Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for July 6, 2007

Friday, July 06, 2007 5:00 AM

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

This week: ThumbStrips and Extension Manager Extended

ThumbStrips

Rating: 3/5

ThumbStrips is a way for users to visually see the history of the sites they visited in a strip or film format. The thumbnails are recorded and displayed as you move through tabs and also through web pages. When you move from one page to another, you see an accumulation of pages at the bottom.

After installation, ThumbStrips immediately opens and is available on the bottom of Firefox. Not in the status bar, but in a whole new horizontal pane.

Not only does a new button appear at the top of the toolbar, but an icon appears on the status bar as well.

When you start ThumbStrips, you'll notice that the ThumbStrips icon in the status bar. Standard procedure for testing a new add-on includes right-clicking on the icon to display a context menu. Instead of a full context menu with options, the context menu that appeared only contained a "stop recording" option with nothing else to select. The big menu button at the top left of the menu contains all of the options on how to get the most from ThumbStrips. The menu located in the big menu button should be attached to the icon on the status bar as a context menu when right-clicked.

After using this add-on for a week, I noticed the use of this particular extension seemed to drag down my page loading time. After reading a couple of posts on the web site, this problem seems to be a recurring problem. Once the add-on was uninstalled, page loading speeds were back to normal.

ThumbStrips doesn't seem to help much in the history department and sometimes confused me when I wanted to go back to a screen. Everything was switching and moving around. I felt like I was playing an online version of the shell game.

Even the author mentioned that they are including a lot of information with their thumbnails when they display them in their strip. It's hard enough to stabilize Firefox, let alone manage add-on's chewing up memory as well.

Overall, I gave the extension a 3 out of 5. It's a good extension, but has room for improvement.

Extension Manager Extended

Rating: 5/5

As you develop add-ons for Firefox, you'll notice that it's a pain to find the ID of the extension and where it was installed in your Firefox directory. The Extension Manager Extended add-on fixes all of that for you.

Install the add-on, restart Firefox, and then open the add-ons dialog under Tools. First thing you'll notice when you select an add-on is that two properties are added: an Install Date and the unique ID for the extension. Now, you don't need to worry about looking for the ID. But where is the add-on stored at?

Right-click on an add-on and notice two new menu items under the context menu: Copy ID and Open Containing Folder. Copy ID copies the ID to the clipboard and Open Containing Folder will take you directly to where the add-on is installed. Opening the containing folder is a definite help.

These four features alone are fantastic for Firefox add-on developers because it takes a commonly used dialog and extends it by including additional developer features. It's the little things that make us happy.

I definitely like this add-on and if you're a Firefox developer, this is a necessary add-on and appropriately deserves a rating of 5/5.


Hope everyone liked this weeks reviews. I'll see ya next week.

If you want your Firefox add-on reviewed, please contact me with the URL and we'll let you know when it's reviewed.

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