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Exploring Firefox Extensions
Gary writes "If you haven't made the switch to Mozilla Firefox it may be because you aren't aware of the great benefits Firefox has over IE. Flexbeta has posted a nice HOWTO guide on Firefox extensions; my favorite is the Target Alert extension which displays a small graphic next to links that are not web pages. For example a mailto: link will display a small envelope, a link to a PDF file will display a small Adobe icon, etc."
The best thing I like about firefox is not that it has extensions , but that the extensions are done up in Javascript and XUL (most of them are). I can safely install most of these because I just take a peek at the code (*tinfoil hat*) to make sure there are no obvious backdoors in it.
:)
Thankfully most extensions are done up cleanly , so it's easy to understand that there is no "crazy" code or backdoors hidden.
Lastly they run the same (almost) everywhere
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
One feature I cannot work out is how to stop Animated gifs from animating.
I've looked around and cannot find it, do I need to add a plugin to stop them, or am I just missing something really fundimental?
liqbase
Middle click to open link in new window/tab
Someone should really change the code of this feature because it doesn't work with javascript links (you get a blank page when you middle-click on this kind of link)
When one of my work mates stepped out for a bit leaving his Firefox running , we just opened Yahoo and did a "Show Passwords" in Webdeveloper :)
That'll teach him not to leave his PC unlocked.
If you know who I am, I'll have to kill you
The thing that has kept me away from Firefox and Mozilla is that each has very large menu bars when compared to IE. You have the Standard Menu bar, the back/forward/stop/etc bar, the address bar; it all adds up.
With IE you could always throw them all up on one line with small icons and it took up very little space at the top of your window when you have the browser minimized.
The Compact Menu extension for Firefox allows me to setup the menu bar very similarly; then just use a small icon theme and boom I have almost the same effect.
Now that I can see the screen the way I want I have to admit firefox is indeed a very nice browser.
I came across this a while ago and thought it would be useful for helping out some novice users who don't understand helper applications and the like. Alas, it's mostly useless. It uses the 3 digit extension, not the MIME type. So it's useless for content served dynamically via CGI scripts. It would also be trivial for a malicious user to create a website, post some .doc files, which would show up as Word Documents, and instead change the MIME type and serve up JavaScript or VBScript to do something evil.
The right way to do this is to get the HTTP Headers and see what MIME type is being returned by the server.
I'm a FireFox user - have been since it was Phoenix - but so many of the skins and plugins have too much of a "Oooh, shiny!" factor to them. How about more flexible X.509 configuration or a harcore Kiosk mode (that's the reason most kiosks run IE) or something like that. It has the same problem as WinAMP - there are far too many skins (40% of which have UI design issues; 40% of which are identical to each other, and 20% might be useful) and not enough technical plugins.
To pre-emptively fend off trolls, yes I know it's free, you get what you pay for, if you don't like it go code it yourself, etc, etc.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Not true! Right Click / Copy Image -- use it all the time for Photoshop jokes I trade on IRC. If she spent more than 5 minutes using it, she would have found some of those features -- too quick to judge. Took me a while to get Firefox *just* the way I likes it.
Doh! Of course it would be there!
Extremely straightforward and easy to find and understand!
Theres me thinking it would be on the Options/Web Features dialog in the "Load images" area.
Sorry for being sarcastic, and I do thank you muchly for the info, it has been something thats bugged me from day one.
I just don't think a novice user could handle changing that.
I wonder what other gems are lurking in the depths of the config area, I shall investigate later...
liqbase
Linux users can select text in a webpage and middle-click: this will take them to the first hit in Google with the selected text as search term. This is amazing!
So I propose a new internet game. Start from a page, e.g. slashdot, and try to reach a certain other page, say somethingawful.com, by just selecting text and middle-clicking. Clicking hyperlinks is not allowed! Have fun!
I'm confused. I just tried it using drag and drop and got an image into Photoshop w/no extra steps.
There isn't even a link for a printable version, so if you want to print the article, you have to waste half a tree.
Perhaps Flexbeta should whack the marketroids over the head with a clue bat?
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Nuke Anything is a favorite of mine. Right click an image, table, or even a frame, select "Remove this object" and it's zapped from the page layout. Quite useful for removing images or overly large margins.
Unfortunately there is no way to know what to change it to so it can be "fixed." Such a wide variety of actions could occur during onClick that it would be very difficult to parse that out and do the right action.
For example, I have used javascript in an href to do the following:
And even with the location and window opens, sometimes it is done with the simple
and sometimes through a function.Random Musings
...signed XPI?
I mean before all those bells and whistles. As a plugin developer i greatly miss them
(not this, but one that really works).
And pleaaaaaaase before you tell me it's useless, go ahead and try to convince some Joe user to install "unsigned hence possibly dangerous" plugin.
To add one more concrete example of a great development tool that I regularly use for development of web apps:
Web Developer Extension. This tool makes working with forms, CSS, images, etc. really really easy. I have been using 'View Source' or 'View Selection Source' much less often since I got this extension.
Similarly, I like to be able to search various online resources directly from my browser. To full-text search my bookmarks stored in Simpy I use browser search plugin.
In addition to that, you can get a number of other useful search plugins over at Mycroft (I keep typing Mycrosft - how bad is that!)
Simpy
Does anyone know of a way to stop this kind of advertising besides turning off JavaScript in the browser?
Are there any Firefox extensions in place that can recognize these types of adverts and squash them? There are often enough DHTML layes in a page these days that I assume it's hard to tell the difference between one meant for advertising and another meant to hold helpful content to support the page.
IANAGE (I am not a Google Employee), but as far as I understand it, Gmail is built almost entirely on a little gem called XMLHttpRequest (it might be HttpXmlRequest or HtTpXmLREQUEST but that's beside the point...)
Basically, it allows you to send requests back to the server, and get XML (Gecko and IE allow you to recieve HTML as well) back from Javascript without having to reload the whole dang page. Gmail uses this pretty much everywhere instead of doing roundtrips.
I'm not sure if Konqueror supports XMLHttpRequest, but odds are that might be why.
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
Their words: It is a pre-release product and should not be relied upon for mission-critical tasks.
# download
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/
Worryingly now, I have visions of some Indian doctor performing invasive surgery on some poor chap in another country using nothing more than a html interface and a shared 56k modem!
liqbase
* Open a new window
/could/ attempt to do something sensible in the majority of cases. Or at least pop up a message saying it can't figure out what to do (maybe presenting a few options?).
/expected/ isn't going to happen is IMHO something that could be improved with just a small amount of thought.
- with contents referenceable by a URL, presumably
* Open a new window to a specific width and height
- which must also contain something pointable to via some sort of URL
* Change the location of the current page
- to something involving a URL at some point, perhaps?
* Change the source of an image on the page
- that image could be displayed in another window via a URL
* Interact with a Flash movie
- which might be referenceable via a URL
* Interact with form elements on screen
- OK, probably no relevant URL for this.
So Firefox
Your point that a general solution is impossible is accepted; however, simply opening a new tab with nothing in it and no indication to the user that what they
Even just a warning would stop me, for example, browsing through interesting adverts in Loot.com, "Open In New Tab"-ing on all the interesting ones, then looking at the tabs to see nothing but (untitled) (untitled) (untitled) (untitled) which is damn annoying.
And the behaviour of Wanadoo's email page to a control-click is just bizarre - you get the mail you clicked on in the current window, and the mailbox in the new window. It's probably quite clever how they managed to engineer exactly the opposite behaviour of what is expected.
It would be much better if they can include at least a couple of the top rated/popular extensions as an option in the custom installation of Firefox's new RC/release?
h p?f=8
As a start, I would like to suggest:
- "All-in-One Gestures" (very similar to the Opera interface)
- "Adblock"
- Target Alert (mentioned above).
The included extensions should customizable during setup.
Later, it would be nice if the installer could offer a (dynamically retrieved) list of available extensions.
Please also post your comments in the Mozillazine forum:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.p
Simple and consistent solution: The user middle clicking on any element is doing so because they desire whatever action they clicked on to occur in a new tab. The solution is to make an exact replica of the current page and its state in a new tab, and then act as if the button had been pushed on the replica page instead. Sure, there will be things that don't work right with it, but I think most of the time that will give the correct behavior. Oh, and open in new tab should work with buttons too, not just links.
--the browser component, has the animated images turn on or off or adjust times directly in easy for joe user to find preferences where it should be. I don't know why it isn't in firefox, have to ask them boys about that. I want a browser and email and editor, so I run the suite, and will continue to do so as long as mozilla keeps offering it. I always preferred the full netscape communicator over the stand alone navigator anyway... The chat client in Mozilla, ehh, tried it, I still prefer x-chat though, although I'll retry it with every new release, maybe it will get better.
There's an extension called MozEX that allows you to use an external program for View Source.
TFA ended up describing the author's personal favourite extensions, so it kind of missed the point that there are extensions for almost everything, like what you need. Some good places to look for extensions:
Like any other kind of software, extensions can vary in quality and stability. You might want to get other opinions of an extension you're considering before you install it. Fortunately, the new Extension Manager in Firefox 0.9 and up makes it easy to uninstall an extension. Before that came along, you had to do it manually which was tricky and easy to screw up.
SIG: 11
Is that uninstallation addressed in the EULA (which I know no one reads) or is Macromedia engaging in violation of computer fraud and abuse statutes?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Flashblock has received a ton of complaints about it not working or Flash sites stopping working etc. Many people seem to think its a buggy extension. Plus considering 90%+ of users use IE I'm surprised they would go to that length for a minority used browser and an even more minority used extension.
Anyway if what you said is true that's aweful and probably illegal to boot. I'd verify what you think is happening is really happening or at least get someone else to verify it. Then file complaints with Macromedia and then spread the word to the big tech sites. Start with the Mozillazine forums first though and make sure that you can get others to reproduce this.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
One of the goals of the Firefox project was to get rid of the 10,000 different nerd options from the dialogs. KISS.
This has nothing to do with "pre-1.0" and everything to do with a UI design decision. The theory is that someone will provide a "Advanced Options" extention.
(And there are IE features that are only available through the registry -- such as setting Quick Search shortcuts.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
The Flash plug-in on Mac is such that under Mozilla it causes high CPU usage. A webpage with several Flash ads on a G3-class Mac will peg the CPU at 100% effectively DOS-ing your browser. You lose any browser context you have, hence dataloss.
So, flashblock is mandatory on these computers.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
On the other hand, there are a hell of a lot of options in the about:config area. Exposing every one of them to the user in the preferences window would be quite burdensome. Apparently the designers felt that turning off animated GIFs was not important to make it to the limited space of the preferences dialog.
(Though maybe they should add an 'advanced' button that would expose more)
I was one of those people that installed Firefox over a version with Adblock and Flash Click to View installed. Now, my Firefox can't see Flash files and I have to fire up Mozilla 1.31 when I want to play Defend Your Castle or something.
At first, I was kind of annoyed about this, but then I began to realize how many ads aren't showing up. There are all kinds of stupid flash things out there, and I don't have to see them anymore. Now, I just tell people that I broke my Flash on purpose.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to fire up Moz. 1.31 and go fling some stick figures so hard that they go splat behind my castle.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Now this seems doable. I didn't check out the target alert extension, but if it already doesn't, maybe it could be modified to show a little script icon for JS links. Or maybe we could just have the href of an anchor tag point to the page, but do any javascript stuff in the onclick, so that users who middle-clicked would get something.
Random Musings
I agree. The best way, imho, would be to turn every possible feature into an extension, and then let the user select extensions during install. That is, you'd have a choice between a default install, which automatically installs a "standard extensions" package, or a customized install, which lets you choose exactly which extensions you want to have on your system.
Well, the situation is as follows: The "edit css" feature of the developer toolbar brings up a window with all the css of the current page loaded. You can then edit the css and see your changes on the page as you make them. This is incredibly neat because you don't have to reload the page to see your changes; they just happen.
However, there's no way to save your changes from this window. The text in the window doesn't even necessarily represent a single file, but rather all the css in the current page. Therefore, even if you're working with a single file, you have to go back to your text editor to save your changes. If you're working with multiple css files, you have to figure out which file to modify and save. It gets to be a real hassle.
That said, as long as you're mindful, it's still an incredibly useful tool. You just really have to watch what you're doing...
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
about:config
..." item that GIF and JPEG ads have. So is there a way to do this with flash ads?
;-) Actually, I can run standalone flash with several programs, so it's not the flash interpreter itself (wherever that is) that's broken; it's its interface with the browsers. I can hope that they don't fix this, I guess, and just use linux for sites like weather.com that use flash.
...
OK; that works for GIF animations. I learned about it a few weeks ago, and set it to "once".
But, after a few days of watching Hurricane Frances on weather.com, I found that firefox was once again soaking up 90% of the cpu. And there were ads in the weather.com tabs that were busily showing me stupid pictures of fish swimming and butterflies flitting from flower to flower. They were flash animations.
The "about:config" page only has one instance of the string "flash", and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this problem. Is there a way to disable stupid flash movies like this?
Also, I know how to use the menu item that suppresses images from a site. But with flash ads, the menu is short, and doesn't include the "Block images from
I find that I have to constantly kill firefox because it's going insane and eating the cpu. It seems a lot worse about this than mozilla (though mozilla does show a lot of the same problems). This is the main thing that's limiting my usage of firefox now. I know that if I open too many tabs or windows, the chances are great that one of them will do something that puts firefox into cpu-eating mode, and I'll have to kill it to get my machine back.
Maybe what's needed is a per-image "speed control" that would limit how much cpu time an image can use. And a way to set the default. This would let me say something like "The default for any active images is 0%, but for this one, let it use 40%."
It's especially annoying when there's one video that you'd like to watch, but it keeps stopping because it's competing with N animated ads that can't be stopped (or even found).
This is mostly a problem on my Mac (PB, 10.3). On my linux box, flash is still broken in both mozilla and firefox, so it's not a problem.
Maybe it's time to get a linux laptop
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
They fix the memory usage problem in Windows. You know, when Firefox hasn't been in focus for a while, its virtual memory is really large compared to the mem usage (in Taskbar) and when you switch to it it sits there for a few dozen seconds slooooowly increasing its mem usage. I KNOW Windows is capable of allocating a GB of memory in a few seconds, so what the heck is the problem?