Coming Soon - 4.x

 I've been plugging away recently on the feature set that will go into 4.x. So what's going to be in it?

Well, far and away the biggest update is going to be a change to a more per-site experience. I kicked around a lot of ideas last year on this, but I never quite got some of my experiments working out like I hoped. So instead, I'd like to get a bit more simplified approach out there. Here's what it looks like in normal view and with the on/off switch shown:

   

Basically the zones are tracked site-by-site now, with the ability to override by site. This helps the browsing experience enormously if one site is bumping up the levels but the other sites are fine. You can also pick the fixed zone for the site and go from there. With the on/off button shown, you can also choose to not filter for a given site. I hope that this experience is familiar for people who use uBlock Origin, for example. Note that the default site zone may be of interest for starting in more conservative modes than Adaptive.

Second, KetchupDreamer had a good idea around the on/off switch. What if there was a smart pause timer that you could pick to disable all filtering for a set time and then reenable it? Well, now that's an option!

Third, the default experience for silent mode has been improved. While setting up your own collection is supported the same as it has been, the default collection acts differently. Not everyone loves the default images that are packed into the addon and importantly the switch in subject matter is often quite visible and pulls the eye towards the changes. This kind of defeats the point of the silent mode being silent. So the default behavior is going to now try to reuse a slightly modified image that was previously seen on that page (watermark is added, slight view change). In many cases, only a few images may be blocked on a page of images, and so doing the change this way instead often blends in seamlessly in a way that the old one did not. It will in some cases eventually fall back to the packed in images but this should be more rare. I'd encourage folks to give this mode a try and see what they think.

Speaking of encouraging folks to try certain things, one of the key final changes is around the initial setup experience. I gave it some thought and the two main options I think many people would need to consider are the silent image mode and whether or not the on/off switch are shown. So here's the first time setup wizard that helps with that:

 

 

It's my hope this will help make users aware of the options that may be most important to them.

As a final note, I've been enjoying using Codex during the development of 4.x. I'm not the strongest on the HTML based UI and it's helped a lot with coding that up. Additionally, there are several features that have been on the todo list for a few years and it's helping turn those into realities rather than staying as dusty dreams.

I'd like to give this a bit longer to bake but it's getting closer. All the features listed above have already been implemented and you can try them out if you're a developer right now! 

Release 3.8.0 - Reveal Blocked Image & Custom Image Collections

Release 3.8.0 is out and I'm excited for two new features in there! I've been using Codex lately to boost some of the coding and it has helped get some great features over the finish line.

First, a small but helpful quality of life improvement. Sometimes a helpful image gets blocked, and it's quite annoying not to see it. As of this release, if you have the on/off switch enabled you'll also get a new option when you right click on an image, "Reveal Blocked Image". This will cause the image to reload so you can see it! As a design decision, I left this gated behind the on/off switch visibility because that's the most likely option to be set if the user wants to intervene in the filtering, so it seemed appropriate since it has the same "permissions" in a way. Note that in some cases this may not work as the thing you are clicking on it is not actually the image itself, but rather other visual elements in front of it. The addon does some work to navigate this situation but it's not perfect. But I'd say it works in about 95% of the situations I've tried it in and it's quite helpful! 

Second, the long-awaited custom image collection support is here! If you use "silent mode", placeholder images will be used in place of the standard blocked image. Now you can create your own custom image collections yourself, either using your own images or by searching a couple popular open image providers. Here's a screenshot of it in action! The way this feature works is it loads the images, downsizes them so it fits well within browser local storage, and then cycles through the image replacements. I know this has been a popular request, so I'm glad to see it finally in place!

 

Also, I have removed the Cloudflare DNS option. From survey and other feedback it seems to have been basically unused by anyone. Leaving it creates more to declare on the new data collection policy tags, so I've decided to remove it. 

Wingman Jr. - Android is out!

 Check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wingman-jr-android/ !

There may be a few bumps but let me know what you think. 

Hello Android, Hello Impostors?

I've received requests for an Android version of the Wingman Jr. addon for a bit now, but I haven't jumped in yet. Why not?

While I've briefly tested the addon for mobile in the past and I've seen that it generally worked, every time you submit to the addons portal it requires to say you tested it specifically for Android if you say it supported it. Testing for mobile does not seem too bad but with the already limited bandwidth I don't want mobile support to hold up normal releases. Additionally, if reviewers have to approve for both platforms it may hold up approvals as well.

In addition to Firefox users, however, it appears that Wingman Jr.'s lack of mobile support has also caught the attention of others. While the code for this addon is strongly open source and I encourage you to use it, there seem to be at least two copycat addons that I suspect of acting in bad faith:

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wingman-jr-premium/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wingman-jr-master-pro/

I believe these to be suspect based on their shady descriptions, seemingly incorrect licensing, and strange home site links. I do not know if these are privacy-honoring or if they funnel data.As far as I can tell, they seem to be capitalizing on providing Android support because the main addon does not.

So - I think it is time to make a legitimate option for Android!

What's the strategy going to be?

1. Clean up the main addon a bit. In particular - based on the fact that a) I believe no one is really using the Cloudflare blocking feature any more and that b) browsing domains are sent to Cloudflare if you opt into that feature and c) in conjunction with a new data collection reporting policy (which is good!), my plan is just to remove the feature entirely. Then I do not need to report any data collection, which will keep things simple and likely make approvals go faster. 
2. Create a new addon with a new ID that is Android only. I will not necessarily update this as often, but the idea would be to keep feature parity based on the version number so if e.g. you use desktop 3.7.0 version you could expect roughly the same set of features on Android for 3.7.0 but desktop might get more in-between releases. 

Based on past experiences, I don't anticipate that Android support will be too hard so I don't expect too long of a timeline, but if there's one thing I know about development - particularly development on a new platform - it's that there are always surprises. So stay tuned to the blog and I'll post as progress continues!

Release 3.7.0 - Quick Scan

 Today's release contains a small quality-of-life feature - a new video option (and the new default), Quick Scan. Why a new option? Previously on sites like imgur.com where small videos are heavily interspersed with images, the perceived performance of image scanning tanks because of all the little videos. Quick Scan just scans a few image frames in the video chunks and provides that as a tradeoff for speed, making the experience far less laggy while still providing a certain level of protection.

Release 3.5.0 - Hidden Tabs and Fixes!

 So the next release is out!

First, a quick note: the release notes page isn't showing up right - you'll get a page to open but fail to load. I think Firefox changed something since that code hasn't been updated in a long time. See https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/221

 Here's what changed:

• If you have problems with the hidden tabs, try the new "Background.js WebGL" option! This allows users to optionally go back to the "old way" without hidden tabs, but falls back to hidden tabs if this is not possible. Note that the speed of scanning is also a bit slower, but for some it may be a lifesaver. It's in this section of the options:
•  
• Fixed Cloudflare-based DNS blocking support as it had been broken
• Improved character set detection for international users
• In particular, some of Dragodraki's reports. See https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/217
•  If you are interested in this issue, see also the tracking bug - character set detection is tricky! https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/219

 

A Progress Update

Hello!

I've been chugging away on some things in the background, but the progress isn't in a release yet so I thought I'd talk a bit about some of the recent work.

 Here are three areas I've been working on:

• Transformation #1 - Switch to a site-based focus for scanning (like uBO)
• Bug - Try to improve the hidden tab situation. I have one idea for this already in motion.
• Research #1 - new AI models, maybe new infrastructure for training

Site-based Focus

I've been working over at https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/211 on getting the site-oriented focus working. I've gotten a bit of the core foundational work in that's not very exciting, and I've been starting to experiment with what kinds of new opportunities are available once going site-based.

One key opportunity is that now sites can be filtered using per-site statistics, which allows for some new ideas. For example, one thing I'm playing around with is an adaptive mode for mixed mode sites: think anything from Amazon to YouTube. These types of sites are historically quite difficult to get right - you can't just set one threshold and have it work particularly well. One aspect of this relates to human psychology as well: you may be generally browsing for good content but then a relatively objectionable image might pop up, and while it may not be that bad it stand out relative to its peers and has a somewhat similar effect.

 Note that generally the site-oriented arc of work is large, so don't expect a release with this feature in it soon. But the adventurous can see the experimentation going on if they like!

Hidden Tab Mitigation

 I have another option available for folks struggling with the hidden tab to try! Basically, go back to how the old addon version worked by picking a different backend option that doesn't use the hidden tab. It'll do a pre-check to ensure the original performance issue doesn't pop up, and fall back to the hidden tab if needed. For most, they'd see a decrease in speed, but it's far better than the tab regenerating. This work was merged in https://github.com/wingman-jr-addon/wingman_jr/issues/209.

New AI Model

I've done a smaller amount of work here, with SQRXR 145 being a potential candidate. This is an iterative rather than new model.