Marked for Dearth

Feedback for the SpoofStick Firefox extension has generally been very positive. Here’s a cross-section:

The information superhighway needs a standard system of roadsigns that Aunt Tillie can trust. The SSL lock was and is helpful, but we need to do more. Spoofstick suggests an important next step. (Jon Udell)That makes so much sense, I can’t believe no one ever did it before. (visitor to Vastly Important Notes)

THIS GUY HAS A RELY USFUL PRODUCT BECUZ ITS TO HARD 2 LOOK AT THE ADRESS BAR AND TELL WHERE U ARE!!111!!!!! (Wendy Edwards on Orkut’s “INTERNET” community)

Udell and others have noted that releasing the Firefox version before the IE version seems a bit odd. The main reason for this is that writing Mozilla/Firefox extensions is about a hundred times (113.7 to be exact) easier than writing IE plugins. You define the UI in XUL, the behavior in JavaScript - save, archive, and view. No compilation, no messy proprietary APIs or toolkits to deal with. Simple and standards-based. In a month or so, I’ll write a postmortem and reflect on the development process for both browsers in greater detail.

On a less technical note, when I learned that “spoofing” was also known as “phishing“, I lamented that we had not called the program “PhishStick”. I vow that, from now on, every pun that can be made will be made, without regard to the potentially short life of its appeal.

[P.S. - Version 0.05 is out.]