Introducing Autofill v11

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! 💘

I was wrong when I said there will be no more updates to Autofill—a major update to v11 will be rolling out soon. Please don’t fret, this won’t be a big headache like the v10 release because most of the changes do not affect the extension’s core functionality. I actually didn’t plan on making amymore changes to Autofill, but my hand was forced by Mozilla. To make a long story short, last week Mozilla notified me that they were going to unlist Autofill within 10 days because the tools I used to build the extension were closed source and they required open source software in order to review the source code for publication. This must’ve been a new policy because the Firefox version had been around for years without any issues. Since the tools I used to build Autofill were over 10 years old, closed source, and no longer supported, it was a good time to overhaul my entire development environment to prepare for the big MV3 changes to come. Hence, I replaced all my ancient build tools with modern open source equivalents.

Since I had to refactor most of the code to make it work well with the new build tools, I figured I might as well make some improvements to Autofill. Aside from modernizing the tooling, here are some of the bigger changes in store for v11:

  • Merged Chrome/Edge and Firefox branches. The Firefox version had always existed in a separate development branch, so anytime I made changes to Autofill I would have had to do it in two places. Now that Autofill versions for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox are all built from the same source code in the same branch, the maintenance overhead will be significantly reduced.

  • Improved subscription validation. Before I was using the email address to validate subscriptions. Some users were not comfortable with this as it would mean their personal information would be stored in Autofill, and also transmitted over the internet every time Autofill communicates with the backend API to validate the subscription. This is obviously not good for privacy & security, so I’ve replaced the email address with the invoice number. Email addresses for existing subscribers should be migrated to invoice numbers automatically in v11, but if it doesn’t then you can grab the invoice number from the order confirmation email. I’ve never monetized anything before, so this was a learning experience.

Here are some other minor tweaks and quality of life improvements to Autofill:

  • Added Facebook and Twitter share icons. If you find Autofill useful, then I’ve added these icons in the footer so you can spread the word about Autofill with just one click.

    social share icons

  • Added lightbox loading screen. Sometimes it can take seconds to retrieve the changelog remotely when you click on the version number link (top right in Options), which can make it seem like Autofill is hanging. The loading screen will let you know that it’s still retrieving data.

  • Removed squigglies in Form Fields. These distracting wavy red lines below the text are not applicable to Autofill rules, so they’ve been banished in v11.

    squigglies

  • Updated developer notice. The fundraiser banner was too red, so I toned it down a notch. The buttons look prettier also.

  • Fixed “what’s new” sometimes showing old version. There was a bug where clicking on the version number link would show the changelog for a different version.

  • Fixed changelog parsing issue. HTML code in the changelog was not escaped (i.e., <...> replaced with &lt;...&gt;), which could break the changelog lightbox overlay.