Today I'm happy to announce that a new version of Lightbeam is available. It contains some new features and several improvements. The release of this major version is also an opportunity to give you more details about what happened since I started to maintain the add-on.

Dark gray background. At the top right is the word 'Lightbeam' und below it the digit '3'. In the main part of the image there are transparent circles and small transparent triangles. The circles are connected with some triangles by thin lines so they are forming a graph. — Image 1: Announcement image for Lightbeam 3

Introducing new features

Some of you record hundreds of websites while their daily use. In the resulting graph with hundreds of nodes it’s not easy to find specific websites. For this case the add-on now offers a search function and when you enter a search term all websites and their connections will be highlighted in the graph. You can choose the colors that is used to do in the settings.

Another way to customize Lightbeam is giving it a new appearance. Until now it was showing itself mostly in dark colors. This makes sense because like the white nodes on the black background light beams appear in dark places. But as there are people demanding dark themes in their applications there are those preferring light variants. Therefore, you can now select a brand-new light theme in the settings!

Not entirely new but something that has changed in Lightbeam 3 is the control of the tracking protection (TP). Users were and are still able to configure if TP should be enabled or not. Maybe you noticed that if you did you were not able to configure it in the settings of Firefox anymore. That’s why things have changed in version 3. From now on the extension display the configuration of your browser by default. If you press the button to overwrite it Lightbeam leads you to its settings where you can finally overwrite the settings and read about the consequences. Since the first button led you here you also know how to restore the browser’s original configuration. After overwriting you can set the TP as you did in previous versions.

These were the most noticeable changes in Lightbeam. You can read the whole list in the release notes when you install the extension.

More things have changed

While the add-on is currently maintained only by myself I’m not the only person influencing the way Lightbeam is developing. Two of the changes mentioned above were initiated by other persons. To complete the picture of contributions I counted the issues opened by persons beside me and found out that five persons created six issues on Gitlab and two created four on Codeberg. Furthermore, two persons contacted me via email with their ideas, suggestions and bug reports. A great thank you to every of these persons!

Apart from new features and improvements there are additional things that did change in the background. Firstly, the repository with the source code of Lightbeam moved to Codeberg as it is a better fitting home for the extension. Next, the add-on was adjusted to be usable on mobile devices and published for Android. Especially if you want to show a graph to another person it’s now really comfortable to just use your phone! To install Lightbeam on Firefox for Android you just need to visit AMO where you add it the same way as you do on a desktop.

Continuing to describe the development on a meta level it also might be interesting to read more about statistics. As a developer of a Firefox-add-on you are able to see some numbers regarding your extensions in the Developer Hub provided by Mozilla. It’s possible to see how many times an extension was downloaded in a selected period, how many users had the add-on installed in their browser and some information about the browsers of the users like the version and the language.

Image 2 shows the development of the numbers of users and downloads during the time I was maintaining Lightbeam. You can see that more and more browsers were equipped with the add-on until 3,981 installations marked the maximum on the 18th of March this year. Since than the number was decreasing slowly until now. Looking at Image 3 which displays the state on July 24th 2024 it’s obvious that most users (more than two third) are recording websites on a Windows-PC, followed by Mac-users with a quarter and Linux-users with almost a quarter. Some (5%) are already trying Lightbeam on an Android device. What is more surprising for me is that one third of the users is using Firefox with French as their prefered language. English is only on the second place with 29% and in front of German with 20%.

Image 2: Screenshot from the Developer Hub showing downloads und daily users from May 4th 2022 to July 24th 2024

Image 3: Screenshot from the Developer Hub showing the most used language in the browser of Lightbeam users and the platforms where the extension is installed most often.

Move to a new chapter

In the past more than two years a lot has changed for Lightbeam and that - despite of the new features - is why I finally chose to give it a new major version: 3. With this version I close an old chapter and start a new one together with you. The last sentences I’d like to use to motivate you to tell me why you are using Lightbeam. Also, use the opportunity to bring up new ideas to improve the add-on. You can do so by writing an email or even a letter (see the imprint for contact details) or by tooting on Mastodon using the hashtag #lightbeam.

Thank you :)