Awesome product...hated using the "browse with" function to change default browsers! (oh and to reply to people complaining about the update frequency....don't act retarded! As has been replied a bit down from here...it's a 4sec job every 1.5 month or so!)
Nice tool but can't be updated behind an authenticated proxy server. Instead you have to uninstall it, restart VS2010, install the new version, and restart VS2010 again.
Also, previous versions (0.8.8 and earlier) have all refused to work correctly for me with VS2010 on my Win7 64-bit machine with Firefox. If I tell it to use Firefox it insists instead on bringing up Google Chrome for some reason. I normally need to test with IE anyway so that's not a huge problem for me but reduces the rating. I'm about to test to see if 0.8.9 works any better in this regard.
It's still a very useful tool; I just wish some of the rough edges could be sanded down a little. OTOH, it's officially a beta product plus it's free so I'm not complaining but rather just trying to provide some feedback.
I love this tool and I do recommend getting it, but be aware that this tool will ask you to update it for absolutely no reason quite often. This is annoying with my slow internet connection, as it takes 30 minutes out of my day every time I have to open the extension manager, wait for Visual Studio to check for all the updates, update, restart VS, and then wait for my solution to reload.
I believe they're doing this to increase their search ranking. Which is lame IMHO.
I'd give 5 stars if they remove the required re-download after X days. What if my internet was down? Does that mean I have to stop working for the day because I can't boost WoVS's web presence?
Others are annoyed by this as well, but usually only remove 1 star because of it. I STRONGLY suggest other users to remove more stars. I can just imagine Clarius weighing the options... "We *could* remove the message, but the one star we loose is worth the extra 80,000 extra downloads we get because of the message."
I half wonder if the time I waste updating this tool would be better spent writing my own copy of this tool. All it does is update some registry keys.
Maybe you want to blame, besides us, your ISP provider? Your VS solution with a million projects?
The bits are in beta and we want to keep only a single build out there to help us get better testing coverage, less support work, etc. That's why we ask you to update the bits, which doesn't happen more often than 1 (one) time every month or month and a half.
So if spending the few seconds (literally, 3 or 4 seconds which takes to download the tool) every 60-90 days to help us test the latest beta bits is sooooo (oh my letter 'o' got stuck!) much to ask to you, please look for an alternative tool that better suits your requirements bar.
UPDATE: seems like you keep editing your original post, so I'll address here what you have added recently.
>>>All it does is update some registry keys.
You are wrong, again. The tool does more than that.
But again, please don't waste any more of your time, I'll love to check out your tool that "all it does is update some registry keys" when you have it ready for testing (later today?) -- just let me know!
First of all thanks for this helpful piece of software. Makes live a bit easier. :) But one question remains. It looks like it's not remembering the last selection. Don't know exactly why and when but if i switch SVN branches and run the project again it will switch back to the systems default browser. To me it's not clear when the system default browser is used or when my selection is used. In my case the system default browser is Firefox. But I want the project to be started always in IE by default. So it's nice to have a fast way to switch the browser if needed. But how can I force the IE usage for a certain project or at least IE in general. Any thoughts on that?
Thank you for your kinds words. It is always a pleasure to invest free time into building FREE extensions for the community and then have people like you crying because they have to spend 3 seconds every month or month and a half to update the BETA bits. Remeber that you can always uninstall this extension, just go to Tools -> Extension Manager -> Installed Extension -> DBS. And voila! no more spending 3 seconds every now and then!
The expiry is annoying and your companies responses to this issue are naive at best and rude at worst. This is hardly portraying your company in a good light. Perhaps something along the lines of "We appreciate your feedback but we've done this because....sorry" could be a better response?
Would I work with your company seeing how you have responded to the below comments, probably not....
We have taken the time (3 times at least if I recall correctly) to explain the details of why we don't want outdated beta software to live forever on users machine having to maintain dozens of different builds out there. You can browse early posts of this very same Q&A and you will find our "We appreciate your feedback but we've done this because....sorry" reply. Then there were very few users (2 or 3 or something like that) that responded to our reply with "pathetic", "worst plugin ever", "you are lying" and stuff like that just because they don't like to spend 3 seconds every ~1.5 month to update the bits and helps us have to support a single codebase instead of multiple ones. Are we being rude with them? I don't think so, I believe our answer is just in the same tone of their complaining. And thanks for your feedback btw!
Awesome tool! Simple, clean, fast.
Is there a way to get the browser switcher to use the Google Chrome Canary build instead of / in addition to the release build of Chrome?
I've gone minimalist with Visual Studio and removed all of the toolbars. Is there any way to choose the default browser by using a menu option instead?
Is there any way to add the "Set x as defult browser" toolbar commands to other toolbars? I'd like to be able to embed the buttons into the main menu bar.
I wanted to do the same thing. By using the 'Customize->Keyboard' and searching for Firefox I found that the commands were under File. So, back to Customize, select menu, Add command, then select from the File category Firefox (list as cmdidBrowseWithFirefox.) This successfully adds the icon to the menu bar but when I click it Visual Studio reports the error 'Command "File.ViewInBrowser" is not available.' Doh :( For now I have to show, select then hide the toolbar as I'm a very minimalist coder and only have the menu bar (and wish that would hide until alt is pressed ;) )
After installing the add-on, when I click one of the browsers icon I get the message: "Access to path C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\browsers.xml is denied". I am running as administrator and I open the access of this file to everyone.
The browsers.xml file has this content:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<BrowserInfo><Browser><Name>Opera Internet Browser</Name><Path>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera\Opera.exe"</Path><Resolution>0</Resolution><IsDefault>True</IsDefault></Browser></BrowserInfo>.
Can you help me?
Thanks
I don't know the reason... but its not working on my formated PC (I used to use this before the clean up). I use Win7 64bits and VS2010 (not SP1 yet)... The buttons are all grey, and the context menu option does not appears... =/ Do you know something about it?!
DBS has a known issue where it won't work on new installs of VS until you use the built-in "View in Browser" feature at least once. Please use VS "View in Browser" first and then it should work. Thanks.
I have 0.8.3 with VS2010 SP1 running on Win7 SP1 64-bit. WoVS Default Browser Switcher doesn't seem to know that I have Firefox v6 installed. My only choice of browser using the tool is IE (IE8). How do I configure WoVS Default Browser Switcher to let it know that I have other browsers installed?
Hi guys, unfortunately DBS browser detection is not currently driven by a configuration file or registry setting that you could tweak. It happens in code and it looks like Firefox v6 may not be properly detected in all cases for AtlantaProgrammer. For timmi-de and Jimi2Cool, which browser (if any in particular) is failing DBS to detect for you? Thanks!
After toying around with things a bit I realized the paths are coming from the registry under the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths
each subkey is the name of an application (firefox.exe for example) with the value set to the full path to the app. The BrowserSwitcher checks the list of apps against some internal list of supported browser exe names and determines which are installed and where they live that way.
For whatever reason none of my other browsers were listed. There's another key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths
that contains 32-bit exe listings on 64-bit systems but mine were not listed here either.
So I decided to try and manually add these values and it worked!
I added the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\firefox.exe
with a value [My firefox install location]\firefox.exe and PRESTO! it's now available in the switcher's toolbar.
I'm not a huge fan of manually changing the registry but adding these doesn't seem to hurt anything (so far).
Suggestion: Can you provide a mechanism (through a config file perhaps) for users to enter in override values for these paths? Auto-detection is great but override capability would really tie the room togather
hope this helps
I have IE 6.. (I know its ancient) and its not detecting I need to specify the path somewhere.A config file would have helped a lot.Hope you can add this feature in a future release.
