User poll: Browsers and add-ons!
Jul. 24th, 2012 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingPop quiz: What web browser do you use by preference, and what add-ons for it can you just not do without?
For me: Firefox, and most of my add-ons are "basic functionality that all browsers should have by default but mysteriously don't."
The first thing I install on Firefox is always Adblock Plus. Add in Adblock Element Hiding Helper and NoScript, and suddenly the web is a serene, peaceful place with no advertising. It's nice. NoScript is a pain in the butt because you have to enable scripting to make a lot of sites work at all, but the disable-by-default model is why I use it. I put up with the expectation that any new site I go to will probably fail, in exchange for knowing that nothing runs without my permission.
After that, Tab Mix Plus is an absolute must-have. Changing width of tabs, showing loading progress bars on tabs, diverting new windows into tabs, multi-row tabs rather than scrolling the tab bar, duplicate tabs.... Tab Mix Plus does all the things tabs should do. For pure browser functionality I've also got Old Location Bar, which disables a bunch of the annoying Location Bar wankery that got added around Firefox 3 - things like "switching to an existing tab rather than opening the URL I told it to open", searching page text to come up with "hints" about which URL I'm typing, etc.
After that... Ghostery blocks web bugs, ad networks, data collectors, etc. ShareMeNot blocks Google, Twitter, Facebook and several other buttons- all those little "share this on" buttons - from appearing, meaning it doesn't load them from the server, meaning it doesn't tell Facebook what websites you've been looking at. Collusion is just very pretty - it shows the web of links and who you've requested data from recently.
Finally I'm into minor functionality stuff. Long URL Please reverts tinyurl and t.co and all the rest of the "compressed links" you see on the web to their full URL, letting you read where a link goes before clicking it. Shocking, I know. Firebug is a web development tool, useful for pulling apart pages and figuring out what's happening under the hood. It's also REALLY useful for it's network monitoring stuff - enable it and load a page, and you'll see which parts of the page were loading in what order, from where, and how long it took. It's really useful for troubleshooting slow websites.
I've also got three legacy add-ons that I just haven't uninstalled. Greasemonkey is a powerful scripting tool, but I don't have any scripts for it running any more - all the functionality I was using it for has been implemented elsewhere. Livejournal Addons *was* really great for auto-expanding comment threads, but doesn't work with the new comment style, and I never used it for any of the other things it does. And Screengrab, for saving entire web pages as images, *was* great and I used it a lot, but it hasn't been updated for compatibility in months.
So: What do you use, and what does it do?
For me: Firefox, and most of my add-ons are "basic functionality that all browsers should have by default but mysteriously don't."
The first thing I install on Firefox is always Adblock Plus. Add in Adblock Element Hiding Helper and NoScript, and suddenly the web is a serene, peaceful place with no advertising. It's nice. NoScript is a pain in the butt because you have to enable scripting to make a lot of sites work at all, but the disable-by-default model is why I use it. I put up with the expectation that any new site I go to will probably fail, in exchange for knowing that nothing runs without my permission.
After that, Tab Mix Plus is an absolute must-have. Changing width of tabs, showing loading progress bars on tabs, diverting new windows into tabs, multi-row tabs rather than scrolling the tab bar, duplicate tabs.... Tab Mix Plus does all the things tabs should do. For pure browser functionality I've also got Old Location Bar, which disables a bunch of the annoying Location Bar wankery that got added around Firefox 3 - things like "switching to an existing tab rather than opening the URL I told it to open", searching page text to come up with "hints" about which URL I'm typing, etc.
After that... Ghostery blocks web bugs, ad networks, data collectors, etc. ShareMeNot blocks Google, Twitter, Facebook and several other buttons- all those little "share this on" buttons - from appearing, meaning it doesn't load them from the server, meaning it doesn't tell Facebook what websites you've been looking at. Collusion is just very pretty - it shows the web of links and who you've requested data from recently.
Finally I'm into minor functionality stuff. Long URL Please reverts tinyurl and t.co and all the rest of the "compressed links" you see on the web to their full URL, letting you read where a link goes before clicking it. Shocking, I know. Firebug is a web development tool, useful for pulling apart pages and figuring out what's happening under the hood. It's also REALLY useful for it's network monitoring stuff - enable it and load a page, and you'll see which parts of the page were loading in what order, from where, and how long it took. It's really useful for troubleshooting slow websites.
I've also got three legacy add-ons that I just haven't uninstalled. Greasemonkey is a powerful scripting tool, but I don't have any scripts for it running any more - all the functionality I was using it for has been implemented elsewhere. Livejournal Addons *was* really great for auto-expanding comment threads, but doesn't work with the new comment style, and I never used it for any of the other things it does. And Screengrab, for saving entire web pages as images, *was* great and I used it a lot, but it hasn't been updated for compatibility in months.
So: What do you use, and what does it do?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-27 04:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-27 10:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-28 04:34 am (UTC)Which is to say: They're doing it wrong, and if the page becomes unusable by blocking Facebook's spyware, I'm okay with that, I just won't visit there.
Your mileage obviously varies?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-28 04:52 am (UTC)I suspect it's an interaction between Ghostery and another extension, but toggling my various extensions didn't seem to have much effect, and turning Ghostery off did.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-28 02:16 pm (UTC)