Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for January 26, 2007

Friday, January 26, 2007 5:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

This week: LeakMonitor, Tippy, and Tags Everywhere.

LeakMonitor

Rating: 4/5

The LeakMonitor extension is great for developers who have one particular leak with JavaScript objects in their chrome or web page. The leak is when you close a window and the JavaScript objects are still held by native code in Firefox.

I installed the extension last Friday and have been using it for the week. I usually don't open additional windows for the LeakMonitor to do it's job. Those days are gone. I strictly use tabs. With my custom CMS I built, when I open a window, I get the LeakMonitor dialog box telling me that there are a couple of JavaScript leaks.

LeakMonitor Screenshot

Two issues came up and both dealt with two extensions installed recently. Now, I don't think just because it reports on the "problem extensions" that you have to uninstall them. Disabling them for now may seem like a more appropriate action until a newer version of the extension is released.

After I installed the extension last week, every time I went into my CMS to open a window, I always received the dialog box saying there was a problem. I click OK and moved forward until I can commit a good amount of time to find out what the problem is, but until then, it does become annoying when I do open a new window.

As I said before, during the daily use of Firefox, I usually don't open windows, I open tabs. This extension may not assist me as much as I want, but for extension developers, it's a great tool. Could it develop into a Firebug or Selenium IDE? LeakMonitor only detects one form of a JavaScript leak. Are there more?

If the author continues to work on this extension and incorporates more "JavaScript leak techniques," yes, it could turn into an awesome Leak Monitor!

 

Tippy

Rating: 5/5

Tippy is a helpful utility extension where it's primary purpose is to add favicons and tooltips to livemarks, but an additional feature is the ability to add a link to the tooltip when you select a toolbar bookmark, so it tells you where you are heading.

Tippy screenshot

After installing the extension on Monday, I nonchalantly went on with my browsing. Since it's the end of the week, I've noticed that I'm starting to use it more and more.

However, one of the things I've noticed is that some URLs in my bookmarks are so long, the tooltips stretch across the entire screen. Hmmm. One idea for the author is possibly creating an ellipsis for the URL if it goes past 100 characters. Just a thought.

I've said this before with other Firefox extensions, but Tippy is an extension that could've been included as an innate ability of Firefox instead of a third-party extension. It is good to see a URL along with a long description in your bookmarks. I can see the option in Firefox as well. The dialog box for this option would be similar to WinAmp's MP3 title tagger syntax: <%title%><br /><%URL%>. Creating these defined attributes for how you display your title and URLs or even....tags would be a great addition.

Tippy is an unexpected welcome. This extension completely caught me offguard and is currently being used every day.

 

Tags Everywhere

Rating: 4/5

Tag Clouds are quite the Web 2.0 thing lately. Tags Everywhere is an extension for tag cloud enthusiasts. Period. If you like tag clouds, this is the extension for you.

When I installed the extension, I surfed over to Digg and immediately, the Tags Everywhere extension kicked in. Tags Everywhere fetches the actual web page behind the scenes and immediately displays a tag cloud of the most used keywords in the article.

Not only is this extension great for tag cloud-ing, but is phenomenal for SEO's (Search Engine Optimizers) as well. Why? Because in an instant, you retrieve your keyword density for a particular article on your site. If the site doesn't have a good word count or great keyword density, pepper your article with more relevant keywords to find the sweet spot for keyword optimization. It would work better if phrases were used as well as complete words, but that's a feature for later. ;-)

Tags Everywhere works with Digg, reddit, Major SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages), and works with other sites as well by displaying a tag cloud at the top of the browser window.

Personally, I am into tag clouds, but not as much as to include it on every single page I surf to. After using it more and more, I realized that I wasn't looking far enough ahead to see the full potential of this extension. Again, it's great for a particular niche of users: the SEO's. This extension provides a quick, simple way to find out your keyword density at a glance and a chance to improve your article to provide the best return in the search engines.

Tag enthusiasts and SEO's are probably the only ones to benefit from this extensions features, but will leave regular users a little annoyed as to "why these words show up at the top of my site?"


Have a great weekend, everyone!

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

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