Fireday - Firefox extensions for May 12, 2006

Friday, May 12, 2006 4:00 AM

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

Newest Firefox Extensions discussed every Friday.

This week, I've noticed a couple of extensions that I was excited about. I also received a user request to do a review on an extension and I want to thank Richard Plant for the request.

FlagFox II

FlagFox II is based on the original FlagFox extension by Joseph Birr-Pixton. FlagFox displays a flag of the current server's location. For example, if you went to Google, you would notice the American flag, meaning the server is located in the U.S. (duh!) :-).

If you click on the flag, if will take you to Wikipedia or GeoTool, which uses a geolocation tool to pinpoint where the IP address of the website is located.

According to the site:

Notes: FlagFox uses no additional network resources. It does one DNS lookup which is guaranteed to be a local DNS cache hit. All images and the mapping database is kept in the extension (which is why the extension is so large!).

Large indeed! The extension is over 750K and it takes up 27 megs of memory. Although the extension has some girth to it, I'm debating as to whether the memory footprint of the extension justifies the use of that little graphic on the status bar.

Rating: I'm giving it a 3 out of 5.

 

HTML Validator

The HTML Validator extension is a great extension to compliment your Web Developer extension. The HTML Validator extension takes the current page you're looking at and validates the page and returns your results as to whether you have valid HTML or not.

Hover your mouse over the icon at the bottom and you notice how many errors you have in your HTML.

This extension is strictly an "extension" of what the Web Developer Bar provides to you and can give you an idea of how valid your competitors site it as well. :-)

Rating: Definitely a 5 out of 5.

 

Firefox (CCK) Client Customization Kit

Most ISPs can now have the upper hand by providing their customers with a customized version of Firefox. The extension is a wizard that takes them step-by-step on making an extension that changes their Firefox to match how they want it distributed.

The changes you can make to the browser are as follows:

  • Add identifer to the user agent string
  • Change the default home page and startup override home page
  • Change the title bar text
  • Change the animated logo
  • Change the web page and tooltip used for the animated logo
  • Add a help menu item that links to a web page
  • Provide sites for which popups and XPInstalls are allowed by default
  • Preinstall browser plug-ins
  • Preinstall search engines
  • Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the personal toolbar
  • Add folders, bookmarks and live bookmarks to the bookmarks folder
  • Set default preferences
  • Lock preferences
  • Add registry keys (Windows only)
  • Add certificates (See NOTE below)
  • Set default proxy configurations
  • Package other XPIs with your distribution
  • Disable about:config

If I was a web hosting company, I would be jumping all over this by providing a slick user theme and add the company logo to the browser. The Firefox CCK extension can make quick work for a Firefox client distribution.

Rating: 4/5.

 

If anyone has an extension they would want reviewed, please let me know and I'll review it in a future post.

Again, thats it for this week...see ya next week!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

RSS LogoLike this article? Link to the RSS feeds to always get the latest posts.
What is RSS?

Related Articles:

Chatterbox - 0 Comments

 

Posting anonymous comments requires approval
and will not appear immediately.

Please Register or Login to post a comment.

 Post a Comment