Building a Better Mozilla With Plugins

Ant writes "Wired has a story on how to improve Mozilla and Firefox web browsers with various plugins/extensions (XPI installations). It lists some of the extensions that have been rated highly by Mozilla users like BugMeNot. One of them not listed and my favorite is PrefBar."

At least

[arieswind]

It may be slightly inconvenient, but at least the Mozilla extension system isn't a blank check to hackers like IE's ActiveX system.

IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't IE taught us that a browser should just be a browser?

mozilla lacking features

[shackma2]

The Wired article calls Mozilla stripped dows and lacking features, but isn't that the point of Mozilla, to be faster by getting rid of the bells and whistles?

I don't get it

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

They make installing plugins easy but installing the program itself on linux requires compliation. The windows version has an installer exe, so where's the linux rpm? They won't get many *nix newbies with this attitude. I want off Konquerer!!

Re:mozilla lacking features

[amliebsch]

That's the point of FireFox. Think of it this way: Mozilla gives you the whole package, whether you want/need it or not. Firefox gives you the bare-bones essentials, then lets you add only what you need/want, ala carte. Analogize with Linux distros. The only weak point is that many people don't realize that they need/want a certain feature until they use it by accident and fall in love with it.

Re:Corporate Acceptance?

[millahtime]

Large Corperations with loads of money just seem to go fo M$ software. Doesn't matter how good it is or if it gets the job done they just use it. That is the problem I run into.

There seems to be a lack of knowledge where I work in general about such things and that is the problem.

The best of the bunch...

[Jugalator]

... is in my opinion Adblock [mozdev.org]. I really like the full regular expression support!

But of course she didn't mention that one, since it would be too efficient against Wired News' own ads. :-)

Disabling my Adblock showed ads on their page at least.

Re:What? No Adblock?

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

Why would a site that uses adverts, and is owned by a company that makes money off web adverts, tell you how to avoid them?

Re:My two cents

[stratjakt]

My beef with the download manager is it puts everythign in the same spot. I'd like to filter by extension, mime type, etc.. Put all the .zips and .exes here, all the .jpgs there, all the .avis hither and yonder.

I hate sorting through a pile of crap to find the pdf howto I downloaded a month ago. And I hate software that makes me act like it's filing clerk.

It's a simple modification, mozilla boys.. Hop to it!

Re:IE

[Vilim]

Unless (as in the case with Firefox) you explicitly tell it to do slightly more

With IE its the opposite, it is more than a browser unless you explicitly castrate its overzealous (and insecure) functionality

Re:Obv you're not an opera user. TBE is only close

[guidryp]

I have been using opera for a long time and trying to get FF to the same functionality is a pain.

With firefox you will still get situations where it pops up new browsers. Go to your tools, extensions "get new extensions" Chances are you now have two browsers... Why?

The best choice right now is TBE single window mode. Even with this I still get an occaisional extra browser opening on me.

I don't understand the difficulty of adding "force single window mode"...

Re:missing adblock

[YaRness]

i think you'll find few sites that depend on ad revenue are going to recommend ways to block ads.

Re:Corporate Acceptance?

[Issue9mm]

"but where are the plug-ins that will improve productivity for the Corporate user?"

Write them. In anticipation of our company's decision to stop using IE (currently in discussion because SP2 breaks the IE Trusted Sites), I wrote an XUL mozilla interface that acts as kind of a google search bar, but for our IT Knowledge Base.

This will prevent the help desk and LAN administrators from having to keep a window open with the knowledge base, as they'll be able to query, search and browse it from their mozilla window no matter what site they're at.

Granted, this might never come to fruition, and was mostly written as incentive to help them migrate from IE, but there's really no reason we all couldn't do the same and sell more companies on Mozilla.

The more corporate-friendly features available, the more corporations will realize it. And with at least a few big names teetering on the edge of continued IE support, now's a better time than ever to push.

-9mm-

Re:Corporate Acceptance?

[rjstanford]

Large Corperations with loads of money just seem to go fo M$ software. Doesn't matter how good it is or if it gets the job done they just use it. That is the problem I run into.

The thing is that, for the most part, it does work. Its also extremely well tested and what weaknesses there are are well known and documented. This is one area where the OSS camp has yet to catch up - and I don't mean providing access to a Bugzilla database with 100,000+ known issues, mostly minor. In the business world, predictibility wins out over other areas nine times out of ten.

Heck, even if I know that everything works perfectly but that my server will only stay up for 10 days in a row before performance degrades, if I have a 15 minute reboot window every week then that's fine too. I'd much rather go with a known solution - with workarounds as needed - than an unproven one that may be better. In that situation, a machine that stayed up for the most part but would randomly stop servicing requests once a quarter - while far superior in uptime stats - would be a greatly inferior solution. Its a different mindset.

Of course, this comment is slanted towards enterprise customers.

No...

[SilentT]

Most people who switch to Mozilla or Mozilla's Firefox browser quickly notice that the browser is pretty bare. It contains exactly what you need to browse the Web -- no less and no more.

I don't know of anyone who's disappointed that Firefox is "pretty bare" the first time they use it. What they notice is that it can do everything IE does, but with tabbed browsing and without the pop-ups or security holes.

Re:Corporate Acceptance?

[bpowell423]

I agree with you for the most part, but to take it one step further... large corporations use MS software because nobody wants to stick their neck out and use anything else, even if it is better or cheaper. The logic seems to be that if you use MS software and it fails, you can bash MS and the management above you will blame MS, too. But, if you use something else like any free/open-source software, then when it fails, the ax falls on you. Management will blame you for the failure, since in their mind you were just cutting corners. I saw this on a project I was working on. I had used MySQL for a project at our facility for a couple of years and it had worked great. Due to the success of the project, corp headquarters decided to try to implement the project at other facilities, but they balked at MySQL and forced me to convert the project to MS SQL. Well... long story short, I now have to keep an eye on MS SQL to make sure it doesn't die, which it's already done several times in 6 months.

Re:At least

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

"...You've probably been told to dump Internet Explorer for a Mozilla browser before, by the same propeller-head geek who wants you to delete Windows from your hard drive and install Linux. You've ignored him, and good for you...."

No, not good for you. I just can't comprehend why anyone would ACCEPT the terms of Microsoft's recent EULA. It is full of terms I'm sure most people would object to if they bothered to read it.

Re:Corporate Acceptance?

[AliasTheRoot]

buy oracle.

had a longer comment but slashdot said it was a bunch of seconds until you can reply and wiped out my post.

Re:Corporate Acceptance?

[buckminster]

Actually the weaknesses are not well known or documented. Particularly with security. There are new issues arising daily -- which would be why CERT recommended that users consider changing browsers.

That's the sort of uncertainty that might make enterprise customers nervous.

FIX THE CALENDAR!

[EvilStein]

All these other plugins are just fluff if adoption is severely hampered by the lack of a fully functional calendar.

Build the calendar, and they will come.. come away from Outlook.
It *can* happen.

Calendar should be #1 priority right now.. mail & news is great, the browser is great.. but the lack of a calendar *really is stopping people* from switching. At least with the dozens of small businesses that I do consulting for, it is.

I cannot emphasize this enough - a lot of small businesses (without exchange) stick to Outlook because of the pretty pointy clicky calendar.

"sunbird" isn't even close. The Mozilla Calendar is waay far off.

Come on, guys... let's dooooo it!

Lack of drivers could lead to rejection

[tepples]

It would have been better in my opinion to make switching browsers also entail switching OS, in the sense of "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right".

I find "get them to switch operating systems NOW" a bad policy. Many households and organizations have sunk significant amounts of money into hardware for which no Free device driver or ported proprietary device driver exists. I will consider your opinion on the matter the moment you point to a working Linux driver for (say) the Microtek Scanmaker 4850 scanner, which the SANE web site lists as unsupported.