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Mozilla Announces Extend Firefox Contest Winners
Foxy Betty writes "Mozilla Corporation has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox Contest, a project initiated to encourage development of extensions for the Firefox Web browser. A panel of industry notables reviewed more than 200 extensions submitted to the contest."
If only AdBlock had been updated for the competition... That's probably the 1 addon I couldn't live without.
Just don't create a file called -rf.
How about upgrading the windows version without leaving the old version number in the add/remove programs? I have to update 40 or 50 machines at a time and it's a pain uninstalling before installing.
AdBlock with FilterSet updater Image Zoom Tabbrowser Preferences
find -name "*base*" -exec chown us {} \; ; ln -s
They're probably really nice and elegant and all that but ... are they not just a wee bitty dull? I mean, two out of the three winners appear to create thumbnails of pages (whether from the history or other open pages). And while Web Developer is a fantastic package it's hardly cutting edge and new. I was hoping for something with real pizzaz. Something where the very idea and description was enough to make me go, "wow".
Anyone else find it a bit anticlimactic?
the layman's guide to computer science
Scrapbook looks interesting. Looks like a better way to re-visit older pages without using the history. Web Developer is dang near indespensible for anybody who does anything with web development. Not a surprise that Chris got top prize for it. The rest of it - meh - doesn't suit my web habits. Expose for FIrefox, big whoop. I barely use expose on the Mac. The closest thing that I've seen for good tab visual managment is color coding via domain. Some of these extensions probably have that; I didn't look all that hard. Tabbrowser Preferences has it, but that beast of an extension is too top heavy.
Congrats to the Winners, I have to say Reveal is a nice little extension and definitely deserves the "honors", FasterFox and IE Tab are also Nice extensions which IMHO are worthy of some "extra credit".
..:)
Ad Block is a sweet extension as well, very effective in getting rid of those annoying "oh so slow to load" flash ads that some cheesy web designers (ad execs?) seem to be in love with.
Rock on FireFox
Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page at the maximum speed with a single click......FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to synthetize full media galleries in one page, from serial contents previously scattered on several pages, for easy and fast "download all"
;)
Great extension for Firefox...just don't sue them for Rhyming-Name Infringement
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Do not install all the entrants at once. It would be bad.
The single most usefull extension for Firefox I have found so far.
If you do research on the web, you'll ask yourself how you were able to live without out, after you gave it a try.
P.S.: I know this sound like marketing babble, but I'm in no way affiliated with the scrapbook guys, I'm just a fanboy who really loves their work.
Seeing as the linked page is useless to those of us running non-Firefox 1.5 browsers (Mozilla 1.7.12 here), I looked up the details of what the winners actually are, and thought I'd share ...
Grand Prize Category Winners:
Best New Extension Overall: Reveal by Michael Wu See everything. Reveal allows you to see thumbnails of pages in your session history and quickly find the page you want. Reveal also includes a magnifying glass to help you see everything. Best Upgraded Extension: Web Developer by Chris Pederick Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Best Use of New Firefox 1.5 Features: Firefox Showcase by Josep del Rio Showcase is an extension thought to easily locate and select any open browser window in Firefox.Our three grand prize winners will receive a Alienware Aurora 7500 Firefox Edition PC and a Firefox 1.5 Prize Pack including: T-shirt, cap, and laptop bag.
Best in Class Category Winners:
Most Innovative: New: Viamatic foXpose by Vivek Jishtu Click on the icon in the status bar to view all the browser windows with a single click. Upgraded: Sage by Peter Andrews Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It's got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don't. * Reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds * Feed Discovery * Integrates with Firefox's bookmarks Most Useful: New: Separe by Massimo Mangoni Helps you keeping tabs tidy by introducing a new kind of tab! Upgraded: Scrapbook by Taiga Gomibuchi ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are: Save Web page; Save snippet of Web page; Save Web site; Org Best User Experience: New: Reveal by Michael Wu See everything. Reveal allows you to see thumbnails of pages in your session history and quickly find the page you want. Reveal also includes a magnifying glass to help you see everything. Upgraded: All-in-One Sidebar by Ingo Wennemaring All-in-One Sidebar is a sidebar control, inspired by Opera's. It lets you quickly switch between sidebars, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source code or websites in the sidebar. It includes a slide Best Integration with a Web Service: New: My Stickies by Jacob Wright Mystickies allows you to place sticky notes all over the web and organize them with tags. You can view, sort and edit your notes with our free web based tool at www.mystickies.com Upgraded: Forecast Fox by Aaron Sarna Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.Prizes for Best in Class (8 awarded): Apple iPod Nano, $250 Gift Certificate for O'Reilly books, and a Firefox 1.5 Prize Pack - T-shirt, cap, and laptop bag.
Just a note to say that if Opera users want to experience thumbnails, the latest tech preview has 'em. Just mouseover a tab - thumbnail for the page pops up near-instantly.
It turns out that it's not a memory leak, it's caching of the web pages which can be a lot of memory if you keep a lot of tabs open. You can turn the feature off, or limit how much ram it uses with this setting.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
It would be cool if we could have the user agent switcher tool with the capability to assign a particular user agent with a particular site and automatically switch upon loading a site. And the switch must be for a specific tab not all open tabs.
- For example I might want the switcher to automatically switch to IE7/XP while visiting my bank's site that expects IE.
- But I may want the switcher to automatically switch to Googlebot while visiting password-protected news sites so that I can go directly in.
I wish there was an easier way to sidestep version requirements of extensions. I'm often stuck choosing between security updates and what I consider essential functionality and features. For example, I love TabBrowser Preferences, but its latest version isn't compatible with the latest Firefox v1.5.0.1 so I stick with 1.5. For the longest time after the 1.0 launch, I was still using beta 0.6 because it worked with my extensions and was stable under extreme usage patterns.
So... any chance for implementing an about:config variable we could tweak if we want to use our 2-hour-old extensions with an hour-old Firefox release? I understand the desire to protect users from doing stupid things, but oftentimes so-called incompatible extensions have no problem running on versions they weren't originally designed for.
(I know I can unpack extensions and tweak their compatibility strings manually, but a more forgiving browser would save many steps.)
--Curby
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
Glad to see Web Developer at the top of the list... it is, IMO, by far the most useful Firefox plugin out there. I've been using it at work for a few months, and even got a few co-workers to install Firefox specifically because they wanted to use this plugin...
Just one datapoint, but it reinforces in my mind how important plugins (they're plugins, dammit! why are they pushing the term "extension"!) are to Firefox's success. Which, I guess, was the whole point of this contest.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
...just add an extension! The Nightly Tester Tool does exactly what you ask.
It appears that "best" means "of practical use to as few people as possible".
This may sound nitpicky, but the headline would be a lot easier to parse if it read like this:
Mozilla Announces 'Extend Firefox' Contest Winners
As it is, I had to read it a few times. I kept stopping at the word "Extend" and wondering how to parse two consecutive verbs (Announces Extend).
I wish newspapers would get a clue and use quotation marks properly as well, but I digress.
It is not a bug, it is a feature! http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009749 .html
I would not surf without either Adblock or Flashblock. Despite this dynamic duo powers, there are still Asian sites that I will not tolerate, with their excesses of flashy clutter.
I do not block everything, just the most intrusive. Hence, I selectively chose the ones to suppress with Adblock, whereas Flashblock may be blanket coverage it stops the cpu from approaching maximum levels of usage.
Oddly of all the winners, I have not even experimented with even one those listed.
One of the finalists really stood out to me, Platypus, which allows users to dynamically edit the sites they visit and then be able to save the changes to a GreaseMonkey script. It works great on getting rid of some of those annoyances on sites you visit.
Okay, does the plush toy they're giving away look more like a fox or a racoon?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
These are the Firefox extensions I can't live without
p ?id=189
GooglePreview:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Venkman Javascript Debugger (for 1.5):
http://getahead.ltd.uk/ajax/venkman
Live HTTP Headers:
http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/
Peter
FWIW, if I use the search function (searching in extensions) from Galeon, the results returned have &application=Galeon appended to the URL, which seems to me to confirm that it is user-agent dependent.
--
If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves, does R contain itself?
Adblock Plus supports the exporting of rules to a text file, which you can paste your blocking rules here and share with us! Anyone?
w00t
Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I didn't win.
Well, I do use web developer a lot.
A
Be sure to read the comments on that blog. You'll find it is a bug, and probably unrelated to the bfcache that Ben Goodger claims it is. That's why his next post is More on Memory.
He probably should have updated his original post though, so this wouldn't be incorrectly spread around the web, as if it's the only Firefox memory problem.
Maybe Firefox can now have a built-in calendar and be able to read all the vcalendar attachments I receive. I really prefer thunderbird over evolution. Maybe, it's because I still haven't gotten ldap to work in evolution, and evolution says it can't subscribe/unsubscribe from folders on my Cyrus IMAP server.
Doesn't anyone else find it odd how the "most innovative" award goes to Viamatic, which is essentially a rip-off from ie7's new feature?
I like tabbed browsing. I don't like the fact that when I have many tabs that they shrink and I can't read the page titles on the tabs.
I don't want my tabs to show up as tabs - I want them to show up in a side bar. Then I can choose how much screen realestate I use for the side pane and I can make it wide enough to read all the titles if I want.
They almost have this already - I mean, they have a history side bar - it seems like it would be trivial for them to make a sidebar for tabs.
FireBug
Unlike some other (poorly implemented) AJAX extensions (/greasemonkey plugins) I've seen, this shows complete responses and requests, as well as any javascript errors in-page. This is of enormous value when debugging clientside scripts: usually you only notice a bug when it's causing a page to break. This extension shows any and all errors, regardless of whether they interrupt your pageview.
People already went over this last time it was brought up, but even with the caching 'feature' off there's still a memory leak for some people.
... I do like the extensions a lot
Maybe someday I'll use firefox again
*drool*
The memory leaks are being addressed, with dozens fixed since Firefox 1.5 was released. You can try Firefox 1.5.0.2 when it comes out and see if you still experience problems or not.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
And, BTW, Firefox developers never, ever, lied and said that Firefox doesn't leak memory -- they merely pointed out that the greater memory use many users are seeing in Firefox 1.5 is largely attributable to the new bfcache.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Although we didn't win this time, we think our CookiePie extension is currently very innovative giving you the possibility to open different mail (i.e: Gmail/Yahoo) or web accounts on each tab. More information at: CookiePie Firefox extension
The Grand Prize, an Alienware computer, runs Windows:
Powered by Windows XP operating systems, the Aurora 7500 provides unparalleled compatibility with hardware, software, and peripheral devices.
So Linux isn't ready for the desktop, it's not fit for education, and now they can't even give it away. Firefox confirms, Linux is dying!
(it's funny, laugh)
Thumbnails of tabs? The only time I really felt thumbnails were useful was browsing through pictures, especially pictures from digital cameras, whose names end up being something like 03042005.JOG (the date) and really don't tell you what the image is. But the title of a web page should (and usually does) give a good clear indication as to what it's about.
One thing I wanted was a definite single only mode. With TabMix Plus I can get 99% of that but viewing source still pops up in a new window (I know you can use a bookmarklet to open the source in a new tab - but it doesn't always work, especially if you have a PHP script that generates the source dynamically). This would probably be relatively simple to add to TabMix Plus though... I should probably just go to them instead.
I use 18 extensions, my Firefox is heavily customized (my tabs switch when I mouseover them, they're on the bottom, etc.), but not cluttered (I disabled a lot of the toolbars). So I'm not a minimalist, I'm not opposed to extensions. I just don't see anything really appealing and new coming from this.
Maybe next time.
I don't use any of them...
The problem, IMO, is the extensive use of malloc() which in turn uses sbrk() to continually extend the heap. The problem is *not* leaks so much as heap fragmentation. If the history or bookmarks allocate small chunks of memory they are going to end up scattered across the entire heap due to normal browsing patterns. So each time you malloc(), free(), or garbage collect you are going to have to scan through the entire heap. If the heap data + active code pages exceeds 65-70% of total physical memory on the machine (under Linux) [this can be observed using "top"] the machine will take a significant(!) performance hit. There is a need to split the heap into separate memory pools -- mmap() might be useful in this respect (one pool for history, one pool for bookmarks, one pool for javascript, one pool for images, etc. That way poor behavior in one memory pool will not negatively impact other pools and paging performance can be optimized.
However I'm reasonably certain there is a problem with Linux with paging in general. One can improve it somewhat by decreasing vm.swappiness from 60 to 20-5 but I believe there are other swapping behavior parameters that need to be changed to optimize the performance for "workstation" performance rather than "server" performance. (Its either that or the entire Linux VM/paging system needs to be redesigned because the amount of paging which actually takes place due to Firefox fragmenting the heap is significantly lower than what the hard drive is capable of [at least on my machine].) I think they paging is tuned so that paging rates do not run so high that they lock out other I/O -- but on a workstation one *wants* the active windows (tabs, threads, etc.) to take *all* the I/O they require. If that isn't the problem then one may need an approach which will lock a greater fraction of the "essential" Firefox pages into memory.
Not a single link on the results page works for me.
p ?id=1810
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Does that URL work for anyone? The same goes for every other id=
I recently migrated from Safari to Firefox, and the one thing I have really missed is Safari's autofill. It was perfect. I have an autofill extension for Firefox, but it really stinks. Am I missing a good one? If not, could someone make one as good as the one in Safari?
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