September 2020 Roundup (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I already posted much of what I worked on in the month of September as separate posts (like Tipjar and the Wii Shop Channel Music extensions), but here's a roundup of everything else I worked on, exclusively for patrons.

NoPlugin

NoPlugin is a browser extension that detects legacy plugin objects on webpages (Adobe Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media Player) and converts them to HTML5 players where possible, or help you open them in native player applications where not possible.

Mozilla notified me that the library that NoPlugin uses to sanitize old plugin data (DOMPurify) had been updated to patch potential security vulnerabilities, so I released NoPlugin 6.3 in September to address those issues. I also took the opportunity to rewrite some of NoPlugin's code and introduce a feature.

One of the areas I've been focusing on with NoPlugin is detecting old Flash-based players for popular video services (Vimeo, Twitch.tv, YouTube, etc.) and replacing them with their modern HTML5 players. NoPlugin 6.2 from February added support for converting old Twitch.tv embeds, but since then, Twitch has introduced new rules that prevent any embeds from working on websites that haven't been added to a list by the video creator.

NoPlugin 6.3 fixes this by giving you a button to open the Twitch content in a new browser tab. It's not as elegant as just showing the video in the page, but it's still better than not seeing anything at all. NoPlugin 6.3 can also read more variations of old Twitch embeds (e.g. embeds for specific videos, in addition to channels), and will display title info if available.

I've also added some basic analytics to NoPlugin, so I get a better idea of which embeds are most-commonly detected and how I should handle future updates. For example, Flash embeds appear to make up the bulk of detections (see the table below from the past week's data), so that's definitely an area I need to focus on more.

NoPlugin is available for Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. I'll be releasing another minor update fixing a few bugs sometime soon, possibly during October.