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Building a Better Mozilla With Plugins
Ant writes "Wired has a story on how to improve Mozilla and Firefox web browsers with various plugins/extensions (XPI installations). It lists some of the extensions that have been rated highly by Mozilla users like BugMeNot. One of them not listed and my favorite is PrefBar."
That's the point of FireFox. Think of it this way: Mozilla gives you the whole package, whether you want/need it or not. Firefox gives you the bare-bones essentials, then lets you add only what you need/want, ala carte. Analogize with Linux distros. The only weak point is that many people don't realize that they need/want a certain feature until they use it by accident and fall in love with it.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
... is in my opinion Adblock. I really like the full regular expression support!
:-)
But of course she didn't mention that one, since it would be too efficient against Wired News' own ads.
Disabling my Adblock showed ads on their page at least.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why would a site that uses adverts, and is owned by a company that makes money off web adverts, tell you how to avoid them?
Unless (as in the case with Firefox) you explicitly tell it to do slightly more
With IE its the opposite, it is more than a browser unless you explicitly castrate its overzealous (and insecure) functionality
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
i think you'll find few sites that depend on ad revenue are going to recommend ways to block ads.
Large Corperations with loads of money just seem to go fo M$ software. Doesn't matter how good it is or if it gets the job done they just use it. That is the problem I run into.
The thing is that, for the most part, it does work. Its also extremely well tested and what weaknesses there are are well known and documented. This is one area where the OSS camp has yet to catch up - and I don't mean providing access to a Bugzilla database with 100,000+ known issues, mostly minor. In the business world, predictibility wins out over other areas nine times out of ten.
Heck, even if I know that everything works perfectly but that my server will only stay up for 10 days in a row before performance degrades, if I have a 15 minute reboot window every week then that's fine too. I'd much rather go with a known solution - with workarounds as needed - than an unproven one that may be better. In that situation, a machine that stayed up for the most part but would randomly stop servicing requests once a quarter - while far superior in uptime stats - would be a greatly inferior solution. Its a different mindset.
Of course, this comment is slanted towards enterprise customers.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I agree with you for the most part, but to take it one step further... large corporations use MS software because nobody wants to stick their neck out and use anything else, even if it is better or cheaper. The logic seems to be that if you use MS software and it fails, you can bash MS and the management above you will blame MS, too. But, if you use something else like any free/open-source software, then when it fails, the ax falls on you. Management will blame you for the failure, since in their mind you were just cutting corners. I saw this on a project I was working on. I had used MySQL for a project at our facility for a couple of years and it had worked great. Due to the success of the project, corp headquarters decided to try to implement the project at other facilities, but they balked at MySQL and forced me to convert the project to MS SQL. Well... long story short, I now have to keep an eye on MS SQL to make sure it doesn't die, which it's already done several times in 6 months.
Actually the weaknesses are not well known or documented. Particularly with security. There are new issues arising daily -- which would be why CERT recommended that users consider changing browsers.
That's the sort of uncertainty that might make enterprise customers nervous.
All these other plugins are just fluff if adoption is severely hampered by the lack of a fully functional calendar.
Build the calendar, and they will come.. come away from Outlook.
It *can* happen.
Calendar should be #1 priority right now.. mail & news is great, the browser is great.. but the lack of a calendar *really is stopping people* from switching. At least with the dozens of small businesses that I do consulting for, it is.
I cannot emphasize this enough - a lot of small businesses (without exchange) stick to Outlook because of the pretty pointy clicky calendar.
"sunbird" isn't even close. The Mozilla Calendar is waay far off.
Come on, guys... let's dooooo it!