Changelog

A reverse chronological list of published updates to Super Simple Highlighter, along with a short summary of what has changed.

2023.07.23

• Copying text to the clipboard no longer requires your explicit permission.

2023.06.23

• Styles in which the background colour is the same as the text colour (aka: redactions) now correctly cover links within paragraphs (and other similar content). Note that this only applies when the highlight is first applied. Changing a highlight’s style from a non-redacted style to a redacted style may still cause the old behaviour.
• Optimisations for faster loading & less memory overhead.

2023.06.22

• Extremely minor bug fix.

2023.06.21

• Attempts to show reason when permissions are denied, even when the user accepts it. See this FAQ question for more details.
• Minor bug fixes and appearance changes.

2023.06.20

• Highlight styles are properly included when Summary is saved as a Web Page. Note that Web Page, HTML Only format still doesn’t work, but that’s Chrome’s fault.
• The return of blurry highlight edges, in the style of the previous version. This is off by default, but can be enabled from the Options page.
• Add ‘Remove All’ menu item to group-specific menu in ‘Pages’ section of Options page, allowing the subset of highlights on pages in that group to be removed.

2023.06.19

• Redesign ‘Advanced’ section of Options page, and add progress bars to show what’s happening during long operations.
• Increase limit for text snippet trimming recommendation to 5,000 characters.
• Optimisations for large numbers of highlights (100,000+). This requires building an index, so it may take a while the first time the Options page is opened, but subsequently it should be faster.
• Fixed slowness opening Popup window and Options page introduced in version 2023.05.17
• Faster backup import/export.
• Better Summary markdown formatting.
• Removed ability to group highlights by storage size and date of last highlight in ‘Pages’ section of Options page.
• Added ability in ‘Pages’ section of the Options page to show all highlights in a single group, or every group.
• The Summary page previously only available from the Popup window is now available in the ‘Pages’ section of the Options page, and can be used for a single page’s highlights, multiple pages, or every page.

2023.05.18

• Unreleased.

2023.05.17

• Pages in the Options page can now be ordered by number of highlights, and storage space used.
• Occasionally highlights wouldn’t be applied after loading a page after ~30 seconds of inactivity.

2023.05.16

• Text snippets (the extract listed in the popup window and “Page” section of the Options page) can now be trimmed. This is to optionally save storage space and memory, without affecting normal operation. See the FAQ for more details.
• Optimisations for highlighting text that doesn’t span paragraphs.

2023.05.15

• Styles with the “Block Quotation” setting enabled now properly span their contents, instead of breaking them up into multiple smaller quotations. This isn’t retroactive - you’ll need to remake pre-existing highlights with this style for it to apply. Also, once this style is applied you now can’t change the style to a non “Block Quotation” based style, and vice versa.
• Re-enable highlighting for file-based documents (those whose address starts with file://). This doesn’t work with .mht files, which are saved in Chrome’s “Web Page, Single File” format. I don’t know why, but I don’t think it’s my fault.

2023.05.14

• A massive optimisation effort aimed at speeding up basically everything.
• Only the first 3,000 characters of a highlight’s text snippet are now displayed. Note that this affects only the copy of the highlight’s text, as listed in the popup window and the “Pages” section of the Options page. The actual, on-page highlights remain unlimited as before, and the remainder of the snippet can be displayed by clicking the “more” link. The full text also is also visible in the Summary page, as was the case before. See this FAQ question for why this and the previous change had to happen.
• The size of each highlight (above the 3,000 character threshold), and the estimated storage size of per-site and entire extension are shown in the “Pages” section of the Options page, making it easier to remove excess data from backups (and slightly speed things up).
• Nested highlights enabled by default.
• Clicking on a highlight in the “Pages” section of the Options page will scroll the corresponding page to that highlight (if it was already open). For reasons currently unknown, if the page isn’t already open it does not scroll.
• Add “Save Anonymous Diagnostics” button. This will save a file containing extension information (including your highlights), but also removes all personally identifiable information from it (web site names, page titles, text snippets). Should you need to send me diagnostics to aid bug tracking, you should use this instead of sending a copy of your backup file. There is more information in the FAQ.
• Better formatting of the Quotation style when part of a column (NB: fixing the “splitting” of quotations will come in a later release).
• Scrolling to a highlight will make it flash 3 times.

2023.05.13

Unreleased.

2023.05.12

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2023.05.11

• Reintroduces the option to make a highlight inside an existing highlight (aka a nested highlight). This option is disabled by default in version 2023.05.11, but will be enabled in version 2023.05.12 and later. When disabled, the entire highlight’s style is changed if the text selection is anywhere within the highlight. You can change the setting in the extension’s options page.

2023.05.10

• Fix memory leak caused by infinite loop when a setting is changed.
• Fix issue where close button wouldn’t initially disappear when highlights overlapped.
• Show the current keyboard shortcut alongside its style on the options page.

2023.05.9

• Fixes a bug whereby the Request Permission button in the popup window wouldn’t show in all cases (especially for automatically upgraded extensions), causing permission to be required every time the browser restarts.
• Added link to Frequently Asked Questions.
• Make the extension’s “sandbox” (Content Security Policy) more restrictive, and therefore safer.
• Size & speed optimisations by assuming modern browser standards.

2023.04.8

• Complete rewrite to comply with modern, cross platform Web Extension standards.

4.0.3

• Simplify popup menu.
• Make highlights less likely to be incorrectly styled by the existing page.

4.0.2

• Include highlights in printed pages.

4.0.1

• Fix bug causing missing close button.

4.0.0

• Small bug fixes, as part of a total rewrite.

3.12

• Group pages (now renamed bookmarks) in options page
• Add style sort to popup, remove style filter
• Optimisations, reductions, and so on

3.11

• Highlight Grouping & Invert options
• Various bug fixes

3.10.1

• Keyboard shortcut updates style of highlight under cursor
• Keyboard shortcut removes highlight if the style is the same (i.e. it toggles, but only if ‘unselect text after highlighting’ is checked in options)

3.10.0

• Fix formatting of saved files
• Add ‘delete highlight under cursor’ keyboard shortcut
• Remove promo from footer of copied markdown
• Add tab key navigation to each highlight
• Add close button on highlight hover
• Filter copied/saved highlights with the current filter

3.9.2

• Explicitly inherit font in highlight style.
• Supply document language in text-to-speech methods, when available.

3.9.1

• fix ‘reset all styles’ button
• scroll highlight to midpoint of page, not top
• allow highlights to be saved along with web page

3.9.0

• Add sort by location

3.8.2

• Support for undoing last created highlight

3.8.1

• Internal restructuring

3.8

• Reformat highlight overview page
• Add keyboard shortcuts for copying overview to pasteboard
• Format overview as markdown

3.7.1

• Better handling of Unicode characters in exported database (still testing).

3.7.0

• Import/Export (experimental)

3.6.1

• Branding

3.6.0

• Really REALLY fix the disappearing extension bug, hopefully along with many others (fingers crossed this time).
• Force text-to-speech function to default to the browser’s default language

3.1.10

• Fix disappearing extension bug

3.1.9

• Optional highlight border blur

3.1.8

• Update copy text format
• Update overview page
• Update popup

3.1.7

• Another repack. Why does this keep happening?

3.1.6

• Add Copy to popup menu.
• Update support files to latest version;

3.1.5

• Repack

3.1.4

• Branding change (einzelcode.com is now dexterouslogic.com)

3.1.3

• Filter by style

3.1.2

• Remove ability to redefine highlight from context menu (see Chromium issue 450138)
• Moved style changes to popup menu
• Increase opportunities for the extension to be unloaded when not in use

3.1.1

• Update typography.
• Reorganise options page.

3.1

• Add warning to enable ‘allow file access’ when highlights are added to a file protocol based page
• Add Overview page to popup.
• F.A.Q
• Make ‘remove all highlights’ confirmation an inline dialog (for Mac)
• Minor bug fixes.

3.0.4

• Increase document parsing accuracy

3.0.3

• Add shadow to highlight
• Unselect text after highlight creation
• Limit number of characters per highlight in popup
• Increase compatibility with page structure

3.0.2

• Add option to keep existing colour for highlight styles
• Create changelog

3.0.1

• Style background opacity
• Select highlight text
• Alert when highlight isn’t possible
• Compensation for illegally formatted documents