Overview
I have created a set of browser plugins that are pretty helpful for developers and I thought that I should share them. I have created basically the same plugin for both IE and Firefox. What it does is add a "Copy As Html" and "Copy As Plain Text" to the context (right-click) menu. It is useful if you want to copy the text or underlying html from a web page into word, outlook or visual studio.
I do a lot of Ajax work that involves xsl transformations in JavaScript and I found this little tool a huge help in seeing the html that was generated by the transformation.
In the releases section there is a setup file that sort of automates the installation. It will install the IE plugin completely and it will copy the file for the Firefox plugin. You will have to manually open the firefox plugin using firefox and choose "Install" to complete the firefox plugin installation. The plug-in should be installed here: "C:\Program Files\Fillmore Technology Group\Utilities\Firefox\copyMenu_- 1.4.0-fx.xpi", but the actual location will be on the bottom of the last form in the setup wizard.
Another (
better) alternative is to install the Mozilla/Firefox addon from their addon site at:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4554 Since there are plenty of resources on the web that explain how to program these, I am not going to go into to much detail on how it was accomplished. I will say that the end result was pretty simple to do, but finding all the information took a little time. Below is a short overview of what was needed:
IE PluginAll that was needed was the JavaScript files and some registry entries. When looking at the deployment solution in visual studio be sure to view the registry to see how it was done.
Firefox PluginThis was more complicated. The plugin is a folder zipped and renamed to .xpi, but the contents have to follow a particular structure. There is plenty of documentation on the web about creating these addons. In the source release, I have included version 1.2 which is a simple version with no localization as well as the current version 1.4 which is localized in many languages thanks to the folks at
http://babelzilla.org
Screenshots
IE
Firefox 