3.1.1 Out Now!

 3.1.1 is in the process of getting released now! Do note that Mozilla is currently experiencing some issues with their review process, which may or may not end up affecting public availability.

(Update: it is still in review, there is a discussion about it here)

(Update 2: It is still in review (2021/09/13) after ~3 weeks. This is quite odd for Mozilla, and I'm a bit troubled; more troubling still is that the community rep has largely gone silent on Discourse.)

(Update 3: Still in review 2021/09/25, quite troubled at the lack of communication. Do note that you can always pull the latest release directly from Github if you want to try it out before Mozilla updates.)

(Update 4: Apparently Mozilla had an issue around addons using the "proxy" permission, and have issued a workaround. I added the workaround and have released this as 3.1.1!)

This version has two main improvements:

• Crash detection - Every once in a while something would crash or go wrong in the addon. Everything would seem to be working, but prediction results would be completely wrong. Now the addon will self-check once in a while and reload itself if it doesn't get back an expected prediction result.
• Video scanning improvements - Eventually I'd like to have full MPEG-DASH support. I'm not there yet, but I can now more or less handle peeking at videos that are sequentially read in sections (range requests) - for example, many Reddit videos. Do note that if video scanning is too slow for you, you can turn it off in the addon options area.
  

I hope you enjoy it! Let me know if you have any feedback using the link in the addon's dropdown.

Crash Detection

 Tonight I was working on a bug you may have seen that is sneaky, so I wanted to blog about it quick and let you know I have a basic fix inbound.

First let's start with the symptom. Have you ever had Wingman Jr. loaded and running in the browser for a while, but then it just seems like questionable stuff starts slipping through and the addon might not be working? (You may have seen this an image- or video-intensive site like Imgur.) You can see the issue over at GitHub.

Well, your hunch is correct! But the way in which it is failing is interesting. Some part of either Firefox or Tensorflow.js crashes. But the end result doesn't crash the whole addon, which would cause a reload. No, instead it simply causes the model prediction results to be incorrect. I've most often seen it send all zeroes back for the model prediction, which turns into "safe".

So to fix this I needed to get a bit creative. The addon will now routinely check itself by using a "watchdog" function. It uses one of the silent mode images already packed into the plugin and checks that the prediction results for that image are the same every so often. If they aren't, the "watchdog" checker will give it another chance or so, and then automatically reload the plugin. To make things a little bit performant for your computer, it will temporarily stop checking when Firefox thinks that the user is idle.

Fortunately this solution seems to be fairly reliable so far in testing, but does have the downside that it may cause a pause during the automatic addon reload. Do note that reloading the addon will cause it to go back to its default automatic mode. If preserving this is important to you, please let me know via an issue in Github or in the feedback link in Wingman Jr. itself.