* Mediafire functionality restored.

The changes in this release:

+ Rapidshare support has been restored.

+ SkipScreen now supports Firefox 4.x, 5.x, 6.x (Aurora).

+ General cleanup.

+ Added a preference to Open Links in Background Tabs. This is an experiment. It allows you to click on a link in Google and other pages and then open the page in a background tab and start processing. This preference is off by default. Let us know what you think.

If you’ve been using Skipscreen but upgraded your browser, your browser will probably update the addon but you’ll have to re-enable it manually.

Thanks for all the testing and other feedback that made this possible.

We’ll be setting up a comment space on Get Satisfaction, a site for communicating any issues or comments you have about Download Songs or Skipscreen, very soon. In the meantime, you can use our Skipscreen, Get Satisfaction page here.

Download Songs is a new app (Mac only, for now) that watches your download folders, and imports any music to iTunes with no fuss. Even music that’s buried in archives or subfolders. We made it because downloading music from the web is still so annoying. Right?

Skipscreen helps a ton, but you still have to find the stuff you downloaded, unzip it, drag it into iTunes, and then clean up the mess of useless .zip files and empty folders. If you are extra-unfortunate, you’ll accidentally drag in a playlist file and iTunes will import the album twice. Argh!

Well, if you download a ton of music from the web and are sick of this post-download hassle, you’ll love our latest effort in making downloading effortless: Download Songs. Combined with Skipscreen, it is literally the easiest way to download songs.

You set what download folders you want it to watch, and whenever a new music file arrives, it goes straight to iTunes. You choose if you want it to start playing or not. For zip and rar archives, it peeks inside to see if there’s music– if there is, it imports to iTunes. You can leave all the imported files intact, or you can have Download Songs clean up the redundant mp3′s, archives, and folders.

Before Download Songs, I’d have to spend ages deleting gigabytes of redundant music, zips, and rars from my ~/Downloads folder whenever I started running low on diskspace. The worst part: I wasn’t 100% sure that I’d imported it to iTunes and had to check each time!

Now I know that when I run out of space it’s actually time for a new hard drive

And there’s one more thing about it that’s really, really cool. Especially when used alongside Skipscreen. It adds a simple search field that you can get to in your menu bar, or with a hot-key (alt-D by default, which previously just made the letter ∂… you won’t miss it).

Hit the hotkey, start typing (there’s a focus issue right now but we’ll fix super-soon) and you get taken to the Download Songs search page, which is a pretty comprehensive search tool for download sites (including an option to search only skipscreen-compatible sites). You can also point it to the search engine of your choice.

You can buy Download Songs now in the App Store ($4.99) or try it for free for 30 days. If you download music from the web, it will definitely pay for itself with all the time and aggravation you save, and all the new music you listen to just because–well–downloading songs just got way easier.

At long last, we have a Skipscreen addon for the Chrome browser ready. Can you help us kick the tires?

Join the e-mail list here and we’ll send you the latest beta version for your testing pleasure.

Being a beta tester would involve, um, going to lots of sites and downloading stuff. Which isn’t a a terrible way to spend a Wednesday and Thursday evening.

(There’s been a Chrome addon named “Skipscreen” floating around out there, but we didn’t create it.)

UPDATE: New Chrome version available. Download here.

We’re looking for bids for a simple IE and/or Chrome alpha of Skipscreen, and wanted to give the Skipscreen community a heads up.

If you’re interested in working on this, send a proposal to skipper AT skipscreen DOT com. Proposal can be for IE (8+) Chrome, or both, and it doesn’t have to be based on existing Skipscreen code.

Also, we’re interested in starting super simple: just wait / click / retry support for Rapidshare and Megaupload– no options, no other UI elements. So submit a simple proposal, and a proposal that includes other features too if you like (but not necc). Awesome!

We looked into it and the detection is confirmed to be a false positive. The anti-virus software is detecting code in the inetc plugin for free and open source NSIS installer (which we use). The trojan writer must have used bits of NSIS, a popular installer used by a ton of projects, and then the anti-virus writers messed up and based their detection on this code.

We’ve alerted the anti-virus company to the error and asked them to fix it. Kinda crappy, but seems like it’s the kind of thing that happens every so often.

UPDATE: The anti-virus company has fixed the problem. Also, within a week or two we should be offering a signed installer, which means you won’t get that fear-inspiring “publisher unknown” problem.