Slashdot Mirror
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."
We're back on track with a good Mozilla article. Now I can get some decent Slashdotting done. Well, that and switching my PC over to Gentoo.
I mean, all these articles about TV and movies this morning? Bring on the Mozilla, Linux, and Mac articles. Let's get some good Microsoft bashing going! Daddy needs his fix!
From the prefbar web site:
It does not work with Mozilla Firefox
my favorite extension is RadialContext, basically gives you mouse gestures for Mozilla and Firefox.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I think all this add-ins are fine and dandy for the typical home user, but where are the plug-ins that will improve productivity for the Corporate user?
IE blends easily with M$'s large arsenal of server-side applications, which the execs just to love to see. Easy integration.
What can Mozilla offer that will aid its cause in the enterprise environment. They added Integrated Authentication in v1.6 which was brilliant, but what else?
How about some add-in for policies?
The Wired article calls Mozilla stripped dows and lacking features, but isn't that the point of Mozilla, to be faster by getting rid of the bells and whistles?
It may be slightly inconvenient, but at least the Mozilla extension system isn't a blank check to hackers like IE's ActiveX system.
... plugin to fix that? :-)
How about a
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Especially as I can now do it one-handed.
The latest version is pretty good. If you click on a malformed link like http://www@.cnet.com it warns you. I thought that was pretty cool.
I can't believe Adblock isn't listed. It even works with Firefox 0.9, despite rumblings I've heard to the contrary.
any article about firefox that doesn't mention adblock and the best filters to use is seriously lacking.
By far, I find the mouse gestures extension to be the greatest addition to Mozilla. This borrowed feature of Opera will certainly and permanently change the way you browse websites.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
...is Enigmail. A GPG/PGP plug-in for Mozilla. It integrates GnuPG commandline tools seamlessly into the browser. It's easiest to use encryption/signing tool I've seen so far.
... 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!
Slow news day, eh? The Article is low on substance. This page has much more details. Looks like the wired article has copy-pasted and not done any real work. The actual article should have had listed quirks, what do the extentions actually do, rather than pasting text from mozilla extention page.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Works with 0.9, blocks anything (hate to admit it, but I've used it on OSDN for Doubleclick crap), and allows for selectivity in blocking.
http://adblock.mozdev.org
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
My fav extension at the moment is GmailCompose, combined with Gmail's great interface, it feels like a real email app, and not just web mail.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Is something like Safari's or Google's AutoFill form feature. Yes, there are some plug-ins (WebDeveloper has an Enable Auto-Completion, but I can't get it to work) that do this, but not as suavely as the aforementioned products. Something that caches form field names and commonly used values and at a push of a button or keystroke, it fills out all of the form based on what the most popular values that are cached for the field names.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
If you hadn't spent so much time spell-checking your post, you might have gotten it.
My favortie Mozilla plug-in is Flash Click to view. It blocks all those annoying flash ads and puts an icon in its place. If you want to view the Flash ad/game/movie whatever, you just click the icon and it loads. It makes browsing the web just a little more bearable.
You know.. its easy really
Go to
Edit - Preferences - Navigator - Downloads.
Select the option to open a progress dialog.
Then works just about like IE.
Launchy enables you to open links and mailto's with external applications like IE, Opera, Outlook, GetRight.
Works in: Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird Launchy Homepage
Henrik Gemal
gemal.dk
After installation, BugMeNot supplies an appropriate name and password from a database that seems to include registration info for the vast majority of websites that request registration. The BugMeNot developers note that most people enter false information on registration forms to protect their privacy, so BugMeNot actually cuts down on database pollution. The only problem is that The New York Times may wonder what happened to all those 86-year-old Albanian grandmothers who head up huge technology firms that used to sign up to read the NYT website.
... well, the other problem is: Now that the slashdot crowd has become aware of BugMeNot, NYT will need to prepare for Attack of the Clones: Geek Edition! :P
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
noone has mentioned Aaron Spuler's Single window which puts all those annoying pages that spawn a new window into a tab instead... just a wonderful plug-in
I've just started using Firefox, and the best plugin I know of for it is Super DragAndGo. If you drag a link to empty space on the webpage, that link is opened in a new tab. It's so simple, but it's the best new web browsing feature I've seen in a long time.
BTW, Camino does not install this automatically, but is relatively simple to go into your chrome folder and hack it yourself.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I use them for moving between pages of on-line cartoons... erm... as well as...you know...
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Naturally, the more extensions you loaded, the more time it took your computer to boot and the more system crashes and incompatibilities occurred. It got to the point that I spent significant time enabling and disabling extensions to try to identify incompatibilities and the sources of my computer crashes. I don't know anything about Mozilla architecture, but might an extension-based Firefox be edging us down that same path?
I know I'd personally prefer it if the Firefox team evaluated the best extensions, and incorporated them into the main code for optimum compatibility.
So here's my question to people familiar with the Mozilla codebase: is my comparison between Pre-OSX Macs and Firefox valid?
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Bookmarklets are an underrated way to extend the usability of Mozilla, Firefox and even IE.
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
I have 'zap plugins' and 'zap images' in my personal toolbar to stop strobing ads and flash on a page-by-page basis. Works great!
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
FlashBlock! That is the BEST plugin EVER created! Everybody who has Firefox installed should also have this plugin installed.
Bryan
Not quite. It has "tab browsing" out of the box, but not the "Tabbrowser Extensions" plugin. Tabbrowser Extensions is MUCH more powerful and feature-rich.. something like 40 different options to set rather than the 3 found in 0.9.
I was disappointed enough that I reverted back to 0.8 so I could have my tabs the way I like them.
IE5 is increasing? Wha? From the link in my sig:
;)
IE5 usage:
April 2004: 10.1%
May 2004: 9.2%
June 2004: 8.3%
July 2004: 8.1%
Were you reading the chart backwards?
Firefox for linux (with gtk+ and xft) comes with an installer. Just extract the tarball and run firefox-installer in the extracted directory and it will behave essentially the same as any winbloze installer. If you want an rpm, I'm sure google will find one if you're that desperate.
The default install is a self contained binary. All you have to do is untar/gzip and run firefox from the new firefox directory.
/opt/firefox and create a link in my window manager. When I want to upgrade or try a different version, wipe out the directory and untar a new one.
Personally I just untar into
Also the reason Mozilla does it this way, is it makes it super easy for any of the distro's to create an install package for it. They dont even have to compile the app if they dont want. So if your really missing that rpm to install, complain to your distro for not releasing one yet.
Download Sort is what you're looking for.
Hope that helps.
Flashblock: Absolute must have stops the all singing dancing net, but lets you use it if you must.
t ensions .html.en
l la/
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Preferential: Lets you change every option, not just the subset that they think you need. Lets me kill gif anims for one thing.
http://preferential.mozdev.org/
Tab Browser extentsion: The only current way to get true single window mode.
http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabex
Adblock: Block annoying adds that get by above measures. I leave them alone if the don't blink/anim and flow in my text. One of those and they are gone. For some reason newegg flash adds were escaping flashblock so, I adblocked *newegg*.
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
Nuke anything: Sometimes a site will serve ads from the same place as usefull image so I don't want to filter. This lets me knock out anything from the page temporarily.
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozi
I don't know of anyone who's disappointed that Firefox is "pretty bare" the first time they use it. What they notice is that it can do everything IE does, but with tabbed browsing and without the pop-ups or security holes.
Er.... You mean this Adblock? The one that's currently the second highest rated extension for Firefox on Mozilla Update?
*shrug*
Mozilla already has a large developer community, almost all of the extensions at Mozilla Update are developed by the community.
An extension developer can submit their extension to Mozilla Update and directly link to the XPI from their homepage.
Or they can provide a downloadable XPI file, the user has to open it (from File > Open), and it'll be installed.
So there is no automatic installation, and the avarage user can't be tricked to click yes for an installation dialog.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Are you sure about that? That security hole won't be fixed until Firefox 1.0.
Extensions in the classic MacOS sense are like kernel modules or plugins. Extension in the Mozilla/Firefox sense are augmentations of the application (usually demand loaded) so they don't significantly impact stability or load time, as far as I can tell. An extension could be implemented in a lot of ways, whether simple or complex. Generally they can't overwrite anything, so they hook into the existing API, and Mozilla provides a pretty vast one.
Mozilla/Firefox don't come with any extensions at all. They are perfectly useful without them. Moz/Firefox may directly incorporate features of popular extensions in later versions, but they cease to be extensions at the point, and are considered part of the application proper.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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!