Well, life’s been a bit of a roller-coaster lately. We have been averaging about 2500 Interclue installs per day in the last few months after becoming a Mozilla recommended add-on, which is about 10 times as many as we were getting before that.
On the other hand we also started getting a lot more uninstalls, mostly due to usability flaws that became obvious after we started getting users who really had no idea what they were getting before they installed - the ones who read the first paragraph of the description on addons.mozilla.org and hit “install” because if Mozilla was recommending it, so it had to be worth a go.
Obviously, you can’t please everyone, and it’s pointless to try. But we’ve been working hard to increase the general usability level of Interclue in the past few months, and also to make it fully compatible with Firefox 3 before the official launch, which happened last Tuesday.
As a result of that hard work we’re actually keeping most of our new Firefox 3 users, many of whom are installing Interclue right out of the Firefox 3 add-ons manager, with very little idea of what to expect. It’s impossible to tell how many we’re getting from the add-ons manager vs people visiting addons.mozilla.org - I’m guessing maybe about half?
Currently we’re running at ~ 6k/installs/day, after slowing to “only” 5k/day over the weekend (we always get fewer installs on the weekend). During Download Day we gained almost 13k new users, and peaked at over 1000 installs an hour.
Lots, huh? Not so many when you consider Firefox 3 itself was getting downloaded over 15,000 times per minute at one point during launch day.
The codebase that runs addons.mozilla.org (a.m.o) is called “Remora” - which isn’t entirely a fair analogy - Firefox is certainly a leviathan of a product and we’re benefiting hugely from being attached to it, but there’s a more symbiotic relationship than the one you find with real Remora. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a subsequent post.
4 comments ↓
Hi Seth,
Congrats to you and the Interclue team! It’s great to see Interclue is getting more and more popular. Keep up the great work!
Marek
Seth, As a journalist, it is my duty to know BOTH sides of a story. We are seeing what is good about Interclue, but what about us who are not sure, or remain skeptics?
I can easily see how these extra applications can be a hacker’s best friend. Especially with Windows, one must exercise care. Not everyone is on Red Hat or Ubuntu, which is more immune.
Has this product tested well for hackability? What about other variants?
Before I download or recommend, I want to know the pluses and minuses, potentially of this program. I also want to know how this is so different than AVG’s weblink scanner.
It’s rather exciting to see another era of internet security, but we still need to know the ins and outs of it. Maybe I’m reading too much Pc World or Computer World, to just download and run things.
By the way, other than being in the media, I am a computer junkie too. I’m sure you know that by reading this comment too.
Thanks for your effort to help us, thus far. We appreciate that. Although, it’s not going the whole distance.
Mikel Grenier
Toledo, Ohio
Hi Mikel,
Very glad that you’re looking to explore Interclue in a bit of depth. Be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Badly designed add-ons can certainly expand the “attack surface” of a web browser, but we’ve put a fair bit of thought into how Interclue could be attacked, eg to mount a cross site scripting attack on another site, and we’re confident that it is secure. Previewed page content is stripped of any scripts before being rendered, and I would say it’s near certain that looking at an Interclue preview of a page is safer than actually loading it in a new tab, which with Firefox, is generally pretty safe.
Firefox addons downloaded from addons.mozilla.org are examined by mozilla editors before they are released from the “Sandbox area” of the site to where the general public can download them.
Also, Mozilla maintains a blocklist that Firefox wiil$ check every session to see if there is a plugin or addon installed that should be disabled to prevent browser crashes or security issues.
The big difference between Interclue and AVG’s Toolbar or McAfee SiteAdvisor is that Interclue is a productivity focused addon whereas those products are purely security addons. Interclue makes it faster to identify bad links, but as of now, does not maintain it’s own blocklist of malware and phishing sites - it instead uses the blocklist that is already built into Firefox, which is updated hourly from a feed provided by Google and StopBadWare.
Firefox itself will already prevent those pages from loading should you actually navigate to them, Interclue takes the additional step of warning you before you click by placing a warning icon next to the dodgy link. This “Danger” Linkclue is only one of about 50 different types of icon that Interclue uses to label links before the user clicks them.
Interclue also provides superb content previews, which are completely lacking from the security tools in question.
There’s no reason not to run Interclue alongside other security related add-ons, but one should be aware that much of the time this will result in significant duplication of effort and more “false positives”.
I’ve been meaning to write up some more documentation about this, thanks for reminding me.
Regards,
Seth.
Congrats! I am totally loving interclue, you’ve got an awesome product. I find it extremely usable (although I did tweak the options a bit), curious what usability issues people would have with it.
I’m curious if any of the uninstalls might be related to firefox 3’s stability (or, um, lack thereof). On some of my PCs it seems just fine. but on my main computer, which is running vista, it crashes left and right and so I’ve had to uninstall most of my plugins to try to get it under control and am now sorely missing interclue. :-( Are you guys hearing about instability problems with firefox 3?
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