Mozilla Announces Extend Firefox Contest Winners

Foxy Betty writes "Mozilla Corporation has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox Contest, a project initiated to encourage development of extensions for the Firefox Web browser. A panel of industry notables reviewed more than 200 extensions submitted to the contest."

improved updater

[cpdsaorg]

How about upgrading the windows version without leaving the old version number in the add/remove programs? I have to update 40 or 50 machines at a time and it's a pain uninstalling before installing.

A bit staid?

[Ithika]

They're probably really nice and elegant and all that but ... are they not just a wee bitty dull? I mean, two out of the three winners appear to create thumbnails of pages (whether from the history or other open pages). And while Web Developer is a fantastic package it's hardly cutting edge and new. I was hoping for something with real pizzaz. Something where the very idea and description was enough to make me go, "wow".

Anyone else find it a bit anticlimactic?

Re:A bit staid?

[pneumatus]

The only extension that i've ever used (and don't mind but wouldn't consider it essential to my browsing experience) is Sage [mozilla.org] and that came a lousy second place to Viamatic Foxprose [mozilla.org] - something that appears to be wholly useless in the 'Most Innovative' category.

Re:Memory Leak

[TrekkieGod]

It turns out that it's not a memory leak, it's caching of the web pages [slashdot.org] which can be a lot of memory if you keep a lot of tabs open. You can turn the feature off, or limit how much ram it uses with this setting [mozillazine.org].

Re:If only...

[ThePhilips]

AdBlock can block scripts too. In fact AdBlock can block almost anything: images, iframes, embeds, objects, etc.

Not all people are that good with HTML/Web terminology: AdBlock unfortunately use lots of it. It's okay for me. But my friend e.g. has whole bunch of extensions (a-la FlashBlock, NoScript) which in fact do what I do with AdBlock alone.

Platypus

[DingoGroton]

One of the finalists really stood out to me, Platypus [mozdev.org], which allows users to dynamically edit the sites they visit and then be able to save the changes to a GreaseMonkey script. It works great on getting rid of some of those annoyances on sites you visit.

Firefox extensions I can't live without

[peter8888]

These are the Firefox extensions I can't live without

GooglePreview:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=189 [mozilla.org]

Venkman Javascript Debugger (for 1.5):
http://getahead.ltd.uk/ajax/venkman [getahead.ltd.uk]

Live HTTP Headers:
http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

Peter

But users of other browsers can't read about them

[TheShrike]

Just tried reading about Reveal [mozilla.org] from Galeon 2.0.1. The mozilla site says

Incompatible Extension or Extension No Longer Available

. Apparently, the Mozilla addon site keys off the HTTP_USER_AGENT, and modifies the results accordingly. Except that if your goal is to persuade other people to switch your browser, or at least inform them about it, shouldn't you let users of other browsers at least read about its features?

FWIW, if I use the search function (searching in extensions) from Galeon, the results returned have &application=Galeon appended to the URL, which seems to me to confirm that it is user-agent dependent.

Re:If only...

[A beautiful mind]

Not entirely true though. I use NoScript to block in-html javascript on sites.

I've also extended my own version of AdBlock to incorporate a new feature which I named relative-to-site blocking: you define what the "site" is with a regexp, a few special modifiers and filter non-matching content from it with a regexp. For example, the following rule:

##\dom##.*

Would block all content which is not coming from the domain currently in the status bar, so if you're surfing example.com images and javascript linked from google-analytics.com will get blocked, but if you're surfing google-analytics.com (for any reason) it allows you to watch it. Of course there is a whitelist too,

#@example2\.com##
or a regular expression like #@\tld:hu##

Then there are the two-level filters which really give the fine-tuning abilities:

###\tld:com|biz|net#####(\dom=/example/)|(\sadom)# #(.*js)|(.*swf)$

A bit of an explanation for this one, the first regexp is a regexp deciding what kind of domains you want to match, the second regexp decides that the domain you're matching - how do you want it to be considered a site and the third part decides what kind of filtering to do with content that doesn't match your defined "site".

Currently five special "variables" exist:
\tld:top-level-domain(s)-here - Self explanatory
\dom(=/regexp/)? - Current domain you're at - like developers.slashdot.org. There is an optional regexp if you want to specify what kind of domains you want this rule to match for - useful for creating multiple-choice rules. Like the long one above.
\cdom(=/regexp/)? - Conservative domain - like slashdot.org even though you're visiting developers.slashdot.org.
\sadom(=/regexp/)? - Subdomains and domain - like .*\.developers.slashdot.org if you're visiting developers.slashdot.org
\csadom(=/regexp/)? - Conservative domain and subdomains - like *.\.slashdot.org if you're visiting developers.slashdot.org

Currently it is only used by me, I made a post about this a while back on the Adblock plus forum, but the Adblock plus devs didn't really react. I might contribute code back if there is interest though.

Re:A bit staid?

[Dan Ost]

I run Firefox in Linux and don't have any memory problems with Firefox. gconfd-2, on the other hand, gobbles up 100M or so overnight, so I end up restarting Firefox just to get gconfd-2 to restart.

Can anyone explain why a configuration daemon eats up 100M overnight? When I start it up, it only takes about 10M.

CookiePie 0.5.4 Firefox Extension

[nektra]

Although we didn't win this time, we think our CookiePie extension is currently very innovative giving you the possibility to open different mail (i.e: Gmail/Yahoo) or web accounts on each tab. More information at: CookiePie Firefox extension [nektra.com]