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."
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Wow, that was the most biased article that I have read in a long time. The summary, for those that didn't RTFA, they pretty much say avoid all the things that make a web master's life difficult; it was from a website perspective and not from the user. Anyhow, it is not worth the read and definitely is not news.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
They're just pissed that NoScript and AdBlock knock down their revenue stream.
"...while continuing to support the sites we love by allowing most ads to appear."
Bzzt - sorry. I chose to not see ads.
When It Counts.
Adblock is bad because it makes their site readable?
NoScript bad because it stops nasty/naughty javascript?
PDF download bad because it stops embedded PDFs breaking your system (but also stops hacked tracking links from working)?
TrackMeNot because it stops you being tracked and wastes bandwidth?
I'd suggest the only waste of bandwidth their is their site!
Paranoia is not "cool among Web geeks,", it's an unfortunate necessity when wandering the jungle that is the World Wide Web. How many times do we hear about exploits using JavaScript? Too often, in my mind's eye. If a particular site that you trust needs JavaScript to run, then whitelist it, even if just temporarily, with two mouse clicks.
I don't call it "paranoid," I call it "due caution" and it is, in fact, worth the minor hassle.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I freely admit I block every ad I can. If I'm going to buy something, I'll actively go looking for it. I resent people telling me that I'm damaging them by not displaying their ads on my PC. Your ads are valueless when displayed on my PC anyway, so why should I expose myself to them? The ad industry has not endeared itself to the internet community. They have only themselves to blame for people wanting to block them.
Adblock and Adblock Plus
Obviously, we have some bias when it comes to ad-blocking extensions, as Computerworld is an ad-supported site. We also understand that these are very popular extensions. But if everyone blocked ads, how would sites such as ours continue to offer content free of charge?
We'll be the first to admit that there are some horribly annoying ads out there. (Buzzing bee, anyone?) But we prefer using Nuke Anything Enhanced to zap the annoying ads while continuing to support the sites we love by allowing most ads to appear.
What a crock of crap! Pure nonsense, to suggest that a extension is worthless to users because it takes away from your revenue is just showcasing blatant bias. Come of your high horse (if you ever had one)
Worse yet, in the intervening time, Internet Explorer caught up. Its tabbed browsing is now superior to Firefox's, for example, and it added plenty of new features, such as anti-phishing capabilities (which Firefox also has). Firefox is no longer the better browser; its extensions and add-ons are superior, but that's about it.
IE's tabbing is superior? Says who? Based on What? The author dismisses extensions like yesterdays news, when they wrote a story about the top 20 and 10 worst? Besides that, extensions are a key and valuable component to FF.
Compuworld is on the MS bank roll?
How about a plugin that fetches all subsequent pages of articles and condenses into a single webpage so a user doesn't have to follow five page links to read the whole article.
I avoided installing NoScript for a LONG time because it -is- truly a hassle. (Actually, I had it, and removed it within a few days.) I finally installed it the other day to stay because of the Ajax vulnerability found where sites could cross-site-script and view information from other sites that I'd logged into. The fact that this is not only possible, but possible on multiple browsers... That's scary. So NoScript stays now.
It's a heck of a lot easier than turning off JS altogether, which is the only acceptable alternative. In addition, it helps protect against future hacks that are found as well.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Exactly, you only have to whitelist a site once. And it takes all of 2 seconds. Annoying scripts however, will fuck with you every time you visit a site. It's not long until the benefits manifest. And since we tend to spend most of our time on sites we've been before, it's really pretty rare that I have to whitelist anything.
In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to deal with client side scripting at all. It's inconvenient, dangerous, and downright impolite. If you want me to see your page, do your processing on YOUR computer. Until then, noscript will have to do.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"And don't forget -- gotta navigate all 4 pages for maximum impressions!"
You hit on one of my pet peeves -- web sites that break a single article into multiple pages. I rarely go beyond the first page, and I only read the first page of this self-serving article. If I knew ahead of time that this was one of those articles, I would have skipped it entirely. Maybe a [WARNING: multiple pages] heads-up is warranted on future Slashdot postings.
There are good uses of JavaScript. Google uses it pretty well; I use Google Maps and GMail continually. The latter really doesn't NEED JavaScript, but it does add some nice features (like the inline autocomplete for addresses.)
But it's a lot of rope for a web site to hang itself with, and more often than not it's evil.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Fasterfox doesn't prefetch links unless you specifically enable that option (or they are marked for prefetching, and who does that?). It doesn't matter which level you select, the indiscriminate prefetching is a separate option.
Its main benefits are multiple connections and pipelining (oh and the timer - I love the timer). To say that you should throw the whole thing out because they don't like prefetching (which is indeed a poor idea) is just plain silly.
Also, what's with the extremely patronizing tone of the whole article? Who made them the hall monitors of the internet?
sic transit gloria mundi
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
I hate dancing baloney on a web page, and doubly so when it's for useless, distracting, intrusive advertising.
Is there any other kind of dancing baloney?
Worse, there are some sites that are just HORRIBLY designed, and use javascript for no real reason at all, and in many / most cases CSS would work BETTER.
Then there is all the statistics / tracking javascript which noscript does a wonderful job getting rid of.
That's funny as hell.
... ... ... // this ord is used for Double Click Integration
#1 Fasterfox: Don't use it, it hammers webservers! There are a lot of links on the page that you are NEVER going to click on, mostly ads. This prefetches all those ads from the adservers webserver, but you're not looking at them! Not cool!
#2 NoScript: Don't use it, it's annoying. Plus, it screws up important scripts. For example, the article has these scripts:
function popup(
function popup_noscroll(
function switchPage(
ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000;
Do you really want to have to deal with the trouble?
#3 AdBlock: Do you think we do this to provide you with lame lists? We don't. We do this to make you watch ads. And you have to watch them! Didn't you get that under #2? You're breaking the social contract, you bastard!
What a joke.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Being a website rather than a desktop application is half the benefit you get from Gmail. I can access it from anywhere I have an internet connection and a browser, and have all my mail in front of me. Not true with desktop apps.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Agreed. Some of the criticisms are valid, but the whole article felt like it was written to make big media companies happy. "Nooo, you don't want to block our ads, it's too much hassle!"
I'll admit that something like Noscript takes a little work before it runs just the way you want it, but until FF is 100% secure, I'll keep using it, especially at work.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
This is a pretty broad set of statements to make, and I doubt the article's author has anything but his own opinion to back it up with. Example: Google Analytics javascripts are everywhere, directly allowing google to track an individual user's journey to any pages that include them. The author apparently doesn't think that visits to such pages are "private information". Or maybe the author doesn't realize how such information is tracked and might be used.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
This has to be the dumbest articles to ever come from ComputerWorld.
Think every single poster we've seen here has agreed how his list of mostly good tools, and it does seem targeted against tools that target ads and privacy. There *are* many dumb Firefox extensions he could have covered (like the 'make us your portal' ones) that he didn't. But really, how stupid does he think we are? Anyone even remotely tech savvy will see through his 'list'. Who is this guy anyway? His bio doesn't exactly shine out from the crowd:
> Peter Smith is a Web developer and freelance writer with
> a special interest in personal technology and digital entertainment.
Web developer = my 6 year old is also a web developer. freelance = mostly unemployed. special interest = means nothing. personal technology = he owns an iPod. digital entertainment = he watches movies, not at the cinema, but straight off a DVD. Hey Computerworld and your mass media cohorts: print crap articles like this and the Bloggers will eat you alive.
I hate those too. Those of you who can tag articles, why don't you tag them as "multiplepages" or "splitarticle" or "annoyingashell"? That would be an useful use of Slashdot's tags (as opposed to that useless "haha" tag).