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."

Article translation

[kpainter]

Number one extension to use: IE7 God, what a lot of drivel.

Any "Performance" tweaks as well

[Pope]

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.

NoScript sometimes breaks DHTML

[illegalcortex]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Hey, I like NoScript

[Saint Aardvark]

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 [ckers.org] 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.

The web with NoScript is so much better!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, I miss some content, but normally NoScript is saving me so much time getting there and missing junk adds, flash garbage etc.etc. that the benefit outweighs the losses hundreds of times over.

constantly having to whitelist sites so that scripts can execute in order

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.

VideoDownloader *is* extremely useful

[cos(x)]

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.

Re:Sorry but the list is BS

[pla]

For example, NoScript, which does make Firefox safer, but isn't worth the hassle
Says who?

Well, not so much in that it doesn't work, but rather, that much better alternatives exist.

Personally, I use QuickJava, which makes enabling/disabling Java and Javascript (separately) just a matter of clicking an icon at the bottom of the window. So I can keep it off 99% of the time, and on the rare occasion that I need Java, I can just whack the button and instantly have it enabled.

Even then, though, you could argue that FireFox makes it easy enough to change those from the Options pane. Personally I find it useful to have a one-click toggle, but YMMV.

Re:As pointless as the last article

[Zebai]

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 [computerworld.com] 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).

The Real List of Extensions to avoid.

[mr_3ntropy]

Here is the real list [mozillazine.org] 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.

Re:Fasterfox

[Dystopian Rebel]

Sites should provide a "whole article" link. But as has been mentioned, they get money for exposing their sponsors to you.

You could save URLs that interest you and use wget or curl to grab your interests from a list.

Re:AdBlock??

[ZiZ]

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 [adblockplus.org] 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 [brianyi.org], the Easy* lists are faster and easier to maintain, plus you don't need an extra extension to manage them.

Re:NoScript sometimes breaks DHTML

[Giorgio Maone]

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 [noscript.net] fixes this issue once (hopefully) for ever.

Re:Hey, I like NoScript

[Red Flayer]

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?

Umm, dancing baloney not on a web page?

Re:Fasterfox

[pjrc]

Some time ago, I got a complaint from someone trying to use my website. I use mod_throttle, mainly due to people trying to run automated whole-site downloader programs that get stuck inside the bugzilla pages. When that happens, every perl-rendered bugzilla page chews up excessive CPU time and they're so heavily interlinked that this continues on forever. The bugzilla documentation specifically recommends installing mod_throttle to deal with this well known problem.

In this guy's case, he wasn't really even aware he was running fasterfox. He'd installed it some time ago and basically forgotten all about it. He had no idea it was set to prefetch.

My mod_throttle settings are pretty liberal. It really takes a lot of excessive, rapid fetching to trigger. That is EXACTLY what fasterfox did.

I examined the logs, and what I saw was fasterfox would prefetch every html link every time a page was visited. Every one, WITHOUT USING THE BROWSER CACHE. That's right, no cache. The same dozen or so pages (linked from the nav bar) would get refetched every single time, even if they were fetched just seconds ago from the last time it saw links to them.

That's just broken. If it were only to check if the html is already in the browser's cache, then after a few pages those most-linked pages would all be cached and the user could have a nice, ultra-fast browsing experience.

TFA hates NoScript because...

[mathfeel]

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?

Re:Missing from the list

[jimicus]

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/ [goatse.cz]

Re:Sorry but the list is BS

[Fordiman]

Yeah. I was gonna say, Adblock at number 3 the avoid? Not if you're an end-user.

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=' + window.location.toString().match(/v=([^\&]*)/)[1]+ '&t='+ document.body.innerHTML.match(/\&t=([^\&]*)/)[1]; })();

Re:Missing from the list

[Anonymous Coward]

You young kids don't remember your slashdot. I'm not sure if it was informative, but it was +5:

Old goatse post [slashdot.org]

And it was .cx, not .cz (Unless it changed, and no, I'm not going to test it)

Re:Sorry but the list is BS

[Oktober Sunset]

Ook? spanks its scrawny ass tho.

Re:Missing from the list

[ad0gg]

The original goatse website(.cx) had its domain seized by christmas island domain authority.

Re:Missing from the list

[Mattintosh]

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.

[shudder] I prefer THIS informative link

[Ahnteis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse [wikipedia.org]

At least, I think so. There's no way I'm actually clicking on your link.

Re:Sorry but the list is BS

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I used to use VideoDownloader. Though it got frustrating when the majority of the time I tried to use it, I was getting "Server Busy" errors. That's when I found FastVideoDownload [mozilla.org]. It runs completely in your browser. If you're on YouTube, click it's icon on the status bar and a file dialog pops up for saving the file. It works great.

For the places it doesn't work, I just keep "tail -f /var/log/squid/access.log | grep flv" in a terminal and then grab the urls and download them with wget.

Re:Hey, I like NoScript

[Red Flayer]

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.

Re:Sorry but the list is BS

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

Re:Fasterfox

[Dirtside]

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 ;)

Re:Missing from the list

[Bretai]

gives me an idea for another extension which stitches these kinds of articles together

Firefox repagination: http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2099 [mozilla.org]

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.

Re:Missing from the list

[Bretai]

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 [mozilla.org]
NoScript [mozilla.org]
Adblock Plus [mozilla.org]
PDF Download [mozilla.org]
VideoDownloader [mozilla.org]
Greasemonkey [mozilla.org]
ScribeFire [mozilla.org]
TrackMeNot [mozilla.org]
Tabbrowser Preferences [mozilla.org]
Tabbrowser Extensions [sakura.ne.jp]
FormSpy [nai.com]

Hmmm. It doesn't feel wrong.

Re:Missing from the list

[lowrydr310]

From TFA:

For some reason, paranoia seems to be cool among Web geeks, but for the most part, it is totally unwarranted unless you're sending and receiving sensitive data.

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.

Re:Missing from the list

[Russellkhan]

Right. These days Tab Mix Plus is the way to go for that functionality.