JSONView 0.6 fixed a couple of bugs around formatting text, especially when odd Unicode characters were present. Where previously JSONView would stop showing content after those characters, it now shows the Unicode escape sequence. Also, when there’s an error parsing a JSON document, the original document is displayed with its formatting intact, rather than squashed into a single line.

However, the most important bugfix is that disabling JSONView from the Addons page will un-do the “Include ‘application/json’ in the HTTP Accept header for requests” option. This is especially important since some popular websites handle content negotiation poorly and break when that option is on. Netflix was one high-profile example, but they’ve fixed their site now. I explained why this happens in detail in the issue report, and I won’t be removing the option because of it, but at least disabling the addon will fix the issue (of course, just unchecking the option will fix it too). I’ve added a warning to the option as well, just in case. Honestly I don’t think most people should need to turn that on, which is why it’s off by default.

The last big change is sort of halfway between a feature and a bugfix – copying and pasting from JSONView’s output will produce valid JSON. This includes all the quotes that JSONView omits for readability, and doesn’t include the “+/-” symbols used for collapsing objects and arrays. Hopefully this makes it easier to copy and paste bits of JSON out of Firefox and into your code or data without having to rewrite it.

Please update JSONView (if it hasn’t updated automatically by now) or download it if you haven’t tried it yet, and check out the code on GitHub if you find any bugs or have a feature you want to see.

On the bugfix side, I fixed the issue I mentioned in my post about JSONView 0.3 where values that were 0 or false wouldn’t show up at all as a result of some overzealous error-checking. I also hunted down an infuriating bug where JSON documents would sometimes report as invalid when Firebug was on. This took a while to track down, but apparently Firebug slows down the loading of the document enough to mess with how I was reading a stream (and I had to be careful not to re-trigger an earlier bug that could cause Firefox on OSX to crash.) Anyway, it’s fixed now, and everybody should see more reliable document rendering, Firebug or not. For those living on the edge, JSONView is also marked as compatible up to Firefox 3.7a1pre, so you should have no trouble installing it on Minefield or the upcoming Firefox 3.6 alpha.

One thing that might stand out is that the new options dialog might not be localized for your language. JSONView’s localizations are handled by the generous volunteers at Babelzilla, which is great for me, but not as great when I want to rush out a release with important bugfixes. In this case I chose to ship 0.4 before all the new localizations had arrived, but I’ll add them all in again for the next release once the translators have caught up.

So grab JSONView 0.4 from addons.mozilla.org, or just update your extensions if you’ve already got it installed. As usual, feel free to send me feedback as comments on this post, and file bugs and feature requests at Google Code.

JSONView 0.3

JSONView 0.3 is now available at addons.mozilla.org. This fixes an error that was showing up when really large JSON files were being displayed, and adds a feature that displays empty arrays and object on one line instead of on two (and doesn’t display the expand/collapse button for them). I also put in some preliminary support for JSONP, based on a patch submitted by Gabriel Barros. The catch is that it only works with content served with the “application/json” MIME type, which is actually not the correct MIME type for JSONP – it should be “text/javascript” or another JavaScript type. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out how to get Firefox to let me handle “text/javascript” the way I do with “application/json” – it seems to be special-cased or something. If any Firefox gurus are reading and know a solution, please let me know! I was holding onto this release for a while hoping to fix that, but I decided that releasing something was better than nothing, so it’s out there and you can play with it. You can see an example JSONP response with the callback highlighted here. I did notice a bug with the 0.3 release right after it was approved – if a value is 0 or false, it shows up as blank. I’ll have that bug fixed with the next release, which should be very soon. It’s great to see that JSONView has become so popular, with over 50,000 downloads and about 12,000 regular users.

XBList 3.2.4

Halo 3: ODST was released a couple weeks ago, and Bungie redesigned their site a bit to include ODST info in your Service Record. This included changing the pages just enough that XBList got confused trying to figure out emblems for people who had never played Halo, and started showing the wrong emblems for those people (only if you prefer Halo emblems to Xbox emblems, which isn’t the default). Not a huge bug, but I took the opportunity to clean up a bunch of stuff in XBList and put out a little release. In addition to the Halo emblem fix, I fixed a bug where your settings could get corrupted and you wouldn’t be able to start XBList. I also cleaned up the menus and settings, consolidating the Halo links into one item, and removing the option to choose a custom notification sound or turn off debug logging. The debug log is much easier to get to if you’re having trouble – previously I had people dig through their Application Data folders for the log, but now there’s an item in the Help menu that opens the debug log directly. Paired with some much more detailed logging, I should be able to fix future problems much more easily. I also changed the system tray icon to bring XBList to the front on a single click rather than a double click, since that feels much more natural in Windows 7. Lastly (and probably not too importantly for most people), I’m storing emblems in your local Windows profile now, instead of the roaming profile. For the few people who use XBList and have roaming profiles enabled, this should save you some sync time. Anyway, you should have been prompted to update when I pushed the update two weeks ago, but if you haven’t gotten it yet you should download and install it now. I still have plans for a major overhaul of XBList, but it’s low on my list of priorities – XBList is still pretty popular, but not as much as it used to be, with maybe 5,000 active users.

TopProcess 1.4

This last update has been a long time coming. Ever since I installed Internet Explorer 8, the TopProcess sidebar gadget has been randomly crashing. I’m not sure what changed in Internet Explorer to make it screw up every so often, but it does. However, it only crashes after running for a few days, so for months I’ve been tweaking the code a bit, then waiting until it crashes, then tweaking some more, rinse, repeat. I’ve finally nailed it down to the point where crashes are very rare, and then I added some code that automatically resets the gadget when it crashes. So you should never see it mess up again. There is also a gadget log file in the gadget’s install directory that I’m using to store errors, so it should be easier to troubleshoot in the future. Lastly, Jean-Pierre van Riel contributed a patch that added IO tracking to TopProcess, so there is now a third way to view your processes. This view shows you the total IO usage (combined bytes in and out, per second) which seems to cover both disk and network access. Get the update from me or from Windows Live Gallery and be sure to rate the gadget. I’m excited to see that it’s been downloaded over 100,000 times from WLG (plus who knows how many downloads from my site).

Of course, the extension must be reviewed before this new version can be released from the sandbox, but if you want to try it out you can download version 0.2 from the sandbox. Hopefully it’ll be approved soon and will show up on the main extension listing. Please give it a look and rate and review the extension on addons.mozilla.org.

I’ll be out of the US on vacation until next month, but after that I intend to do some more work on the feature backlog for JSONView, as well some updates to other projects. Remember you can vote on features or file new ones at the Google Code issue tracker for JSONView.

JSONView has gotten a bit of coverage on the blogs, too, which I’ve enjoyed. It made it onto the front page of Delicious and reddit programming, and Ars Technica wrote an article in their journals. Also, I was