plusstrip - firefox extension

PlusStrip is a tiny Firefox extension that captures pasted URLs from middle-click and URL bar removes any newlines followed by a plus (+) character. This is really only useful if you paste links copied from IrcII/EPIC clients. This is because by default these clients will split long messages into multiple lines .. here's an example of a long link to eBay as it would be displayed on a terminal:

<peikko> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.
+dll?ViewItem&category=53240&item=3836054422&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW

If you are not familiar with middle-click, try the following: select the link above with mouse (starting from http:// and ending in WDVW) then position the mouse cursor somewhere in the browser window and press the middle button of your mouse. And what if you don't have a middle button? Well I cannot help you there..

Do you need this extension? No, you do not, unless you specifically use IrcII/EPIC client and are familiar with the above problem. Otherwise this extension is completely useless.

Usage

None! You just install the extension and it just works. There are absolutely nothing to configure.

However the installer seems to work sporadically, so if you have any problems with the previous link, then try downloading (right-click and "Save Link As...") the installer file file and open the local file in your browser. You can navigate to your save location using the browser itself: try typing / (UNIX) or C:\ (Windows) into the URL bar.

Firefox 1.5 and earlier

PlusStrip version 0.5 onwards works only with Firefox 2.0 (and later). If you are using Firefox 1.5 or earlier, please download and install PlusStrip version 0.4 instead.

Firefox 3.x and later

I have switched away from text-mode IRC clients, so it seems unlikely that I will be updating Plusstrip for post-2.x Firefox browsers. Plusstrip does not work on Firefox 3.x.

How It Works

PlusStrip captures both URL bar entries and middle-click pastes. Capturing URL bar entries is done using XUL overlays (see chrome/content/plusstrip.xul in the XPI) and mouse pastes by overriding the readFromClipboard function.

(Note: Earlier versions of PlusStrip used a different mechanism to capture mouse pastes.)

Version History

Version 0.5: Updated packaging and routines to work with Firefox 2.0. Note: This version does not work with earlier Firefox releases.

Version 0.4: Updated RDF version so plusstrip works with Firefox 1.5+ too.

Version 0.3: Did something. Made to work with Firefox 1.0.

Version 0.1: First published version. I am not personally too happy about the way it "captures" URL middle-click pastes, but it works.

See also

  • Mozilla Firefox
  • I followed the XPI format of Go Up extension quite closely. It is a very minimal extension which made it very useful in understanding how extensions integrate into Firefox.
  • URLfix also "fixes" URLs but only in URL bar. It gave me the original idea that I could write a simple extension for doing something similar.
  • The official Mozilla Application Extensions page contains up-to-date information about extensions.

Fact sheet

Requires: Firefox 2.0
License: GPL
Last active: August 2007

 plusstrip.xpi, 10 kB (Firefox 2.0 and later)

 plusstrip_0.4.xpi, 11 kB (for Firefox 1.5 and earlier)