Saturday, December 24, 2005

Firefox Extensions

I hate Firefox, but i still use it ! I simply hate Firefox for the amount of RAM it eats up. It simply sucks. I have never seen any software program eating up that much amount of memory. It simply keeps sucking up memory like a vampire sucks blood from human body. On my office machine i've seen FF eating up more than 450 MB of memory. Damn it, after every few hours i have to close it, sometimes i have to kill firefox.exe as well so that i can restart the FF. It sucks in most java sites, sites which refresh quite often, it sucks in some flash sites, but still im using it.

I love its tabbed-browsing, ya ya Opera has that too but it has ads :). One more thing i simply like about Firefox is some of its extensions. Some of them are really great. I will list some of my favorites here:

1. Tab Mix Plus - This is easily the best possible extension you can find. It provides every almost every feature you would ever require relating to tabbed browsing including the session restore. Its simply awesome, though its newer version had an annoying bug - If you upgrade from tab mix plus previous version, it will restore every tab twice !! But in a fresh install of newer version this works fine. Rating : 5/5

2. Dictionary Tooltip - This is a pretty cool extension for illiterates like me, who have to check the dictionary every few minutes while reading on web. You can configure which dictionary site you want to use and you simply have to double-click the word, you want meaning off and you will see the meaning in a pop-up ! Really cool. Rating : 4.5/5

3. Performancing - This is extension which i have started using just 3-4 days ago. This one lets you blog easily ! This sits in statusbar as a simple notepad-esque icon. You click it, it opens a split window where you can type (paste) your blog entry and in one-click it will post that entry to your blogging site be it blogger, wordpress et al.. Really cool. I used this for the last post and am going to use this only from now on, though i wish it had the option of changing the font of posts too (or had default font as my favorite Verdana ;) ). It also lets you blog a link by a simply click. Rating : 4/5

4. IE TabView - This is a cool extension, which on a single click lets you change the rendering engine from Geeko (Firefox) to IE's rendering engine. Pretty useful for sites that doesn't open well in Firefox. You simply click on the firefox icon in the status bar, it will open the same page in IE. It seems a bit slow and buggy sometimes, but is pretty useful. Rating : 3.5/5

5. Paste and Go - Small and Sweet is the word which describes this extension. It just combines your two tasks "Paste" and "Go" into a single task. Very cool. Rating : 3.5/5

6. Adblock - This one is pretty good too, it lets you block almost every ad on a webpage. Simply right-click any ad/frame and just click Adblock ! Cool. It also lets you use wildcard characters. I have started using this more extensively at home, especially since when i saw my broadband MB download meter going up like a delhi's auto-rickshaw meter. I use this sometimes in office too, especially when some scantily-dressed babes suddenly appears even on harmless sites (ya that's news, mail sites et al only and none of what you perverts are thinking) - i don't want to get blamed without doing anything :D. Rating : 3.5/5

7. Search Status - This is another simple extension i have started using since this week only. It shows the Google's page rank and Alexa's (?) page rank for a webpage. A good feature is that it also shows the Related Links to that webpage ! Can be pretty useful when you need to visit some similar sites. Rating : 3/5

8. FlashGot - This is also a good extension it integrates your download manager with the Firefox. Especially useful for larger download files, where you need to download using download manager only and might require pausing and all. Rating : 2.5/5

These are some of my favorite FF extensions. IE 7 is going to be released soon, with tabbed browsing, RSS support, so-called improved security. I wonder if i would switch to IE, mainly because some of these extensions will be absent ! Maybe some of them will be there, maybe i will switch to IE or atleast use it a bit more. But for now i am hooked to Firefox.

Rumour of the week - Microsoft buying Opera !!

Man this would be something, it would be a big setback for Firefox, because even the greatest of IE critics and FF fans regards Opera as the best browswe available with most of FF features *INSPIRED* from Opera. But i don't think MS are yet so desperate especially after they have put in so much of effort in bringing up IE 7. They cant simply dump all the hard and good work done by their employees and use something new suddenly.

Btw Merry Chrismas to all :)

2 comments:

AKS said...

Opera no longer has ads ( Check out version 8.5 ) It is also now a free browser :) for desktop.

Kon ?? said...

ya ya ya i know it now :)

but still it doesnt have some of these extensions or maybe i have got USED to using firefox !!

in general it takes some radical feature to move a user from one software (browser in this case) to another.