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."

Comments

The best thing is not that it has extensions

[Gopal.V]

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 :)

Nuke Anything

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Anml4ixoye]

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)

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:

• Open a new window
• Open a new window to a specific width and height
• Change the location of the current page
• Change the source of an image on the page
• Interact with a Flash movie
• Interact with form elements on screen

And even with the location and window opens, sometimes it is done with the simple

javascript:window.open()

and sometimes through a function.

Re:Yet more good reasons to switch from IE

[Linknoid]

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.