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Firebird Extension Idea

Web: I watched a hilarious Rob Corddry segment from The Daily Show last night, repeated from earlier in the week. Having not seen The Daily Show in a while, since dropping everything but basic cable, I went looking through The Daily Show video archives to see if I could find a few more good ones — with no luck.

Every link on the Video page links to something like this:

javascript:openMediaPop(‘/multimedia/tds/cord/cord_8065.html’,”,’SRM’,’high’);

Which opens a popup with this page. Now, the interesting thing is that I do have Real Player installed — but for some reason, Firebird hasn’t figured this out. If I could just get through the twisty-turny maze of Javascript ‘detection’ code, I could get the URL for the .ram file directly from the server and play it.

So this is where my idea for a new extension comes in. It should do this:

  • intercept Javascript calls to navigator.userAgent, navigator.plugins et al, and allow the user to select what plugins to report;
  • add a context (right-click) menu item to list the URIs used in data attributes of object tags, and allow those to be cut and pasted — or launched in any helper apps registered for that filename extension. Alternatively, it could just replace the object with a link to open that file in the helper app.

The first allows the user to choose what plugins to report are installed, and navigate their way past broken ‘detection’ scripts like Comedy Central’s and The BBC Radio Player’s.

The second then allows the user to get hold of the URL for future use, or pop it up in an external viewer.