markus’ blog

Firefox extension roundup: Adblock, Add n Edit Cookies, Adsense Notifier, Bookmark Synchronizer, Document Map, Fangs Screen Reader Emulator, Live HTTP Headers, Measure It, Resizable Textarea, ScrapBook, SessionSaver .2, Small Screen Renderer, View formated source, View Rendered Source Chart

October 20th, 2005

Firefox extensions have ultimatively one goal: make your (web-)live easier. Therefore I’ve gone through the top rated extensions and picked 15 of them.

Note: All extensions have been tested under Windows only.

For a better overview here’s a rough grouping of the extensions:

• Business
  • Adsense Notifier
• Surfing
  • Adblock
  • Bookmark Synchronizer
  • Resizable Textarea
  • ScrapBook
  • Session Saver .2
• Web developer
  • Add n Edit Cookies
  • Document Map
  • Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
  • Live HTTP Headers
  • Measure It
  • Screen grab!
  • Small Screen Renderer
  • View formatted source
  • View Rendered Source Chart

Let’s get dirty:

• Adblock

  Blocking ads is bad for business. Why do ads exist? To annoy people and make extra money? Think about how many services (!) on the web you use day by day. For free. Granted. So, for how many would you really pay money for? The answer is almost always: zero. So people running services you use for free do what? Have rich parents paying their money so they can run your free service? No, they show ads. They earn money by having their users generated adviews and adclicks. The more users, the more money. But usually: the more users, the more it costs to run their free service. Simply math, isn’t it?

  You actually didn’t come here to get an extra lesson in how ads work. So when it’s bad for business, why this extension? Simply because there’s demand for it. Blocking ads years ago was mostly about blocking popups which is a no-no nowadays and no one seriously bases his business on it and every browsers has some some sort of blocking mechanism anyway. Popups went away and then people became annoyed by the normal ads, fullbanners, skyscrapers, you name it.

  Adblock does blocking and it can block them all. The interface to do so is dead simple. Right click on an image (pressumable a banner, but it could be a regular image too) and select Adblock Image. Flash can be blocked in a similiar way as can iframes.

  Enabling / disabling could be done easier (e.g. right click on the status bar) and domain/url filtering where to apply the blocking mechanism would be nice.
  

• Add n Edit Cookies

  A typical once installed, you never want to miss it-extension. You keep asking yourself the question how you could lived without it. When your regular job is to work with web applications and sessions/cookies, this extension is unavoidable.

  It’s strength comes from easily viewing the current cookies and also editing them. It has problems with some themes (especially ones which don’t support buttons with custom heights), but this doesn’t stop it from being one of the most useful ones out there.

  Some bug reports already suggest useability enhancements which could be really useful.

• Adsense Notifier

  Never let your business get out of control. How to achive this? Install this extension and have your current Adsense account information always displayed at the bottom of your browser in your status bar. The output can be formated to certain degreeds and with right click you can open your Adsense account in the browser right away and are automatically logged in.

  Unfortunately it doesn’t support multiple accounts.

• Bookmark Synchronizer

  If you’re using Firefox on more than one computer (and you are, aren’t you), there’s no way around this extension. It automatically downloads/uploads the bookmarks upon browser start/closing from/to your server. This part of a feature Netscape 4 had: Roaming profiles.

  Seeing support for sftp would be nice. Oh, and synchronizing local resources to/from a remote system should be implemented as a core functionality in FF so I actually sync whatever I want (Cookies, Settings, content of other extensions, etc.)

• Document Map

  The document map is an outline of the headings of the whole HTML page you’re currently viewing. It opens up in the sidebar and be used to view the rough structure and the content of the document side-by-side. This works by analysing the document and building a tree view of all headline defined inside. This one adds up much to accessability.

  Very useful for large documents (think about the XHTML specification for example) but please change the accelleration key and provide a menu entry/toolbar button. On windows the key is alt-o and I had to try four pages until it worked (WordPress and Wikipedia both already have alt-o defined).

• Fangs Screen Reader Emulator

  Whenever you develop websites you should also care about users with disabilities which for whatever reasons have a hard time using computers and the internet. This extension helps the developer to get a feel on how the disabled expirience your website.

  Basically it converts every element of information into a textual representation. This may look something like this:

  Page has twenty-three headings and one hundred eighty-two links Slashdot colon News for nerds, stuff that matters dash Mozilla Firefox Adblock Heading level one Link Slashdot List of five items bullet Link Graphic Space bullet Link Graphic Red Hat Software bullet Link Graphic Security bullet Link Graphic Programming bullet Link Graphic Businesses List end Heading level two Heading level four Link rfceight hundred twenty-two List of five items bullet Link Preferences bullet Link Subscribe

  Heading list and List list shouldn’t use such small windows to show it’s content, I’ve to regular scroll them to see all the content.

• Live HTTP Headers

  A great help if you want to know what’s going on behind, especially behind the communication between your client and the server. Nice features are different kind of transfer modes and custom filters for content you don’t want to watch. You can also easily watch Ajax communication which happened unnotices; until now.

  I would prefer a two-paned view like Fiddler does. That way you have a better overview over all the requests.

• Measure It

  Nearly hidden in the statusbar it doesn’t occupy much space but aids much in measuring dimensions directly on-screen. Left-click to activate it, the currently viewed page turns into a ghost state where you can measure any two places you want.

  Measuring areas offline the currently viewed page window would be nice. Some sort of snapping to on-screen elements (borders, images) would be nice, too.

• Resizable Textarea

  Spotting this one was actually fun: I just typed resizable textarea into google and found what I wanted. Incredible. Helped me a lot while writing this lengthy blog entry with Wordpress. The Wordpress textarea is already quite bug, but still for an article of this link it was definitely more comfortable resizing it to the full available height of my browsers viewport.

  Having resizable handles on every border and corner would be nice (just like Windows windows).

  Update 28th Nov. 05: Jeremy D. Zawodny released a version which works with FF 1.5!

• ScrapBook

  ScrapBook is an astonishing extension. With a winking you take a snapshot of the current page as it is and add a comment to it for archiving. This is a feature I’ve only seen in commercial addons for IE so far. It saves whatever resource you currently see in the page locally. The snapshots of the pages can be organized with folders and notes. It even includes a search and term highlighting interface.

  You can save anything you see in your browser: HTML documents, PDF documents, text files. You can even select a part of a page and move the selection to the ScrapBook. Wow.

  My wishlist:

  • Save documents on a remote location for centralized accessability (like Bookmark Sync does)
  • Selecting multiple documents in the tree view to move them around
  • Have a document being the child of another document, not only of a folder

• Screen grab!

  Not soo much needed for developers but for designers or when you just want to save an image of the current page: screen grab is your solution. Right click from the current document it allows taking a snapshot of the complete page (even if you don’t see the whole page in the viewport!), with and without browser frame and save it locally.

  Impressive. Requires Java. Has issues with BIG pages because of the memory required by the Java virtual machine running inside FF.

• SessionSaver .2

  A core feature of other browsers (Opera…) is to save the state of the windows when you close your browser and have it restored on starting the browser. Well, here you got it for FF.

  Gives the impression it could mature a bit, i.e. provide optional fancy dialogs on start if session restoring is wanted. The tabs fading in is absolutely annoying. But still, this extension simply rocks :-)

• Small Screen Renderer

  Seeing how the screen may look like on small screen devices is a must have nowadays which this extension provides. Simple extensions, works without hassles.

  A button for the toolbar would be nice.

• View formatted source

  Whenever the pages’ source code looks like gibberish , this extension helps you not to get lost. It reformats the source code into properly nested HTML tags.

  An optional monospace font for the view formatted source window would be nice.

• View Rendered Source Chart

  Another, interesting, approach to visualize the nesting of HTML tags. It builds nested, colored blocks which represent the block-level elements of CSS. At any given point on the page you see easy how far your nesting level is because you see the differently colored blocks.

  Looks nice, not yet sure if it’s that useful.

Entry Filed under: Firefox & Co