Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 Firefox Extensions to Avoid
jcatcw writes "First there were the 20 must-have Firefox Extension and ensuing Slashdot discussion. Now Computerworld has the top 10 to avoid. For example, NoScript, which does make Firefox safer, but isn't worth the hassle, Or, VideoDownloader for slow downloads, when it works at all. Then there's Greasemonkey — on both lists."
Number one extension to use: IE7 God, what a lot of drivel.
Avoid any so-called "performance" tweaks that do nothing but open a few dozen connections to every web server you visit. It's fucking pointless and does nothing but piss off server admins. Cut your max connections down and make sure pipelining is on to get real, actual performance increases.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I'll be happy when slashdot submissions list the allononepage version of articles.m mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9015599
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
One more "me, too". I hate dancing baloney on a web page, and doubly so when it's for useless, distracting, intrusive advertising. Not to mention all the stupid security problems that come up when you just blindly trust any code to run in your web browser.
For a handful of sites, JavaScript is worth turning on; for everything else, there's NoScript.
Carousel is a lie!
I admit I don't use myspace / facebook and things that go boing (though I guess that even if I did, whitelisting two sites one time wouldn't really stress me out) but I have to say that you are sadly deluded if you think that I keep whitelisting your site to see the stupid scripts on it. Most of the time, if it doesn't work straight up, then it's a good sign that the content wasn't worth it. You learn this quickly since on the first day you use noscrpt you do try whitelisting, but soon you realise you aren't really seeing anything worthwhile.
Simple message: if you are designing a site; make sure it works fine without the scripts. Otherwise you will lose viewers who just don't care enough.
For those who cannot (*BSD, non-i386 Linux) or do not want to run Flash, VideoDownloader is pretty much the only way to watch YouTube videos. That, and sometimes it actually is great to fetch a video from YouTube for offline viewing, even if you have Flash installed. Sure, the server that the extension uses may go down sometimes, but so what? Just wait a couple of seconds and try again.
They really pushed it by mentioning adblock, but they totally lost their credibility when they mentioned PDF download, the only people who will EVER want to view a PDF in browser, are those who don't know there are other options.
And to top it off, when you didn't think site could lose any more karma, i see a link to another article
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/4251 Why Firefox has lost its mojo
This article states that IE has bridged the gap in features and quality because a few copycat features they've implemented. So, computer world is on the do not visit these idiots list. I admit, i dont like firefox 2.0 as much as 1.5, but the only reason for that is I get a nasty memory leak when viewing tags that have way to much flash or js (fault of the website as much as firefox).
Here is the real list of problematic extensions. I found it when trying to figure out why my FF has become so slow that I have had to go back to IE (yes, imagine how bad it must be). My tabs just remain stuck on "Loading..." with a white page and nothing happens. And the memory usage keeps climbing. Yes even with all latest versions of everything. So I set out to minimize my add-ons to the barest that I must have.
So far I have 4 I can't live without. Adblock, IE View Lite, Firefox View, and BugmeNot. Out of these I am assuming only an "Always on" types like Adblock can cause memory + slowdown issues. The others should not hurt much right?
The blacklist has some popular extensions like Adblock, but usually its only the older versions with problems. Tab Browser Extensions and Tab Browser Preferences particularly stand out as they are not recommended.
Oh and the article is drivel.
I'll make mention of the same thing I did last time AdblockPlus + Filterset.G came up: you might try switching to the EasyList and EasyElement subscriptions instead. I was a staunch user of Filterset.G for a long time, and only switched to Easy* because I was reinstalling, in a hurry, and EasyList came up as an option when AdblockPlus was installed, but I'm hooked now. In my experience, and experiences of others, the Easy* lists are faster and easier to maintain, plus you don't need an extra extension to manage them.
This flies in the face of science.
It was a glitch in dynamic inclusion of external scripts through the document.write("<script...></script>") hack used by some AJAX libraries (e.g. Scriptacolous on Digg). This was an rare problem under normal conditions, but NoScript filters used to make it appear more frequently.
Good news is that current NoScript 1.1.4.7 Release Candidate fixes this issue once (hopefully) for ever.
There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This has to be the first time in history a link to goatse could reasonably be modded +5 Informative. It won't, of course - it'll be modded -5, Troll.
But since you ask:
http://www.goatse.cz/
Yeah. I was gonna say, Adblock at number 3 the avoid? Not if you're an end-user.
' + window.location.toString().match(/v=([^\&]*)/)[1]+ '&t='+ document.body.innerHTML.match(/\&t=([^\&]*)/)[1]; })();
Though, I gotta say, videodownloader is overrated, especially if you're only after YouTube videos. The below link will work more quickly:
javascript:(function(){var x = document.createElement('iframe'); x.style.width='1px'; x.style.height='1px'; document.body.appendChild(x); x.src='http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I went ahead and tested it with my fingers poised and ready on ctrl-w, just in case...
Damn good thing, too. It's back. Beware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse
At least, I think so. There's no way I'm actually clicking on your link.
Wow. My comment is neither interesting nor informative, AFAICT. Funny, maybe, since the PP was referring to the "useless, distracting, intrusive advertising" aspects of the dancing baloney... but I guess this goes to show that one man's funny is another man's informative/interesting.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The more I think about it, the more this article is really awful. It should be titled, "10 Firefox Extensions I Want to Avoid Despite not Having Good Reasons to Do So", or "10 Firefox Extensions that Cripple Our Site And We Are Too Lazy To Do Anything About It", or, given the tone of it "If You Know More About the Web Than I Do, You're A Hopeless Geek, Get A Life".
For most of the extensions he gives several reasons _to use it_ and then some really lame excuse like "but I don't like it" or "that's too much hassle for me", or "you're just paranoid", the latter being a particularly egregious example of stupidity given the millions of machines that are botnetted. Those so-called "too paranoid" people will be the only ones left surfing when the next big virus/worm/trojan takes down half the 'net.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
They do have one -- click on "Print this story" and it gives you a single page with the entire article... unfortunately, it uses a popup to do so ;)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
gives me an idea for another extension which stitches these kinds of articles together
Firefox repagination: http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2099
Of course, once you do that, it becomes even more obvious that the content to garbage ratio on that site is well below 50%, but at least you don't have to click and wait at each break.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -Brian Kernigan
You're breaking the social contract, you bastard!
So, would it be wrong to show people the whole list, allowing many people to ignore their ad-laden web page altogether?
Fasterfox
NoScript
Adblock Plus
PDF Download
VideoDownloader
Greasemonkey
ScribeFire
TrackMeNot
Tabbrowser Preferences
Tabbrowser Extensions
FormSpy
Hmmm. It doesn't feel wrong.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -Brian Kernigan
I'm not using Noscript because I'm paranoid. I ran into many sites that used Javascript to float ads over the entire page. Noscript puts me in control of the content I wish to view.