Add-ons
musichemyst
About me
| Name | musichemyst |
|---|---|
| Location | Ohio, USA |
| Occupation | Master of Ceremonies |
| User since | June 10, 2010 |
| Number of add-ons developed | 0 add-ons |
| Average rating of developer's add-ons | Not yet rated |
In a little more detail...
I'm just a big, long-time fan of customizing web browsers. To the point that, as an interest/hobby, it rivals my fascination with and love for the actual content of the Web itself.
My experience has been this: Browsing the Web used to be all about the novelty of having the greatest information and media resource of all time right at our fingertips... however, the Web has grown into such an absurdly enormous and wildly diverse collection of information that navigating it is becoming a task that makes getting lost in the Amazon River Basin seem like a Sunday stroll in the park. And the only solution is building a better web browser -- a piece of software that can pull down massive hunks of data from the Internet for a user and be able to present that hunk in its entirety (or close to it) and yet do it intelligently, arrange it logically and make it accessible and digestible in a reasonable amount of time for the user regardless of who they are and what degree of technological know-how they may have.
Of course, building the ultimate web browser is probably an unattainable goal. But, in my opinion, the best effort at creating such a piece of software has come out of the Mozilla camp as Firefox and, particularly the wide array of creative add-ons that it's inspired, have allowed for the best innovations in web browsing so far. And it's been pretty amazing and rewarding being able to indulge my geekiness (to the point that it gets in the way of my nerdiness, heh) by tinkering with Firefox and developing my own add-ons and mods while simultaneously having free access to an open-source community like this with so many brilliant concepts, clever gadgets, hidden gems or, always at the very least, some plain old fresh perspectives all on how to access and digest the web (before it eats us first!).
My Reviews
Adblock Edge
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
I tried this addon as an alternative to AdBlock Lite and so far Adblock Edge is the better addon in my experience. Page load times and browser performance are better than AdBlock Lite (only a bit, but noticeable enough to be worth the switch), and I particularly like the Adblock Edge's settings/filter manager.
* ISSUE : "Adblock Edge fails importing AdBlock Lite custom filters"
I've noticed other users have had this problem and it would appear to be a bug... but luckily there's a simple workaround. The problem is that AdBlock Lite exports custom filters to a .txt file that begins with a line of text that says "[AdBlock Lite 1.1]". However, Adblock Edge will only accept imports of files that begin with "[Adblock Plus 2.0]". The fix is simple: open the file in a text editor and change " [AdBlock Lite 1.1]" to "[Adblock Plus 2.0]". Voilà, Adblock Edge will now accept the file and the import proceeds as normal.
AutoPager
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
I decided to give AutoPager another shot after running into issues with my long-time favorite paginator, AutoPagerize, and I'm glad I did.
The key feature here is AutoPager's 'Lite' mode. Now, while 'Normal' mode will paginate just about every web page out there right out of the box, it uses a "brute force" method of checking each page against a huge list of pagination rules which, ultimately, makes Firefox sluggish due to greater RAM/CPU usage. (In fact, AutoPagerize takes the same approach and has the same issue, and it's one reason why I sought an alternative in the first place.) It's not a horrendous performance hit, but it is noticeable.
However, with 'Lite' mode, you start with a clean slate (i.e. no pagination for any site) and then chose which sites you want AutoPager to paginate as you go. For example, go to Google, click the AutoPager icon to see a list of rules for Google search, choose a rule to install and, from there on out, Google search results will always be paginated. Want pagination for your favorite forum, but not for Facebook? Then install the rule for your forum and skip installing any rules for Facebook. Or install a rule for Facebook but disable it in AutoPager's rule manager so that it's has no affect for now but is there in case you might want it later. This method of selectively installing/enabling pagination only for the sites you want significantly reduces the amount of RAM/CPU that AutoPager uses and keeps Firefox performing nicely -- even when you have dozens of tabs open at once.
The only downside is that the name 'Lite' might be misleading. 'Lite' mode certainly is light on your computer's resources, but it's much more complicated to use than 'Normal' mode. Beginner-level Firefox users will likely be at a loss and users with even an intermediate-leaning understanding of web browser and web pages may find 'Lite' mode to be a bit too technical and too much work. (Then again, that's what 'Normal' mode is for -- anyone can use it and the performance hit is acceptable during simple/routine browsing activities.) In addition, the issue of complexity is further compounded by the fact that AutoPager's interface (addon config, rule management, etc.) is somewhat lacking when it comes to being organized and intuitive. And this is why I rate the addon 4 stars instead of 5.
Ultimately, though, once you get past the quirks and get a feel for AutoPager's overall system, it's well worth it. Pagination is a very, very handy feature to have in a browser, and AutoPager provides probably the best all around approach for making it work.
Toolbar Buttons
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
This is one of my favorite addons. Many of the buttons this addon provides are so useful I'm surprised that Firefox still doesn't include buttons of the same functionality by default. And it's an excellent addon for Firefox users who want to save space and do away with the Menu Bar while still having the essential Firefox functions/commands (and more) easily accessible.
And I really like the new icon graphics in the latest version. They're even more attractive than before and several provide significantly improved visual representations of what the button's function is. This is just my personal taste here, but there were little quirks with the way I thought some of the icons looked -- e.g. black and white only icons for the buttons that toggle Java, CSS, Flash, etc. -- and you pretty much improved everything I thought could look a little better.
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