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Firefox/Thunderbird Plugins: Is Less More?
comforteagle writes "I've published the first of a two part look at the new dynamic duo of Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird. While most folks thus far agree with the 'less is more' mantra when it comes to the base applications, the plugins seem to be a different story. Hey, there's little wiggle room to debate that the firefox base application (the subject of the first article) isn't the shizzle, but how about the add-ons and plugins? For that matter, do you agree that less is more. or is too little included?"
After that haven't added much to Firefox.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
i use both of these, however i chose to stay with Firebird (0.7) instead of going to Firefox, because firefox .8 had some bugs with the download manager that I didn't like.
A great plugin for Thunderbird, which allows you to use GPG to sign/encrypt your email messages. Very cool!
Investing forum
Having a program that is simple (and small!) is nice, especially when you can add on the features you want.
However, for it to be successful in the mainstream the customization has to be super easy and painless.
I have had difficulties in the past with customizing Mozilla/Netscape, particularly with trying to switch to small buttons/icons, and that's frustrating.
By the time I download all the plug-ins and extensions I need for work; I've got something just north of Mozilla and just south of Netscape 7.x. Not needing Firefox or Thunderbird.
The browser setups I use at work and at home are vastly different. I like to keep the most efficient and streamlined tool set at work, and I'll load up all the toys at home. Thus the ability to add and remove the plugins appeals to me.
I am me...I think
What does the Google toolbar do that Firefox popup-blocking+integrated search can't? Pagerank? Who cares about that?
...
Anyway, I personally would rather not have my browser and mail program in one binary. Often I want to kill my browser so it forgets about security permissions (or heck every now and then it blows up all by itself). Having to restart my mail program too is annoying. Now all I have to do is figure out how to make firefox speak Java....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
so offer different downloads.
- 1 package with only the barebone browser.
- 1 package with the browser and x of the most used plugins. perhaps an option during install to manually select which plugins to install or not(custom install)
- 1 package with the browser and the whole shebang.
ofc some sort of verification would be needed before a 3rd party plugin would be added to an "official" download...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I use it myself, and the Enigmail plugin works great once its configured. Unfortunately, making the Win32 port of GPG work with your keys is a bit of an ordeal, but it's mostly just the learning curve of GPG itself.
link for the lazy (and slashdotting).
about:config
Quite possibly the coolest thing since sliced bread.I love the RSS Reader Panel plugin for Firefox. Simple, powerful, and only one keystroke away...
I use Firefox exclusively (except when Outlook occasionally insists on openeing IE). It is so good I want to install it on every friends PC I have to rid of spyware and viruses, but then think of having to support them when they visit a Flash (or whatever) site. If it wasn't for this I doubt most of them would even notice the difference, but still reap the benefits. I think the common plugins should be included with the installation, with a custom installation mode for those who know what they are doing.
While I agree that plugins are all very well and good, and that less may indeed be more, it would, IMHO, be far more useful if some of them were included with the original download.
I'm currently using mozilla and while I understand there may be legal issues stopping them, I would have preferred them to include flash/java/shockwave/etc with the package as standard.
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While the Google Toolbar is what makes IE useable, I don't think its better than having a builtin search bar like in Firefox. IE has a terribly inefficient interface, wasting entire vertical sections for a few buttons and for the address bar. Most people leave the Google bar below it all and make it even worse, so the interface is even more cluttered. While its neat to check out the pagerank of certain pages, its not something I want to do for every page I'm on. Also, I don't think Google Toolbar can make up for not having tabbed browsing, that is a major setback to me using IE.
I don't see why it would need a branch. How about just including 2 or 3 installation files; a tiny one for us who like simplicity, or larger for those who prefer all the plugins to come in the box.
I love Firefox's plugins, and all the great features it has even without plugins. But it's getting pretty annoying to have to nuke my profile and reinstall all my themes/plugins of choice every time I install a new release or nightly build of FF... yeah, sometimes it doesn't break anything, but usually even 1 day's difference manages to break an extension or two, or completely mangle my profile.
6 2) that I'm able to reproduce on every machine I use Firefox on - and it's a serious pain. However, the first nightly that fixes that bug introduces two severe rendering bugs (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24285 6, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242691 ), plus a bug that breaks forms on sites like PayPal (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24270 9).
I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since Firefox is still beta software, but it would be nice if they could at least make old extensions and themes not completely crash/freeze the browser. On my system, having an old theme or extension installed is usually good enough to make Firefox crash or freeze at startup.
If the milestone releases were stable enough for everyday use, that'd probably make it easier. But every firefox/firebird/etc milestone I've used has had showstopper bugs that drove me to the nightly builds. 0.8 for example has a cache corruption bug (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1236
I think it would be really good if the Firefox devs could backport bug fixes to the milestone releases, so that it would be possible to get a very stable version of Firefox, even if it's missing some of the shiny new features. Right now I'm stuck using a nightly that doesn't support almost any of the extensions I use, and still has a bunch of bugs that weren't in 0.8, just so I can browse the web without feeling like I'm using a crippled version of IE.
Another solution would be to just settle on a standardized plugin API and stick with it, so that extensions and plugins don't break in bizarre ways every time a new nightly comes out. I'm not sure how realistic that idea is, though, based on how complex the Mozilla/Gecko/XPCOM framework is.
Basically, I love Firefox, and I loved plain Mozilla before Firefox came out, but they're both way too unpredictable. It would be nice if something could be done to 'settle them down' a little bit. Even now Firefox randomly crashes while I'm loading various pages, and exhibits lots of funky little behaviors I'm just getting used to, and I can reproduce all this on other machines. Nuking my profile and installing the latest Firefox nightly is becoming a daily affair for me. All this maintenance is nearly enough to send me back to IE.
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troll::post();
or better yet have a single installer/downloader that would allow you to check/uncheck which features you wanted installed, like other complex apps do.
-ashot
I use the google toolbar to search within a page all the time. You can have multiple words and there is no annoying popup window like the regular page searching function. You can also highlight all instances of the words.
I use this every day and it is why I don't make Firefox my main browser.
Everyone, the Google Bar for Mozilla is NOT the same as the Google Bar for IE. The Google Bar for IE is FROM Google. IE agrees to give Google browsing habits from those IE users in exchange for Page Rank. Now, before the Google Bar for Mozilla, Google had a javascript popup you could drag into your boorkmark toolbar. You click it, get a popup, enter a search term and get a Google page. Now we have the Google Toolbar which has everything EXCEPT Page Rank and YES, It's important. Extremely important for E-commerce. Well now someone has done the same for page rank. Drag this javascript to your bookmark toolbar, click it and a popup gives you page rank. (takes a bit though) Get it from http://seo(dot)nickstallman(dot)net/
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Does anyone else get annoyed that the little popup shows up after a download saying it's completed but you can't click on it to bring the file up? heh.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I just hope they resolve that bug where sites can pester people into installing XPIs :(
At least one place was offering some kind of spyware XPI that I remember hearing about, and the last thing I want to see is for us Mozilla users to start having some of the same spyware problems as IE has long had...
It can be loaded standalone as an application or it can be a mozilla/firefox plugin.
Sunbird
It's almost usable. I wish it was geared a bit towards multi-user being an outlook replacement. I have it setup right now for two users to get in and make changes, but there's no way to tell which user made the changes, etc. I'm sure it will improve over time.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I'm all for shipping lean applications--not so much because of storage--plugins are usually small--but because it confuses new users less.
The problem I have is that installing plugins over the web for Firefox or Thunderbird is non-trivial, at least on Linux. I haven't been able to get Java to work at all on recent versions. And in order to get any of the "automatic installs" to work, I have to run the browser as root; installing stuff in the user's home directory doesn't work. I haven't figured out at all how to get Thunderbird plugins to work.
Part of the problem seems to be related to the browsers themselves, part of the problem seems to be with the plugins and extensions themselves.
One extension also wiped out my complete bookmark file, even though it wasn't even bookmark related.
Downloading extensions over the web also raises lots of security issues and versioning problems.
If these browsers are going to ship lean-and-mean, then their web-based install features must work correctly, for regular users, on all platforms, and securely.
Since Firefox and Thunderbird still seem to be far from that state, it would probably be better to include most reasonably stable and moderately sized plug-ins with each release for now, but to disable them. That way, novice users don't get confused, but experienced users don't have the hassles and worries of web-based installs.
I like how you can click on any of the search terms on the right and it will automatically advance you to the next instance of that word on the page. It's really usful for long pages where only a small part may be relevant to you. You can also have each search term highlighted a different color making it easy to pick them out on a page.
I've been completely dedicated to Firewhatever & Thunderbird since I first became aware of them; the first thing I do on a new machine is delete every little blue "e" shortcut I can find (or replace the standard mozilla in the case of linux). There are probably 3 reasons I use firewhatever, in order of importance:
1. Adblock & Flash "click-to-play" extensions (the only ones I use, actually) 2. Popup-blocking and a sensible refusal to remap keys to stupid things (e.g., I can still right click to view source or download images even if a web site designer has included an annoying-yet-useless bit of javascript) 3. Bookmark shortcuts in the location bar (e.g. "dict inane" or "google al qaeda training manual") 4. Tabbed browsing
The wonder of adblock and flash click to play has almost redefined the web from my vantage point; banners and annoying animations are virtually non-existant on sites I frequent.
If the targeted user is a computer savy person, or at least someone who likes to tinker, then less is better. Someone like this can add what they want. Actually I think most people can add what they want for that matter, but will they?
If the targeted user is someone who does only a little tinkering then it is to little.
The real problem is, if you already have a browser on your computer ( windows / IE or mac safari ) are you going to download another browser? Some people ( like me ) will, but the majority will use what is installed already. So the first hurdle is getting people to download the browser. Then if you bundle to much that download becomes to big, and problematic. On the other hand if you bundle to little then why bother to download it in the first place?
I actually think it is really a catch 22.
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Users don't want plugins! No, I don't want a video "right in my web page". Just launch the media player and let me resize it and interact with its full menu to set things like video options. Got a cool flash/Java app? Let me save an swf or jar and click on it whenever I feel like running your stuff. Why do you think I am connected to Internet all the time anyways? Want to sell me stuff? Not gonna work if I am pissed off at your ad format. Use text or in-page images with tasteful colors. Or better yet, give me an intelligent search engine to find stuff at best prices when I am actually looking for it.
I use Safari and Opera for 99.9% of pages and they are pretty good at blocking the worst offenders, by design and because they tend to write IE-specific Javascript anyway. Firefox sounds like the right thing to install on PCs of friends who don't want to buy Opera.
I agree - pluggins are a pain to find and mess with.
l
,like linux, this is the start of distro's for Firefox?
Sorry if someone already mentioned it, but...
Try Firefox Black Diamond edition.
http://blackdiamond.mozdev.org/installation.htm
It still takes a bit of tweaking, but some of the best pluggins are already installed.
Perhaps
_The_ problem with firefox/thunderbird extensions is that they are a security and usability nightmare (and then I'm talking about the good ones, not the spyware .xpis). There is _no_ QA whatsoever, the code is often extremely bloated, different extensions conflict with each other, place access points to themselves in half a dozen different places, and the authors often don't keep up to date on changes in files related to their extensions.
Some well known extensions like "TBE" replicate every single tabbrowser related security hole which has been fixed in mozilla proper for the past year.
Added to this is that a lot of these extensions are basically javascript reimplementations of c++ functionality that was ripped out since the firefox developers thought useless. Adding more than a handful of extensions has a very noticable impact on the vaunted speed of these programs.
Well known mozilla developers refuse to use extensions unless they've personally reviewed its code (which naturally enough they don't have time for).
Me, I'm following their lead. I have a lot more trust in them than in some anonymous extension writers (if they were good, they'd be working on the main products rather than writing extensions).
Is this...
script language="JavaScript"
function foo(){
bar();
shizzle();
}
function bar(){
document.write("Bling\n");
}
function shizzle(){
document.write("Bling\n");
}
The function foo() will cause FireFox to only write "Bling" instead of "Bling Bling". The function also causes the page to 'hang'.
This script will work in IE. Let's not give people an excuse to stick with IE because websites X,Y and Z do not work with FireFox.
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
...that followed the Firefox philosophy. :/
:) Not that I use MS Office anymore anyway, but OpenOffice could adopt a similar approach.
I've been ranting for years that what we need are applications that come with a base set of features that you can extend via plugin type dealies at will. It could even work in a non-opensource setting. Imagine Microsoft selling WordLite with just the features that the common man uses (about 1% of what's included now). If, at some point in the future you wished to add feature X, you pull up the Office web site, choose the feature, pay a nominal fee to download it and install it. Voila! You're able to pay for ONLY the features you want while people with different needs can pay for ONLY the features they need. And I don't get stuck installing half a gig worth of crap I'll never use.