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."
GoToGoatse - The extension takes you to that famous page everytime you click a link.
I'm still not sure why anyone would install it though.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I use NoScript not for security but because it cuts out one more way that web sites can annoy me, with their javascripted pop-up ads.
Yeah, it takes a moment to re-enable JavaScript for sites which insist on using it for navigation (which is itself annoying, but sometimes a site has content I want.) But it's less than the aggravation of having the text I'm trying to read covered with a pop-up layer.
I don't mind polite advertising, but anything that moves (Java, Flash, and most recently Javascript) is going to be worthless unless I absolutely require it.
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.
Number one extension to use: IE7 God, what a lot of drivel.
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!
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.
Really, sites like Slashdot, Google, etc. have it right. Minimally intrusive ads with quality content == a good experience for most users.
Sony ha
...but that's probably because my NoScript and AdBlock settings impaired my viewing experience.
Have you read my blog lately?
I also love how they put in 'Adblock' and 'Adblock Plus'. They say, well we don't like it being an advertising web site, but trust us, it is not very good.
I thought 'Adblock' was a great extension and very effective.
I also like 'Noscript', it is simple to prevent sites that insist that they and every site they connect to should be allowed to run javascript on your browser. 'Noscript' allows me to specify only the sites, like the one I am browsing, to actually run Javascript instead of every ad aggregator that wants information on you.
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?
This is a good opportunity to bring up a problem with NoScript. It seems to have a flaw with certain sites. With digg, it sometimes makes the thumbs and the show/hide comment links not work properly. It breaks the thumbs completely and instead of the show/hide working in a DHTMLish way, it instead follows the href version of the link. This bug doesn't show up all the time, but on a page where it does show up, you can reload over and over and still get the bug every time.
It does this even when all the sites it lists for the page are set to allowed. But if you set it to "Allow script Globally" (basically, letting EVERYTHING through) and reload the page, the bug goes away. So something there is being blocked that shouldn't be.
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'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
Here you go
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
The Henry Earl extension! If you don't know about Henry Earl, read up on him here. Show the brother some love.
Seriously. I don't often cry "worst evar!" but this qualifies. I'm going to be installing that PDF-downloader extension just as soon as I'm done mocking this list for sucking so hard. And while I do agree that NoScript just breaks too many sites (and it's only going to get worse as the web gets all AJAXy and buzzword-compliant), I don't think I'd bother with the web without tools like Adblock Plus. What can I say - I'm sensitive to noise, both visual and audio. I find it harder than most people to filter out extraneous crap from my sensory input. Maybe it's because I grew up muting the TV audio during commericals (it got to be reflexive in our family) but advertising grates on my nerves like nobody's business. I'll tolerate Google-style text ads, but I find anything with graphics distracting and want it gone.
And yeah, some of it is my significant anti-consumerism bias, too. I block ads on principle, as I consider them an ever-increasing intrusion into my life. Yes, people have the right to create and use advertising, but I have the same right to use any legal means to keep them away from me. And for those who ask, as this article did, "what would happen to all the great ad-supported sites if everyone used these tools," well, they'd be replaced by something else - subscription-driven services, smaller clusters of free services, etc. I love the web as much as the next guy, but it's not like I'd be lost if the entire web went dark tomorrow. I have other interests. But that's not going to happen anyway.
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.
Computerworld, you get no sympathy from me for being an ad-supported site.
... small banners, no animation) get killed too is collateral damage, and it's the advertiser's own fault that people see fit to block the crap. Many even constitute security hazards. Yeah, I'm going to allow THAT to be displayed on my browser (yes, it is MY BROWSER, and it is meant to render things as the USER sees fit...many seem to have forgotten that).
If ads had continued to be a small banner at the top or bottom of the page with NO ANIMATION, or even small ads down the sides that didn't interrupt the flow of the CONTENT (again, no animation), then guess what? I would never have seen a need to use ad blocking software.
The fact is that advertising has gotten very intrusive and counter productive. Hell, I'd likely visit a few advertiser's sites, but now I never see them because of the way they were changed to be as intrusive as possible, hence sent to the bit bucket. WHy do advertisers believe that being as in-your-face as possible would do anything BUT piss people off about the stuff they are trying to sell?
That decent ads (see above
So cry me a river. I'll stick with adblocking software. It's your own damned fault that people block your precious advertisers these days.
AdBlock used to offer an option of loading but not displaying the ads, though I don't see it in AdBlock Plus. It's effectively impossible to detect that, unless you do something like Salon, which grants a "day pass" for watching an ad. Just add a simple captcha to the end of the ad if you really want to be a dick about it.
But the future of Internet advertising is with astroturfing, viral ad campaigns, etc. That can't be blocked with any technical solution.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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
Within just a few minutes, CW was slashdotted. It's mindboggling that any real media company converting to the web can't handle the hit rate.
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.
In other news ... Russian mafia releases list of 10 pieces of software to avoid. Topping the list are anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities. Details at 11.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
TFA doesn't even render right with NoScript enabled. This is excusable, I use javascript to position HTML things all the time, but what is UP with the long list of OTHER sites that's being block. Why the heck would I want to enable any more sites for sole ability to display ads?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
that and AdBlock keep me sane.
If I wanted my web pages to have video auto-run and constant bouncing moving images, I'd turn on their scripts.
But I don't.
Either serve up static or slow ad pages - with NO SOUND - or you die by my NoScript and AdBlock enabled mouse!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Pushing an ad on someone who doesn't want to see it is, what, going to suddenly make that person buy something?
Why do you think telemarketers hate do-not-call lists? They should be celebrating to high heavens, since all their non-customers got sorted out of the pool. *BUZZ* wrong answer. There's plenty people that don't want to be bother with them but who respond to ads - not directly but then you don't see a TV ad and immidiately call and order unless it's TV shop. Hell, there's plenty people like you that'll deny they get affected by ads that still do. There could be ten brands of tooth paste with exactly the same goop and you'd pick the one with the best commercials, or the best packaging, or the best store placement. Or the one you got last time, which amounts to the same.
Face it, for every thing where you're choosing on facts (for example for most of slashdot, computer equipment) there's a hundred things you're not, and you have neither the time or inclination to investigate. All people are like that, except maybe for them it's fashion clothes or ecological food or vacation resorts or whatever. Then we can sit and laugh at the people that buy memory-starved Dells while they laugh at us for going to that overpriced beach resort when there's a better and cheaper one just nearby. And if you really seriously mean that you're in the small minority that doesn't get affected by any ad, ever, well you are still indistinguishable from the rest. Don't expect them to give up trying anytime soon.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
FTFA:
Does NoScript make Firefox safer? Sure. Is it worth the hassle? No. For some reason, paranoia seems to be cool among Web geeks
I guess they think that having your system pwned and turned into a spam-spewing zombie DoS machine of death is what really makes one cool.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse
At least, I think so. There's no way I'm actually clicking on your link.
Let's just settle in a sane, easy-to-comprehend alternative like virus.getPlural().
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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 right clicked, copied the location, pasted to my friend Derek.
I'm pretty sure, judging by his reaction, that you were right not to click GP's link.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to assume a new identity...