Slashdot Mirror

I'm neither a mozilla adept nor evangelical, and I cannot address your concerns about lusers the whole world over, but there are ways to keep your own box reasonably secure.

An xpi file is only a zipped archive. Rename one to zip and try it, if your zip program doesn't recognize the extension.

What is inside the compressed xpi archive will differ from extension to extension, but many of the files are 'human readable'. (rdf, js, manifest, xul, etc...)

Where you may need another program to read the xpi archive's files are the *.jar files, which are sometimes a part of an extension's archive, but they are also archives, which most compression program can handle, and they too are usually archives of 'human readable' files.

It takes a bit of work, but hey, it is after all, your box, not mine.

Also, for the security conscious:

• only download XPIs from the secure firefox estension site
• be wary of extensions which are in conjuction with a specific internet site, unless you trust the site before loading up the extension
• use a program which monitors and lists your net connections now and then

In a bit of opposition to the second recommendation above, I use and have been happy with a few of MR Tech's Mozilla Extensions, especially the local install extension.

The Mr Tech website also has a public board for mozilla-based extensions.

Also, check out available bookmarklets for functionality you are looking for, and avoid extensions if a bookmarklet does the trick. A few possible places for applicable bookmarklets are, one, two, three and four.

AutoLink feature requires you to click a button (screenshot here) in order to change the web page (i.e. it's like a bookmarklet).

Let me reiterate: it won't modify the page you're viewing, unless you actually click a button on that page. This means that user is 100% aware of page being modified.

Now compare this with MS SmartLinks, which modifies every page you visit by default.

I've posted this before, but I like to keep bringing it up for the sake of being the devil's advocate:

I'm starting to feel sorry for IE. Everyone's picking on it. It does have some nice features:

• Bookmarklets [bookmarklets.com] are cool (do these work on Mozilla/Firefox/Opera?)
• You can embed HTML in the TaskBar [virtualplastic.net]
• You just can't beat the real Gooogle Toolbar [google.com]
• Favories can be managed with any shell because they are individual files (if only *NIX stored things as files)
• DHTML Behaviors [microsoft.com] can make client-side development a breeze!
• Like most newer Windows products, you can rearrange the toolbars with maximum flexibility [microsoft.com]

I'm starting to feel sorry for IE. Everyone's picking on it. It does have some nice features:

• Bookmarklets are cool (do these work on Mozilla/Firefox/Opera?)
• You can embed HTML in the TaskBar
• You just can't beat the real Gooogle Toolbar
• Favories can be managed with any shell because they are individual files (if only *NIX stored things as files)
• DHTML Behaviors can make client-side development a breeze!
• Like most newer Windows products, you can rearrange the toolbars with maximum flexibility

Bookmarklets let you do something similar. See Highlight

Actually, I've been using an approach similar to this all along: Bookmarklets!

My toolbar is pretty much nothing but bookmarklets now. One for Google, one for Google groups, one for AltaVista, one for Yahoo Maps, etc. It's a clever use of JavasScript in bookmarks. Since the dialog boxes they popup are client side (since it's just JS), I save a roundtrip to each of the websites. In other words, I can actually execute my Google search without ever waiting for the main Google page to download and render. I'm submitting my query directly to the cgi...

If you're even moderately handy with JavaScript it's very easy to enhance the existing ones or write your own. There's a whole set of them targetted at web developers that let you do lots of handy features like computing color codes, changing browser dimensions, and so on.

I haven't tried out the keyword function you're describing, but given the bookmarklets I'm using, it doesn't sound like they do anything I can't already do...

Both of these things are cool tricks which I accomplish with the use of Bookmarklets

I've had a google popup in Mozilla since, well, since I was still using Netscape. I've also got a dictionary popup in my toolbar, and one for FOLDOC. See bookmarklets

Try visiting http://www.bookmarklets.com/.
It's very easy to set up searches in almost any engine, plus much more. Right now i can select a section of text in a webpage, and just clicking one bookmark I can open a fresh window (since I usually just want to check something before reading on) with a search google, yahoo, IMDb, freshmeat or several other engines.
Also, it's easy to do all sorts of other stuff, like jumping to an url, eventhough it's not a link, ROT13 decoding, resizing the screen or changing simple layout stuff, like backgroundcolor (on any site that is, right in the browser)

javascript:Qr=document.selection.create Range().text;if(!Qr){void(Qr=p rompt('Se arch:' ,''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www.google.com/s earch?q='+escape(Qr)

javascript:Qr=document.selection.create Range().text;if(!Qr){void(Qr=p rompt('Se arch:' ,''))}if(Qr)location.href='http://www.google.com/s earch?q='+escape(Qr)

without using 4 different PCs

I use different machines - there's no other way. IE versions won't co-exist (they claim it now works for 4 & 5.5, but I found it very unstable). You also need Macs and Linux to run the non-Windows browsers. Even the "same" browser on a different OS can show different rendering bugs; especially support of CSS features and font sizing.

The Bookmarklets site has some cute tools for testing at different window sizes, with the minimum of effort.

The deja-browser site gives a feel for the "experience" of old browsers, but it doesn't emulate the bugs accurately enough to be used for compatibility testing.

Compatibility with "old" browsers is easy anyway; anything looks flat, grey and ugly through Mosaic 1.0, but then it just deosn't get any better. The real hassles are finding out the little things like IE4 not supporting "float" in CSS.

Try Bookmarkets.com, because believe it or not, this has all been done before and it's actully pretty useful.

Note-- Javascript laden links ahead: (None are malicious)

You can do things like this executive dice roller.

Or, read your cookie that was set for this site. How about seeing when this page was last modified?

See a word over 2 syllables you don't know on Slashdot? Search at Dictionary.com.

Do a reverse lookup on someone's phone number.

...easy make it a bookmarklet ie javascript, in a url: that sits in you bookmarks... errr just look at the site you'll get it.

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE