Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for February 9, 2007

Friday, February 09, 2007 5:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 1 | View blog reactions

This week: Stylish and Tab Effect

Stylish

Rating: 5/5

Stylish is an extension that allows your inner designer to take over and create a different web site based on a style sheet. You could even look at this extension as an...well, extension of the CSS zen garden. Without turning this Fireday into a CSS explanation, CSS is meant to change the presentation of a web site without altering the content. The Zen Garden shows the full extent of this technology, which by the way, rocks! You could apply a holiday theme to your entire web site with just one CSS file. How cool is that?

Getting back to the extension, if an author is too lazy and doesn't provide a style sheet for their web site, why don't you create one using Stylish?

Stylish allows you to create a Cascading Style Sheet and easily apply it to a web site. The next time you visit that web site, Stylish will apply the style sheet automatically.

After installing the extension, an icon will appear in the status bar in the form of a page with a paintbrush. Left-clicking on the icon will display a context menu with the following options: Manage Styles, Write Styles, Find Styles for this Page, and Global Styles.

Manage Styles displays a dialog box with a list of styles that can be applied to the page. If you are just starting out, your list will be blank. If you want to create one, click on the "Write..." button and type in your description and the CSS style. The style will be applied immediately. There is a "Find Updates..." button available to see if anyone else has created other stylesheets for other sites.

Write Style allows you to create styles for just this URL, the current domain with or without a www, or create a Blank Style sheet.

Find Styles for this Page incorporates the same functionality as the Find Updates button on the Manage Styles dialog box.

Global Styles are applied to every page you view in Firefox, regardless of domain.

Stylish is a good extension for individuals who want to break out and view the web by their own perspective instead of the author's view.

Stylish receives a 5 out of 5 for stability and for providing a good quality extension.

Tab Effect

Rating: 2/5

Since tabbed browsing appeared in Firefox, I didn't think I could download any tab extension that I would dislike.

I was wrong.

Tab Effect is an extension that uses DirectX 8 and paints...yes, I said paints...a cube transition from one tab to another.

Don't get me wrong, the idea is there and I'm guessing the author wanted to create something similar to the Internet Explorer fade to a web page transition using alpha channels, but after browsing for a period of 30 minutes, the transition became annoying. I couldn't remove the extension fast enough.

If there was an option to speed up the transition from tab to tab, it may have pushed the rating up to a 3, but that would be the most I would give this extension. The extension may have been created as an attempt to show that it could be done, but only attempted to annoy me and slow down my browsing.


I'm still on vacation so that would explain the thin amount of posts for this week. Everything should be back to normal on Monday. Have a great weekend, everyone!

If anyone has questions, please post them below or Contact me directly.

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Chatterbox - 1 Comments

1.  Alb on Friday, June 06, 2008 10:05 AM said:

"I couldn't remove the extension fast enough." What's the difference from any other uninstall extension method by going to tools/addons?! You have a problem..

 

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