Jeff H.

About me

Developer Information
Name Jeff H.
User since Jan. 6, 2010
Number of add-ons developed 0 add-ons
Average rating of developer's add-ons Not yet rated

My Reviews

Pastel Gradient

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

Pro: the pastel colors make text and icons more visible and easier to read than the FF default theme.

Con: in MS Windows, at least, when the FF title bar is active, this theme does not change the color of the title bar to indicate when the browser window has lost focus.

DownThemAll!

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

It took me months to learn my way around my last multi-segment download manager/accelerator because the core and advanced features--preferences settings, filters, download selector dialog--were all undocumented, and most of them were not intuitively obvious. Now I want to ditch it because they've added software updating through OpenCandy (can be considered spyware because it reports what is installed on your system, and can not be disabled). I'd heard of Down Them all, and decided to have a look. Sadly, the documentation is not much better. Of course, it doesn't help that English is a barrier, being that it is not the developers' first language.

I think I can figure out a few things because of their similarity to features in the previous software, but there are other features that will remain opaque without documentation (such as the filter's pattern matching language, which includes operators not found in any flavor of regular expressions I've ever seen), and some features shown in screenshots on their website that I do not even know how to access, much less use. I'm just too tired to go stumbling around yet another bit of software, trying to figure out how to use the core features by guess and by golly. It is hard work coding new whiz-bang features into a software app; I know because I've done it. I can't see the point in spending the time and effort without also writing complete documentation, so that all those great features are accessible to the end users.

Note: I haven't actually tried the software yet, but AMO requires a rating in order to post a review...

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (2.0.8.1-signed). 

ThunderBrowse

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

When it was decided to split Mozilla apart into Firefox and Thunderbird, some of the Mozilla developers thought this was a bad idea. They formed a group that took over development of the old Mozilla comm suite, and re-branded it as SeaMonkey. As in the Mozilla (and Netscape) of old, the web browser, news/email client, and HTML editor in SeaMonkey are integrated into one app, where they all share the same Gecko rendering engine and other resources. There is no need to "launch" a separate web browser to follow a link in an email, because the browser is already there in the same app, and already running.

The existence and popularity of ThunderBrowse argues powerfully that the SeaMonkey developers were right. If you find yourself running both Firefox and Thunderbird constantly, and wanting to resort to an add-on like this so that you don't have to, maybe the answer is to install SeaMonkey instead, and to be grateful that someone had the foresight to keep the old Mozilla comm suite alive.

This review is for a previous version of the add-on (3.3.4). 

Always Online

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

Well, it failed to prevent FF from going offline again. So, I removed this, and installed StayInOnlineMode by NettiCat. That one worked the first time. I will hope it is more reliable than this one.