Slashdot Mirror
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."
FireFox features I can't live without:
1. Middle click to open link in new window/tab
2. Find as you type
3. Themes/Skins/Chromes
4. Customizable toolbars
5. Plugins that allow me to put just about anything on the toolbars
6. Great development tools - javascript console, venkman debugger, live-headers plugin
All that boils down to:
1. Easier to use
2. Easier to customize
3. Broader advanced feature set
--
We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind
Dude, 2003 called, they want their joke back.
Tabbrowser extensions, to get the tabs reacting the way I want(i.e everything in the same browser window, middle mouse click on the tabbar opens an accidently closed tab).
And for browsing Slashdot, this kind of helps.
...has to be Web Developer.
A MUST for every webnerd.
It even lets you edit CSS live on the web.
adblock is one of the greatest extensions I must say. Adblock along with the following filter block 98% of ads..
/[\W\d][Aa]d(server|s|remote)?[\W\d]/ /[\W\d][Bb]anner(s|id\=)?[\W\d]/ /[\W\d][Ss]ponsors?[\W\d]/ /amazon\.com.*\W(promotions|marketing|merchants|st ores|associates)\W/ /yimg\.com.*\W(a|flash)\W/
[Adblock]
http://seanism.com/
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
Firefox is the ultimate porn browser !
As extensions go, nothing beats adblock.
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.
1: Mozilla Firefox had terrible fonts on Linux. I know there is the possibility of using one compiled with xft. But where is it? Whenever a new release is announced, the version producing those bad fonts is what I find.
2: I find that it is slower than Konqueror on most sites. My only use of Mozilla Firefox is on Gmail. I wonder why Google will not support Konqueror yet.
3: Firefox keeps some important passwords long after I have logged out of my online baking site. It is not the problem of the site but Firefox. I have confirmed this.
Please note that I am no expert in these matters. I just download stuff and use it as such.
Cb..
You were so close. Control+[1-9] goes to tab 1-9.
Then there's always Control+Tab/Shift Tab or Control+PageUp/Down to go to next/previous tabs.
I've written up a little extension called Wikalong.
Basically, it puts a wiki in your sidebar, that is indexed off the current page you are viewing. The wiki is online so anyone using the plugin, that visits a page you make notes on will see your notes, and vice versa.
It doesn't work perfectly yet, but I'm hoping to attract some smarter people than I to help get it straightened out.
More details on the site I linked above.
I am quite interested in how the Mozilla team decide what goes into the browser, and what should be left as an extension. Many built-in features of Firefox can actually made made as an extension instead, which could make the browser more lightweight and start up faster. Yes it would require the user to download more extensions, and I think it could be solved by providing extension packs with several useful extensions put into one easy-to-install package.
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.
'Apply new extension without Firefox restart'-Extension
An email has been sent to the administrator notifying them of the problem. Please try again later.
Is this a direct effect of the slashddos plugin?
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
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!
1. Right-click on an image
2. Select 'Copy Image'
3. Paste into mspaint, Photoshop, etc.
This works fine in FireFox 0.9.3
Texturizer.net has a nice collection of extensions you may not find on mozilla's dev site.
Some extensions I'm currently using:
Flat Bookmark Editing
Add Bookmark Here
CuteMenus
Paste and Go
Gmail Notifier(Still works)
Free iPods? Sure. freeipods.com
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.
Flashblock replaces Macromedia Flash animations with a button you have to click to download and run the animation. Most uses of Flash are abominations to me; I like to choose when to consume it.
Gripe wrt Macromedia: a couple of days back I installed the latest and greatest Flash player from Macromedia on my WinXP box and it uninstalled Flashblock for me.
Better yet: it also prevents subsequent (re-)installation of Flashblock.
Solution: download Flaskblock.xpi, unzip it, mod so that it installs under a nom de guerre, rezip and install.
Anybody at Macromedia, if you're listening: STOP BEING NAUGHTY.
__
Arse
...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.
Actually you now can copy image directly from firefox, time to switch her back!
I also held back for a long time for the exact same reason. There is an extension for mozilla that does it, but in Firefox 0.9 there is a "copy image" function built in when you right click on any image.
Maybe you should be aware of the fact, that Firefox is still pre 1.0 ... so you shouldn't vote against it based on such bugs...
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
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.
You miss the damn point. Firefox and other browsers are trying to take market share from IE, not the other way around, so it's far more important that new Firefox users can successfully import settings from IE than the other way around.
I would have thought that that much would be obvious to even the most fanatical Firefox/Mozilla user.
The bottom line is that a key tool used to help migrate users from IE to Firefox doesn't always work, so that's a clear minus point against Firefox. If the first thing that you try do when moving to Firefox from IE causes crash after crash wouldn't that curb your enthusiasm for carrying on with the transition? After all, switching to any new piece of software is often a leap of faith, and it's hard to make that leap successfully if you find a brick wall in your way.
You might not see things that way, and these things might not bother you, but that doesn't make them any less frustrating to others.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
it's a link to yet another 'Gay Nigger Association of America' domain.
Pssssst. What really revolutionized my browsing and will make it very hard for me to switch away from FireFox is AdBlock. Right-click on any image, flash animation, or iframe, and you can permanently add it to a block list. (Sshhhhh Don't tell anyone, but I don't see ads on slashdot, CNN, NYTimes, or any of my favorite periodicals any more.) If there was a way to keep a centralized list of blocked sites or an easy way to import and export the lists, then you'd have a real-time distributed content-blocking system.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Here's some extensions I like that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Magpie. Those who've used FlashGet with IE will love this little thing. It'll snatch all the files pointed to by links from a page according to some pattern, for example *jpg, and save them to disk or open them up as tabs. Great for collecting "nature pictures".
Firefox's bookmark dialog's "Create in" feature pisses me off. It never, ever, has the folders you need in it's puny little drop down. OpenBook removes it and replaces it with the full bookmarks folder tree.
You can reorder tabs with MiniT using simple drag and drop on the tab bar. I think this should maybe be added to Firefox itself, it's pretty basic functionality.
It's like deja vu all over again.
just a warning, if you look at it wash your eyes with gasoline.
..........FULL STOP.
Mostly to avoid bandwidth problems - if someone starts reading an article and decides that he/she doesn't like it or isn't interested, the site hasn't already served up the entire article to them (usually just a fourth or a sixth). Also, it gives them an opportunity to flash different ads at you on every page. Finally, if you're in the middle of the article, it makes it harder for you to back out (which is a pain for you, but marketing people would love it).
--- Bwah?
Advertisers seem to be finding a way around AdBlock by using those floating DHTML ads that fly across your screen and land in the middle of the screen and block the story you're trying to read. (Wow, that's annoying).
Does anyone know of a way to stop this kind of advertising besides turning off JavaScript in the browser?
You can block the individual JS files that load. Try blocking http://www.tek-tips.com/jsource.js
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
I introduced my step-daughter's girl friend to Firefox when she was complaining about all the pop-ups in IE, but after about 5 minutes she switched back to IE. The only reason: In IE you can copy an image to the clip buffer and paste it into Photoshop or some other graphic program (she was grabbing pictures to make her Livejournal icons), but in Firefox (and Mozilla) you have to save the image and then open it in Photoshop as an extra step. Evidently managing all those little files was more effort to her than dismissing all the popups.
Here's how a non-techie person thinks: "Damn, I can't do that thing I used to do in this Firefox. Back to Explorer, because there the thing works and I'm used to it already."
No, thoughts like "perhaps there's a trick or a setting to do this thing in Firefox" will not cross their mind. They're not stupid, it's just not obvious to them that (or how) computer applications' functionality can be altered by the user.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
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
Uninstalling user-installed software? That's unforgivable. Too bad. I used to think Flash was annoying. I guess it's not just flash that sucks, but all of Macromedia.
Here's a rule of thumb: How much can you afford to annoy your customers? That's exactly how much flash you want to inflict on visitors to your site.
What proportion of people sit through a flash movie, versus the number who click "skip intro?" I've asked that question a lot, and never gotten an answer. Web developers aren't tracking it. They aren't about to point out that an expensive feature only drives customers away. Nobody is actually looking at those statistics. These irritating time wasters are just put up without any concern for whether they are an asset or a liability.
Only a few people are so dumb that they are impressed with an online movie that they didn't choose to watch. "Ooh! Looky! Stuff on the screen is MOVING!" Maybe those people are the ideal targets for marketing.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
There is also the tried-and-true trick of null-routing the advertisers' domain name(s) to your local host. Just add the following to your hosts file:
127.0.0.1 server.that.you.are.blocking.com
I'm surprised no one's mentioned BugMeNot yet. It connects to a database of usernames and passwords, allowing you to log in as the public BugMeNot account.
This is especially useful for a one-time posting on a site, or to read members-only newspapers and things like IGN Insider.
--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.
And since you don't have that externsion...you can't conveniently uninstall it to restore Flash, and since that externsion wasn't available for 0.9x you could not reinstall it (it may have since become available). What you had to do was poke around in Firefox's files and figure out what to delete to remove the extension. Yuck!
So, before doing a major upgrade, uninstall all extensions.
Getting way off topic here but...
You never, ever use a racial slur, even just to repeat the words of others.
You may never, but the rest of the world is generally aware of something called "context". If the poster was using it as an insult, it would be bad. They weren't though.
Tell me, do you get offended when one black person calls another "nigger" not as an insult? Or even themselves? Or if someone repeated such a conversation to you? It is quite common for minority groups to take insulting terms and reclaim them.
The poster could have used asterisks or put N-word, but it was horrible to use the word itself!
Surely it is the concept of slavery and discrimination that is horrible, not the word in a context of a non-insult? If someone wrote "n****r", from context your brain is just going to subsitiute "nigger" anyway. Asteriks and euphamisms are pointless, either you completely obscure what you are trying to say, so why say it, or everyone know what you are saying, so why hide it?
If you are really that easily offended (and not just trolling as I suspect) then I suggest you avoid Slashdot, and webforums in general, and definately stay clear of usenet.
Maybe it's my installation, but every time I try to install an extension either it doesn't install or I have to reinstall firefox because it won't start anymore.
That's been a major problem for a while, because extensions are/were essentially becoming part of the main program. You could uninstall them manually, but it was a tricky, fragile practice. Fortunately, Firefox 0.9 introduced a new extension manager that makes the process much easier -- if the extension author supports it. Which leads us to the next point.
I'd say the extensions system needs just a bit more work. And mind you, I've seen a lot of mozilla bugs as I've been with mozilla since version 0.8.x
Not all of the problems are with the extension system itself. An extension can be well or poorly written; it can have bugs, incompatibilities, etc., just like you won't always have a success with every program you see on freshmeat and try out. It's not automatically stable just because it's an extension. If the extension author has written their extension to support the new extension manager, it's easy to uninstall if you determine it's of no use to you, but ideally, a bit of research should be done before you try an extension out. Sites like ExtensionRoom and update.mozilla.org have a place for users to put reviews and comments, so it's a good idea to glance over those, and see if lots of other people have problems, before taking the plunge.
SIG: 11
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
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)
Here's some more extensions I use that I haven't seen mentioned.
Dictionary Search: Lets you set up various online encyclopedias and dictionaries (e.g. Wikipedia, M-W.com) so you can highlight any word in a website, right click and get a definition for it.
Allow Right-Click: Allows you to right click on sites/objects that have that option disabled.
IEView: Adds the option to open the page in IE to the right-click context menu for those few sites who won't come out of the stone ages and believe MS is the end-all, be-all of browsers.
Basics: Adds a button to the tab bar to open new tabs. This was available in Mozilla and I missed it when I first moved to Firefox.
Unclose Tab: Sometimes I'll close the wrong tab by mistake. This extension allows you to right click the tab bar and re-open a tab you just closed.
>> it has been something thats bugged me from day one.
>So ask for your money back.
Yeah, and since IE came to me free of charge too, I guess I can't complain about that either, huh?
It's this kind of "the-software-was-free-so-love-it-or-else" attitude that impedes FOSS progress. Making something free doesn't make it bulletproof or impervious to critique.
-E-
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.
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
Or because you use Opera, Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror, Camino or OmniWeb. IE and Firefox are not the only two browsers out there.
I've investigated this further and can't reproduce my results.
My best guess is that Flashblock is not hooking all the possible ways of triggering a Flash object, and I mistook this for untoward behaviour by the latest Flash Player.
Abject apologies to Macromedia.
__
Arse
I like how I have everything set up in Firefox. All of my favorite extensions, rss feeds, booksmarks, etc. Is there an easy way to back this all up? I'd also like to configure a single install package that install all of the extensions I want. Possibly by saving the extension files in subfolders?
Try the filters listed here. They block most ads for most people and very little else. The only one I've found a problem with is IMP...it has a "redirect.php" script that it runs on login which triggers one of the filters. I think there should be an adblock exclution list. It's actually interesting how popular adblock has remained even though there hasn't been a major update since at least Firefox 0.7...
I would think someone would have designed a new extention with more bells and whistles.
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?
I used to think Weather.com was the coolest thing since sliced bread. Of course, it took Firefox's popup blocking along with the Adblock extension to make browsing it tolerable.
However, since discovering the following resources, I don't even bother with Weather.com anymore.
http://www.weather.gov/
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
http://weather.unisys.com/
These sites offer much more in-depth technical information and are not funded by ad revenue.