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I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla

Started by Devindra Hardawar · 4 months ago

photo credit: Cristian Levin
In the midst of all the Firefox 3 debut insanity, a tweet by blogger Louis Gray got me thinking. At the time everyone was trying to download Firefox 3, but most were failing miserably due to Mozilla’s servers collapsing. Gray casually suggested in ... Continue reading »

2 comments

  • Christina Warren

    6 months ago

    I felt pretty much the same way -- until I switched to my Mac fulltime last August. At that point, Firefox 2 was so sucky in OS X (something they incrementally improved with the release of Leopard and something FF3 significantly improves upon), I found myself using Safari despite my early loathing for it -- or using Camino, the cocoa-native version of Gecko (sans plugins).

    I thought I would die without my extensions -- but I didn't. In fact, because I have to use Firefox (or Camino) for blogging anything for Weblogs, Inc. (Safari doesn't work) and found that fewer extensons reduced the number of Mac conflicts (again, most of those issues are fixed), I started to evaluate how many plugins that I previously thought I had to have, really were unnecessary.

    Don't get me wrong, things like AdBlocker Plus, Grease Monkey and the StumbleUpon bar are all still things I j'adore and install, but many of the other features are either already implemented into Safari (for Mac anyway, it has a built-in web inspector that is better than Firebug and that doesn't make me disable it when I use Gmail), like the ability to specifiy which element of a page you want to download (for YouTube videos and the like) or there are bookmarklets for stuff like Deli.cio.us and others. I end up having a faster browser and less crashes, due to conflicting programming that sometimes leaves a messy plugin trail.

    I agree that modularity is the reason Firefox has taken off -- but I think that if they don't get a hold on some of the poorly coded plugins that can eat memory and slow things down, it could wind up being a curse.
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  • Devindra

    6 months ago

    Hey Christina, you're certainly right about poorly coded extensions, they can easily ruin your Firefox experience. The few times I had to completely rebuild my Firefox profile (not fun!) was due to some badly written extensions.

    Ideally, Mozilla would be able to vet extensions before they head out into the wild--but that may be logistically impossible. For now, it's up to the community to keep bad extensions in check.

    Firefox both needs good extension debugging for users, so they can know exactly what is screwing up their installation if something goes wrong, and for developers, to prevent these sorts of issues in the first place.
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