Extension Madness

Lately it seems like a lot of the people I know are switching to Firefox. I applaud the move and wish them luck with the best browser out there - in my opinion. I have noticed, however, that useful extensions can be tough to track down for the novice user. Therefore, I've decided I'd list a few of my favorite extensions to aid you in your surfing.

Sage
Sage is an RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Firefox. Sage allows you to add feeds to a list, discover feeds on a webpage, and check feeds for updates, quickly alerting the user to new content on their favorite websites. If you are familiar with sites like Engadget, Hackaday, Slashdot, Stereogum, or any other compatible sites, and haven't used a news reader this is your chance.

ForecastFox
ForecastFox is a handy little extension that adds the current weather to your status bar. Unlike WeatherBug and other desktop products, ForecastFox does not contain any kind of spyware/adware. It's extremely unobtrusive and easy to use. All you have to do is move the cursor over the icon and you can instantly find out the current temperature and other useful information.

Adblock & Adblock Filterset
Adblock, coupled with the filterset - which acts much like PeerGuardian or SafePeer for P2P programs - is a must have extension for any user of Firefox. The web has become a very scary place with pop ups and stupid flash banners, and other such web annoyances, but with Adblock those problems can be a thing of the past. Adblock allows you to easily filter the garbage out, and help you maintain your sanity for just a little longer.

Disable Targets for Download
A very common problem with Firefox is it's tendency to spawn a window or tab when the user is trying to download a file from the internet. This extension helps combat this problem by blocking extensions from spawning a new window or a tab.

Popup Blocker Hack
While this isn't exactly an extension it is still pretty handy in the added functionality offered to Firefox. When Firefox first emerged nearly no popup would escape the built in popup blocker, but now that's changed. It's quite common for a few to slip by and open up a new tab or an ugly window. With this quick hack Firefox will work just like before, and popups will be a thing of the past.

Longhorned Tiger

The other day after reading about the ease of installing the recently leaked OS X x86 Developer build, I decided I would give it a try. Once I finally got the image copied, OS X started up without a hitch. The only problem was, my mouse wasn't working correctly.

Long story short I would eventually get OS X functioning correctly, and it was quite rewarding. I've always liked Apple's UI although I admitedly have very little experience using it. The computer was running quite fast, percievably faster then when I run XP, but I didn't really know where to go from there. Sure, I had the thing running, and it was pretty cool, but what's the point? What benefit does OS X yield? After a few hours of searching I can say I couldn't find any compelling reason to switch to the Apple camp.

Sure OS X has the cool task bar thing on the bottom of the screen and has...well, I don't even know what else it has. (That's not entirely true, I do know that it has a command line which is based on Unix which gives the OS some appeal over MS, but I couldn't find out where it was) The problem I had with my experience was that it seemed to simplified. I felt like the interface was catering to the lowest common denominator of computer users. I may have felt this way due to the lack of software pre-installed on the machine, or maybe it's the fact that I have no real experience with Apple's products (any of them). Either way, it felt too empty.

A few days after my OS X debacle, I started thinking about the next major endeavor from the Microsoft camp, and decided I'd like to give it a try - though, it is still in beta. I installed it rather painlessly - fired up the disc and went off to class, only to return to a strange looking background with transparent everything, and I mean EVERYTHING.

The Beta build didn't include drivers for some of the components of my system (SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Pro, HP 1510 Printer, and I think my GeForce FX5700), but it seems to manage just fine. Much like Tiger, Vista is fast. It felt much faster then my XP machine even without drivers for some of the hardware - which is what I suspect is crippling the performance in XP. Installing software was very easy however, in about two seconds flat I was using Trillian and downloading things from usenet. It was a pretty painless experience.

I definitely like some of the things about this early new interface. The new start menu is pretty nice because it doesn't build out onto the desktop, it's contained within itself. In other words, space is perceivably saved. It also has a built in search bar on the bottom, which is very accessible. The Control Panel has received a face life and seems to be slightly more user friendly, providing links to the common task in the topics underneath the topic button. Internet Explorer 7 beta is pretty slick too, it supports tabbed browsing. I don't like the position of the control bar though - it is placed underneath the tabs, unlike almost every other browser (which supports tabs) that I have seen.

Although Vista and OS X were nice diversions, I have to stay with XP (If not just because it's legal). If Vista was final then I'm sure I would switch, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done to get the functionality and support up to where it needs to be. Maybe if OS X didn't make me feel like a 2nd grader in a computer lab I would stick with Tiger, but it definitely does, and I definitely won't. I'm looking forward to Vista, even if the majority of the internet is not.