireBible installed, please check for updates to install version 1.1, or head on to FireBible to get it!

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 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!

• Bibles/Commentaries/Questionable
• General Books/Daily Devotionals/Essays/Other
• Maps/Images
• Dictionaries/Glossaries

FireBible annotates the URLs when you visit them, placing them in one of the four categories above. Then using a simple places query, I can list them out in any way I want. What you see in the screenshot is just a number of queries I think will be useful. Besides the FireBible toolbar, they are also available in the Bookmarks menu where they can be modified and queries can be added or deleted.

Of course, FireBible has always had history, bookmark and tagging support since the beginning. Anything you read is recorded in Firefox’s regular history and locations can be bookmarked just like regular HTTP URLs. FireBible 0.9 simply adds annotations to these URLs so they can be correctly categorized and presents them in a central location, without being “disturbed” by your regular browsing history. Because the annotations will only be added for content you read after installing FireBible 0.9, the categorization might seem off for a bit, but it will settle down with use. I plan to make FireBible 0.9 available around the time Firefox 3.5 is available. FireBible 0.9 will only work on Firefox 3 and above, Firefox 2 support has been dropped, primarily because of the places queries and some cool new features yet to arrive. Stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, if you have any suggestions or critique, do send them along or leave a comment.