Top 10 Firefox Extensions to Avoid 538
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."
Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
here's the tell... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
As pointless as the last article (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
What users need to do to maximize our cashflow.
NoScript is in fact worth the hassle (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
#3 = Adblock? No bias there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Totally lost credibility (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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?
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
This news source is not objective and is, therefore, made of Fail.
Fasterfox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, we have some bias when it comes to ad-blocking extensions.......But if everyone blocked ads, how would sites such as ours continue to offer content free of charge?
You know, I can give them the same answer I would for a dvr skipping commercials: Because I can and I will, that's why I use Adblock Plus. Its fantastic and does it's job. I despise commercials and ads. I'm sorry it creates revenue for you but that's not my problem. Are they really asking us to deliberately look at ads just for their financial benefit? You either need to be witty/interesting/funny or trick me into seeing your ad, you don't get my eyeballs that easily. I would like to seek products that I want and that's the point in which I would like relevant products to come and seek me. Not randomly. If ads work and create revenue, great. But don't tell us to allow personal annoyances for your financieal gain.
As for their content being "free" because of ads. Well, if they made me register and pay for their content, what are the chances I would (hint: 0%). So what we end up with is this technical cat and mouse game. Hopefully consumers win and we don't end up in the universe of Minority Report.
Re:here's the tell... (Score:1, Insightful)
Then don't view sites that have ads!
If you block the ads then use the site anyway, you're just freeloading.
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:As pointless as the last article (Score:4, Insightful)
As for a site broken by Adblock: how about not using horribly intrusive ads? They don't work except maybe with the moron element.
Re:Adblock and Adblock Plus?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:3, Insightful)
But it's a lot of rope for a web site to hang itself with, and more often than not it's evil.
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
Fasterfox (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:As pointless as the last article (Score:2, Insightful)
oh for those days, when pages merely DISPLAYED things that I wished to VIEW.
Re:As pointless as the last article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally, what's the "winning" scenario here - consumers (if they can be called that) - getting everything for free? And how is this related to Tom Cruise?
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
What I won't do is expose myself to more advertising than I have to.
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." - George Bernard Shaw
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any other kind of dancing baloney?
Re:The web with NoScript is so much better! (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there is all the statistics / tracking javascript which noscript does a wonderful job getting rid of.
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The targeting is one thing, but far more important is that Google's ads tend to be far less intrusive (and thus far less likely to get added to a user's blocklist).
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
For sites like this, it rapidly becomes apparent that the purpose of the site is to generate ad revenue, for which the content is a draw, rather than a site that presents good content and is supported by ads. When I perceive this then the site is not one to which I will return in any case, ads or no.
Remember how the web used to be in the early 90s? You had some "THIS IS MY PAGE BLINKING TEXT DANCING HAMSTERS LOL!one" pages and then you had some black text/grey background sites with 500k of text on how to beat some game or cook a souffle. The latter is what I want to see (and incidentally I think that sites like myspace are wonderful for putting all the crap in one place). A site like Jarod Wilson's guide to MythTV [wilsonet.com] has pertinent ads and a VERY high content/ad ratio. TFA has links to HP forensics solutions in an article about Firefox. No thanks!
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Winning is businesses finding better ways to make money than by annoying the general user. And yes, I find any and all ads annoying. I don't care if they are relevent or targetted or whatever. If I want to see/here about a company, I will seek them out. If there is any "legitimate"
form of advertising, it is in the form of yellowpages-like directories or catalogs. Beyond that, I don't want to see it or here it. And quite frankly, I don't give a crap how it affects business.
-matthew
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh yeah, that'll happen. Because EVERYBODY will be willing to pay for content. Guess what, when competition is giving it out for free, guess where everyone will go? Not the pay site. Sure they take a hit, but then they get popularity which is infinitely more valuable than a few hundred subscribers.
2) Everyone makes you register for access
That's what bugmenot.com is for. If I run into registration for content, I most likely don't bother. It can't be that important to waste my time to go through a registration process where I will input all fake credentials and a use an email address from mailinator or the like.
3) Everyone makes you pay a fee to read anything
I am free to avoid that right?
Talk about flamebait. You all subsidize MY internet experience? What's up melodrama? You get revenue from advertisement don't you? You're way too emotional about this. Sorry, that was a bit of flamebait in itself. Mod me as you will.
Re:As pointless as the last article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Missing from the list (Score:5, Insightful)
#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.
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is that's not the user's problem now is it?
Don't whine to me if your business model doesn't work because it annoys people. That's the free market, baby. Adapt or die.
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:4, Insightful)
While ads have helped the web become what it is today, I can't help but think that maybe if there weren't so many sites out there trying to get hits for ad purposes, the web might be a better place. Even if that means I have to pay for subscriptions to sites with content that I want, I think I might like that web better. We'd still have a lot of low-cost hosting solutions out there, and we'd still have people posting whatever they want. There just probably wouldn't be so much auto-generated garbage out there to sift through in order to see the interesting stuff. Then again, I've thought about this for all of about 3 minutes now, so I could be completely wrong.
Re:Hey, I like NoScript (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
You should look at ads because they'd like you to ?
Migth as well argue they should drop ads because readers would like them to. Especially anoying ones.
Re:Missing from the list (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:5, Insightful)
You just said something else, although you didn't realize it:
That mass advertising itself is also like a drug. I'm constantly amazed when I hear people talk about their experiences when they don't watch TV or go on the internet for awhile.. it's like they see the world completely differently, and in fact, they do: without the constant drum of advertising against their skulls, they start to see a world NOT based entirely on crass consumerism, a world where there IS meaning and simply joy in things like going to a picnic or talking to your family or reading a book on a gentle afternoon.
We've become so conditioned to be the perfect consumers that we're actually surprised when we step out of that mold. I never watch or listen to ads anymore, and advertisers be damned: I'll buy your product when and if I need it, and only then will I go looking for it. You do not need to spend every waking moment of my life telling me I am a worthless piece of shit because I don't have the latest gadget or waving things in my face that you KNOW I'm going to have to use credit to buy.
Fuck you, all of you. I am a human being, not a machine you can control.
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfounded (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Who is this guy anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Adblock and Adblock Plus?!?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do advertisers deserve a "chance?" I feel that I've already given those soulless worms a good 25 years of my life (I'm 32 now and have blocked ads for about 4 years). Enough is enough. They've had their chance. I want the parts of my brain that are wasted storing stupid jingles and subliminal messages back. I've got better things to store there.
-matthew
Re:Sorry but the list is BS (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand that companies have to make a bit of a profit, and that allows me to see their content; I don't mind these ads so long as they don't break any of the rules above. A hovering popup in the top right hand corner that dissapears in 10 seconds doesn't bother me, so long as it's not covering any content. I've found some ads useful from time to time when I'm doing research on hardware. For the most part google ads satisfy all my conditions.
Just my $.02 - take it as you will.