First I clear my cookies and try to watch a video, say one of Fabio Capello’s crazy interviews in English, the site greets me with the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available at the moment”

Now, if you’ve had ISP issues before with the BBC’s site you will know that if your ISP has acrazy routing scheme up the BBC site will give you the following message:
“Sorry this content is not available in your country”

Notice the difference?

Now all I have to do to watch the video is clear my cookies once more and use the User Agent Switcher plug-in for Firefox to gain access. Simply switch the agent to crappy old Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and enjoy the videos…

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1. Watch Hulu, South Park, One Piece videos using a SSH Tunnel

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Post tags: bbc, blocking, Firefox, linux

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Request Access

Whether you’re still in education or stuck at work (I made that sound fun, didn’t I?) It’s highly likely that you have seen the ‘Access Denied: Inappopiate Content’ message, or filtered by ‘x’ webpage crop up on numerous occasions. Well how about a nice extension for you to message whoever decided to block the site in question? With some luck the site may be accessable one day.

We have a bit of a theme here, two extensions used for annotating the web. A really handy set of tools if you’re writing a dissertation, thesis, or just an esssay. I’ll be repeating myself if I describe the benefits of each extension, so I’ll let the authors do the talking. These extensions handle the task of annotating the web in different ways, one with a separate frame, the other in sticky note style.

ReframeIt

ReframeIt adds a collapsible side-margin to your web browser where you can comment on the text of any website. All comments are part of a free online community where you can share your thought and ideas across the web.ReframeIt adds a new layer of meaning to the web by allowing users to provide their own comments along-side any website. The ReframeIt Plug-in creates a collapsible margin in the side of your web browser where the your thoughts and ideas are displayed. All Comments are organized through groups and tags allowing other users to locate interesting web content and see it placed in a new context.

Fleck

Fleck allows you to add Notes and Bullets to websites. You can then share these annotated pages with other people. After installation a small button will appear in your browser. Click that button when you visit a website and you will get a toolbar at the bottom of the page you are visiting. Another small icon will show you if there are Annotated versions of the page you are currently visiting.

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Post tags: extensions, Firefox, fleck, reframeit, request access

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Cache Status

Most people complain about Firefox 2’s extreme use of memory, Cache Status provides a handy little fix. Providing cache information and the ability to manually clear the cache. I know this is possible from within the about:config menu, but why bother when Cache Status can free up memory for you?

Video DownloadHelper

There are plenty of good videos on Youtube, Megatube, Dailymotion, and all those other video streaming sites. Now there are three problems with these sites: you have to be online to view them, the servers can get hit pretty badly causing really slow streaming, and finally videos can often get removed from the sites. Why bother with any of these problems again, when you could just download the video. Many sites provide this functionality, but why not just use this handy extension instead?

Snap Shots

Snap shots of websites is one of the features Ask.com is toting as one of their main features that Google does not have. Well why bother with Ask anymore, when you could go back to good old Google and use this extension to get the Snap Shots for you?

That’s it for now, expect another 3 good extensions in the future.

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1. Watch Hulu, South Park, One Piece videos using a SSH Tunnel
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© jim for 406 Not Acceptable, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cache status, extensions, Firefox, snap shots, video downloadhelper

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But if I could only choose four Firefox extensions, what would I choose? Here are my choices in the usual reverse order:

4. DownThemAll

I find this extension so useful when on a fast line. My internet connection seems to be around the 12Mb area (I don’t know the actual speed, as I get the thing for free) and when your downloading you often find that you get nowhere near your connections actual speed. Using any download manager will do the trick and bring those speeds back into line, but why bother with an external manager when you can have one specially built for your favorite browser?

3. Adblock Plus

Whilst Adblock seems to still be the more popular extension, Adblock Plus is by far the superior option for removing adverts from your internet experience. Whilst Adblock requires manual blocking of advertisements, Adblock Plus uses a set of continually updated set of filters to do the blocking automatically. In addition, the extension can — not by default — attempt to regain the space that would have been taken up by the advertisement.

2. Nightly Tester Tools

Now although this extension is designed to help testers when using the nightly ‘Minefield’ releases of Firefox, this tool has one major feature that all users of Firefox would find useful — force Firefox to believe an extension is compatible with the current version and enable it. Now why would you want to do this? Well unlike Internet Explorer, which seems to get large updates every now and again; Firefox is updated with bug and security fixes pretty regularly. When this happens all of your extensions will be disabled, as they are signed as being compatible up to the last version released; although many extensions are updated within hours of this occurring, many extensions are not. In addition, users may still be able to use extensions that were abandoned by their creator. Please be careful whilst using this extension, as it could cause problems with your browser.

1. NoScript

Everyone hates pop-ups and there are even worse things than pop-ups on the web these days. Thankfully Firefox’s built in pop-up blocker does a good job in removing pop-ups, so do Internet Explorer and Opera, but browsers with blockers just happened to be a double-edged sword. Since a large portion of their pop-ups were annoying anyone anymore, whoever it is that likes to make the damn things decided to work out how to get round all these blockers. Instead the internet (which is serious business by the way) is infested with Javascript based advertisements. These damn things can either block 99.9999% of the bloody screen, follow your scrolling of the page, follow your mouse (by now you start to wonder why they haven’t got the message,) jump out of no-where when you click a link, and steal your first wallet. Ok they might not steal your wallet, but they frustrate me more than pop-ups ever did.

So you could just turn off Javascript, for sure that would kill the little fuckers, but you wouldn’t be able to surf half the web either. So that’s where NoScript comes in and saves the day. NoScript turns off Javascript for every site and lets you whitelist the sites that you do want to allow to use Javascript. Thus you no longer have to view the annoying advertisements, plus you can still do your internet banking. Between NoScript and Adblock Plus you can truely reclaim the web.

What would your choices be?

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Post tags: extensions, Firefox

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It’s good to see that Mozilla have targeted the memory issue with Firefox 3, and beta 3 fixed over 350 memory issues:

Memory usage: Over 350 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 3 includes more than 50 improvements to memory use over the previous beta.

I’ve done a little test, by running both Firefox 2.0.0.12 alongside Firefox 3.0b3 for about 20 minutes to see how each handled memory under Ubuntu Gutsy. I think this image shows some quite conclusive results:

That’s around half the memory usage for Firefox 3.0b3! Quite remarkable, I am sure you may have different results, after all Firefox is designed to use more memory if you have it — secondly, you will be browsing different sites and using different extensions to me. In this test both browsers had Adblock Plus! and NoScript installed, but turned off.

I’ve noticed Firefox 3 is much more responsive and I do like the extension searching function (sorry Mozilla, I’ve been around since 0.6 so I’ll keep on calling them extensions.) The only problem I have with the browser is the new UI, the Linux look is sub-par — Firefox 2 has a much nicer interface. Whilst the Windows ‘keyhole’ button looks horrendous and so does the attempt at a keyhole on the Mac. Mozilla should provide the old interface with the browser, as the new one fails to deliver. The idea behind the keyhole based button is all well and good, but it needs to be implemented much, much better to be effective; I can see many users simply downloading a Firefox 2 based theme to get rid of the ugly button!

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© jim for 406 Not Acceptable, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Firefox, Firefox beta 3, memory leaks, Mozilla

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