These are the Converter's most recent features. For older releases please scroll down to the bottom of this page. Recorded history only goes back to version 0.5.0 (September 2006), although the Converter has first been released as version 0.1 alpha (January 2004). The stuff of legends.
WARNING! Do not convert this page until you've read what you're interested in—most of the explanations will be messed up and they will become very hard to follow!
This release contains several improvements, mostly by popular demand, plus some fixes of all kinds.
| Type | Feature | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| bug fix | Fixed number parsing for currency conversions |
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The examples were improperly converted (various problems related to the values themselves). Thank you LD, Ndi, and indyhsu for reporting these bugs. |
| improvement | hardening | n/a | The Converter used to process fractions by evaluating them as JavaScript code. This was a minor security risk, since the evaluated string was already matched against regular expressions. But even filtered, evaluating untrusted strings in JavaScript is potentially dangerous, so I decided to switch to a safer approach: the Converter is now 100% eval()-free. Thank you AMO team for highlighting this issue (they implement an automated tool which tests for this a while back). |
| new preference | One way conversion |
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The measurements in the example would both have been converted in previous versions of the Converter, regardless of your preferences. Now only the one in unfamiliar units will be converted (i.e. if you prefer Imperial, only "1 cm" will be converted; if you prefer metric, only "1 inch" will be converted). You can disable this feature from the preferences, by unchecking "Only convert unfamiliar units". This was requested by several people over the time. |
| new preference | Hide measurement confirmations | 1/10 cm |
By default, full page conversion of the measurement in the
example would result in "1/10 cm (0.1 cm = 0.0394 in)".
Starting with this version you can enable
preference "Don't confirm the value being converted"
in order to hide Converter's confirmation of the measurement
-- the example would be converted like this:
"1/10 cm (0.0394 in)".
The next feature is related. While I don't think this is a good idea because of known limitations of any contextual converter, I have implemented it because of popular demand. You will also be warned within the preferences window itself upon enabling this preference. |
| new preference | Hide original measurement | 1/10 cm |
By default, full page conversion of the measurement in the
example would result in "1/10 cm (0.1 cm = 0.0394 in)".
Starting with this version you can enable
preference "Replace original text" in order to hide
the original measurement -- the example would be converted
like this: "0.1 cm = 0.0394 in".
By enabling both this preference and the one above you end up with blind conversions, which simply replace the original text with the converted value. While I don't think this is a good idea because of known limitations of any contextual converter, I have implemented it because of popular demand. You will also be warned within the preferences window itself upon enabling this preference. |
| UI improvement | Contextual info messages in preferences | n/a | Some of the preferences are inter-dependent, and some are unsafe, so I added a contextual information system in order to warn users about these issues as they experiment with the preferences. |
| bug fix | Fixed adjusters for negative values |
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For some strange reason nobody noticed that many negative measurements were being adjusted in a completely nonsensical manner: -10 metres was converted to -394 mil, and -10 feet to -3,048,000 metres. This was caused by such a rookie programming mistake that I feel quite silly now that I admitted it. :-) I was simply testing if the values were low enough to adjust them to smaller units – e.g. if a value in metres is smaller than 0.1, convert it to centimetres, and so on. Obviously, negative values are always smaller than 0.1, no matter how big they are in the negative. Yes, quite a silly one indeed. Anyway, now it's fixed. |
| bug fix | Fixed page restore bug |
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Some very specific conditions (replicated in this example) used to cause the Converter to fail restoring certain elements in a page when that was requested. In this example, the "1 m" conversion would have been restored, but the "2 m" conversion wouldn't have been. Repeatedly converting and restoring a page containing such elements used to result in horrendously repetitive conversions; pure ugliness ensued. Not any more. |
| capability | New format |
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None of these formats were recognized by previous versions of the Converter. Now they are. This "only" took one year to implement, thanks justmyview for reporting it. |
| minor capability | Currency support | 200 RSD | Serbian dinars now converted to/from. Thanks Marko for pointing this out. |
| minor improvement | minor internal streamlining | n/a | Further streamlined a couple of features in the Converter. This doesn't affect end users in any significant way, it's mostly related only to code internals. |
| compatibility | tested with Firefox 3.6b2 | n/a | As such, bumped compatibility to FF 3.6.* (the Converter contains a lot of logic but features virtually no fanciness, so it only depends on a few core features in Firefox; those are quite unlikely to change during the 3.6 series). |
This is a minor release containing a single bug fix -- the next full release I'm working on takes more than I expected, and what with the Converter being featured at AMO I decided to release this one ahead of time.
| Type | Feature | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| bug fix | Some strings were freezing Firefox | 1010010101001010100101010101010101 | Trying to convert the example with currency conversions enabled used to freeze Firefox for significant amounts of time. This was fixed to a certain degree -- very long legitimate values still confuse the regular expression meant to catch them, but I expect those are pretty rare (we're talking about legitimate, explicit prices above 99 billion units). Even then, the Converter does work, it just takes a while to figure it out. Thanks Mike for reporting this bug. |
| internal change | reverted prefs system | n/a | Gave up on Mozilla's "new" preferences system because of its bugs (the thing isn't new at all, it was implemented in Firefox 1.5, but it's still too buggy for extensive use). |
This release improves currency support, adds a couple of requested features related to the interface and fixes a few bugs.
| Type | Feature | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| capability | Currency formats added |
|
Added support for a few unambiguous currency symbols (€, £, ₪, ฿, ₦, ₲, ₱). More logic is needed for the dollar symbol because of the various currencies it is used for in different parts of the world. |
| capability | Restoring the original page | n/a | You can now restore the original page after full page conversions via any of the mechanisms used to trigger full page conversions (pop-up menu, status bar icon or status bar menu). |
| new preferences | Output number format now customizable | n/a | You can now customize the way numbers are shown from the preferences menu (i.e. the decimal separator and the thousands separator). Thanks chrisraven for the suggestion! |
| bug fix | Removed ambiguous format |
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In the previous version both examples would've been converted as 6'7". I removed support for the format in the first example altogether because I don't think it's that common. Please let me know if you encounter it in the wild. Note that 6 feet 7 inches is properly converted as 6'7" -- the Converter takes exception at the comma in the examples. |
| bug fix | Skipping CSS | n/a | Because of an unfortunate oversight on my part, the Converter used to process all internal CSS blocks on full page conversions. That only affected performance, but depending on the amount of CSS the performance hit could be significant. That problem was fixed. |
| internal update | New preferences system | n/a | Since the Converter doesn't support Firefox 1.x any more, I was able to take advantage of the "new" Firefox preferences management system. |
| minor bug fix | Status bar icon uniform across windows | n/a | Changing the preference on whether the status bar icon should be visible is now instantly applied across all Firefox windows. |
| minor bug fix | Fixed spacing in matched measurement | A 10 foot piece of steel | The Converter would've matched "10 foot " (notice the trailing space) as the measurement, which resulted in ugly spacing when triggering full page conversions ("A 10 foot (10 ft = 3.05 m)piece of steel", notice the lack of a space just after the conversion). That only happened in some particular cases, but it has been fixed now. |
| minor bug fix | Properly matching awkward Imperial variant | 7 1/2 inches | This would've matched "7 1/2 inch", with a full page conversion looking like this: "7 1/2 inch (7.5 in = 19.1 cm)es" (notice the "es" trailing behind the conversion). This was fixed. |
| minor improvement | Streamlined internal rounding method | n/a | Improved the rounding method used for displaying all values. I'd love to brag about the speed delta, but I really don't think there is any noticeable change there -- mostly it was improved simply because it could be improved upon. |
This is a major release containing significant changes.
| Type | Feature | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| major capability | currency conversions |
|
In order to use this feature you need to choose your preferred currency in the options dialog. Some currency conversion capabilities have been implemented in the Converter. The number of formats is rather limited right now, but the values themselves are correct -- currency rates are retrieved from Google every six hours, on a need to use basis (i.e. there is a caching system in place which stores currency rates for six hours, but no pre-fetching is performed).The Converter currently only recognizes the ISO names for the currencies (as seen in the examples), and does not yet recognize any informal formats ($10, 20 €, £15, and so on). For such formats you can use the next feature, at least as a temporary solution. Disabling currency conversion capabilities inhibits all tests and background connections related to currency conversions, so if you don't want to use this capability you can completely turn it off without incuring any overhead. |
| feature | custom convert selection | n/a |
A new option is now available, "Custom convert selection". If this is enabled (default),
selecting text and clicking on the Converter entry in the pop-up menu will trigger
a custom conversion of the selected text.
This is useful if you encounter measurements the Converter supports but doesn't understand, e.g. "$1273.8" or "Will Smith may be 6-2 but I'm not sure". You can then easily adjust the format to something the Converter understands ("1273.8 USD", or "1283.8 AUD", or whatever, and "Will Smith may be 6'-2 but I'm not sure"), and then use the next feature to trigger the conversion and close the window. If this is enabled, even clicking on a properly converted measurement will trigger a custom conversion (notice the suspension points appended to the measurement). This could be useful if you wanted to compare measurements (plus, the menu entry previously didn't trigger any action, so this doesn't effectively change anything). |
| minor improvement | added keyboard shortcuts in windows | n/a | In the custom conversion window you can now trigger the conversion with ALT+C or Ctrl+Enter, you can close the window with Esc, you can toggle single conversions with ALT+S, and you can open the options window with ALT+O. The options window can be closed with Enter ("OK") or Esc ("Cancel"). Thanks Casey for the suggestion. |
| capabilities | new formats and combinations of formats |
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These formats wouldn't have been recognized by previous versions of the Converter; now they are. Thanks Eduardo for the suggestion. |
| minor improvement | the single conversion option is now persistent | n/a | In the custom conversion window, the single conversion option is now persistent across sessions. Thanks Casey for the suggestion. |
| minor improvement | proper focus on reopening windows | n/a | If you have the options or custom conversion windows open in the background and use the pop-up menu to reopen them they are now properly brought to the foreground. Thanks Casey for the suggestion. |
| obsolete | removed support for ancient Firefox | n/a | Removed support for Firefox 1.0.x browsers -- now only Firefox 2.0+ is supported. Firefox 2.0 itself is not supported by Mozilla any more since the beginning of 2009, so I don't think I'm actually affecting anyone with this change. |
| internal improvement | release handling | n/a |
Improved the way the Converter is dealing with new versions.
There are now three types of releases: minor (where you don't
even get prompted whether you want to learn about new features),
normal (where you do get prompted), and major
(where you are directed to the new features page unconditionally).
New installations now get unconditionally directed to the welcome page, which has been streamlined to show relevant information for new users. |
| minor internal improvement | further streamlined atoms | n/a | Further streamlined the parsing atoms, which translates to improved performance, easier addition of new atoms, and more flexible code. There should be no observable effect for the end users though, because the performance improvement is only marginal and everything else is internal. |
| minor irrelevant improvement | regression test versioning | n/a | The regression test page now features a prominent warning if you're trying to test against a version it wasn't intended for. The notice is only visible in Converter 0.8.0+. |
This release contains several minor improvements.
| Type | Feature | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| new format | improving support for wacky Imperial | 3-3/8-Inch | Yes, someone actually encountered that in the wild (thanks Edy) |
| minor improvement | addressed false positive | 1811-1821 |
The example would have been treated as a timestamp in previous
versions of the Converter (i.e. it was being assumed to be a
military time followed by a timezone, like 1200+0300, which
would be noon in my Eastern European summer time). The Converter now tightens that assumption by only recognizing proper timezone formats. That still produces false positives but to a lesser degree (and it's pretty much unavoidable), e.g. in a text reading "1100-1130 people were there" the Converter would still assume "1100-1130" to be 11:00 AM in some hypothetical UTC-11:30 timezone (incidentally, timezone UTC+11:30 actually exists, but UTC-11:30 isn't used). |
| minor improvement | Options button in custom conversion dialog | n/a | The custom conversion dialog now sports an Options button. You still need to re-convert upon changing your options, but at least you don't need to fish for the options dialog in the pop-up menu. |
| minor improvement | bling | n/a | Added icons for all of the pop-up menus - hopefully these will help usability for intensive users. |
| consistency | internal URLs match website URLs | n/a | Several URLs had to be adjusted in the code following the website restructuring. Now they all point to the right places. Also, since the website now fully conforms to HTML 4.01/Strict I needed to change some assumptions in the regression tests page, which obviously had to be mirrored in the code. |
| internal bug fix | bug in regression testing fixed | n/a | Fixed a bug related to regression testing (even if some tests failed, the overall result used to be success). |
| internal improvement | rewrote parsing atoms | n/a | Having been pumped up towards code rewrites by the AMO guys and by my redesigning the website, I have finally rewritten the internal parsing atoms, something I've been postponing for a while. This doesn't affect end users in any way, but makes future debugging somewhat easier. |
This release contains no visible changes (or at least I hope so).
| Type | Feature | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| internal changes | major code restructuring | n/a | A nudge from the good people at AMO has finally motivated me to restructure the code, something I've been procrastinating about for at least a year. No new features in this release, and hopefully no new bugs either... |
This page only contains feature reports for the newest few versions of the Converter, in order to avoid clutter. Older Converter feature reports are also available.
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The Converter is graciously hosted by mozdev.org, which provides free project hosting for the Mozilla community. For questions or comments about mozdev.org, please read the mozdev.org feedback page. |
 
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