FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

During the last year i expanded my plugin usage in Firefox. Some of them being really useful and some of them… well… was not even worth the time spent on installing them.

Here is my hot pick from 2009

Poster

This one is for those people who cant get their head around the classic cURL. The fact remains that there are still people who are into development/testing and doesn’t know about cURL and i’m not talking about newbies. So here is one tool that can save your day. Do any HTTP related work with this and i bet you will fall in love with this.

poster FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Tamper Data

This lets you mess with the HTTP headers and parameters. But the best use of this i have found so far was that it can display the headers in a very neat way, that can be understood easily

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Lazarus

This is a form recovery tool. I bet everyone of us has that frustrating moment after filling a form and submitting it, the data is all lost due to some insane wizardry behind the scene that we didn’t know about. Well not anymore. Lazarus helps to recover the form data that was entered and saves the frustration.

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

SQL Injection

Well do i need to describe what this is? In short this can run selected SQL Injection attacks on the fields on a webpage. Great tool identify similar vulnerabilities.

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

and last but one of my favorite -

Regular Expression Tester

Anyone who has worked on regex knows that, it would be great if they could see the regex in action on the test data, on the fly, as they are building it. This plugin is a dream come true.

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Trust me you need this plugin.

For the layman, you dont need any of these plugins. But i assure you that the following is a must have for both geeks and non-geeks alike.

  1. Password Exporter
  2. ScrapBook
  3. Firefox Extension Backup Extension
  4. DeepestSender (for bloggers)

For the geeks and the web-developers here is my list –  FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

 FireFox Top 5 Plugins from 2009

Should You Download on June 17th?

180x150 02 Should You Download on June 17th?

Bruce Almighty, the movie starts of with Bruce, a TV Reporter, asking an old woman, who owns a Patisserie -

“So tell us mama, why make Buffalo’s biggest cookie?”

“Well, man from the health department say he find rat pellet in store. I say no is big chocolate chip. So we close store down, clean up, and make big cookie for to bring back customers”

I see no difference in that and this -

Come June 17th and there is going to be this multitude of people from around the world, who are just going to download Mozilla Firefox v 3.0. Why? Just because they are attempting to set a world record on the maximum downloads of a single software in 24hrs. What a creative reason to set a record?

So what is so great about this download spree that the guys at Mozilla are hyping about? Does the people who download it get a free mug every day for the rest of their life? Or is it something like the spam mail, ‘If you dont download Fx in the next 24 hours, your system will be infected by a deadly strain of I love Fx virus!!!‘.Its all for the sake of a record and damn publicity!!!

I use Fx and its not that i wont be using 3.0. Its a great browser and i’m sure just like the way it has changed my browsing experience, it has done for millions. The plugin support is amazing. To download it on that particular day is a personal choice. I agree. But just because you like a piece of software doesnt mean that you need to join a drive just to download it.

The way i see it, is as a smart marketing strategy. If they are really as good at the cookie that they sold, then why do they need such a drive. If a product is good, people who use it becomes the biggest marketers for it. They spread the word and the number of people who are using it expands. Why does Fx3.0 need such a drive? Fx2.0 was brought in with a big bang. But it suffered as it began to eat up memory. A normal session of Fx2.0 with 3-4 tabs open is enough to consume 10s of MB of RAM.

Memory is cheap, i agree. But that doesn’t mean that an application can take up as much memory as it desires. I’m not too good at judging as to what is wrong. But can say that the memory management was poor in Fx2.0. At the time when Fx2.0 was released people with normal browsing habits found that the systems slogged badly, Windows and Linux alike. They opted to move out. Intermittent releases didn’t solve the version either. How annoying is it when you get a new version to download every couple of weeks?

Fx3.0 is hailed to be faster and secure. The Release Candidates a.k.a Beta are better than Fx2.0.

… As several of the linked posts below accurately reported, we’ve decided to add one more beta in order to make further improvements in the areas of polish, performance, memory, and overall quality … [from Mozilla: For the Record]

The question remains, are they still the same old Patisserie reopen by making a big cookie, after the Health Dpt. shut’em down?