Fireday - Firefox extensions for September 29, 2006

Friday, September 29, 2006 5:00 AM

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

This week: Professor X, Load Time Analyzer, and MAB.

 

Professor X

Rating: 4/5

When developers optimize pages, they automatically click the view source and look at what their competition has done to their pages. Professor X eliminates the need to view source anymore. 

Professor X analyzes the current web page and displays the header details at the top of the page. Some of the items included in the extension are:

  • Active Links
  • Title
  • Meta Tags (keywords, description, etc.)
  • Generator (WordPress, TypePad, etc.)
  • JavaScript Source
  • CSS code

...and any thing else included in a header of a web page. The author, Stuart Robertson, said he added CSS to allow the site to be more visually stimulating. I definitely agree with this. The site has a good combination of color to look at and focus on specific sections rather quickly.

The extension took seconds to install and after a restart, was up and running. The one thing that would rock is if a toolbar button was installed to activate Professor X.

Load Time Analyzer

Rating: 4/5

I really had to dig to find this one.

Developers should enjoy this extension. The LTA (Load Time Analyzer) is provided by Google and installs nicely as a toolbar on the top of Firefox.

According to the site, the intended use is as follows:

  1. Choose which events you’d like to record using the “Record” drop-down menu.
  2. Click the “Clear” button on the toolbar to reset the event log.
  3. Visit a web page.
  4. Click the “Graph” button to display the page load graph.
  5. Use the “Scale” menu to view the graph more easily.
  6. Choose which events to graph using the “Graph” menu.
  7. Choose which labels to show on the graph using the “Text” menu.
  8. Change the colors of the graph by clicking the “Colors...” button.

The data in the graph proves useful in showing how long it takes for each section of the page to load. Using this graph, you can focus of which section of the page needs optimized and provide a faster page load...all thanks to Google.

The downsides to this extension are the presentation (translation: colors and buttons) and the Events and Time metrics. First, the presentation. Since Google's name is on this extension, it makes me wonder if a developer at Google developed it and just shipped it out the door without pretty-ing it up. Just a visible usability issue. This may be a personal preference to me, so just ignore me. :-)

Secondly, at first glance, you can't determine what you're gauging by the numbers. Are the numbers in seconds or milliseconds? You don't know. I imagine they're milliseconds.

The LTA extension is still excellent for testing your web pages for simple speed metrics and the graph can easily be used to analyze and optimize your layout for quicker load times.

MAB

Rating: 4/5

MAB (Mozilla Amazon Browser) is geared towards those dedicated to shopping on Amazon. MAB shows the potential of what XUL can do as an application language. The application has been reviewed already on the O'Reilly network as a case study.

If you wanted to search for a particular product on Amazon, click on the search box at the top and click Search. It's that simple. When you click on a product in your search results, the product data will be display on the right side. You can even save your search results for later.

The MAB extension has the ability to add items to your shopping cart as well. However, if you wanted to complete a purchase, you need to visit the Amazon web site instead of completing the transaction through MAB.

MAB has taken the Amazon API and created an application around it. It is all of the Amazon inventory displayed through the extension. This is another extension that can be categorized as a Super Extension (Extensions that can be their own stand-alone applications).

The installation was a little difficult. I installed the extension under Firefox 1.5.0.7, went to MAB under the Tools pulldown menu, and clicked "Open in a Tab..." and....nothing happened. I tried the other option ("Open in a window"). Nothing. I downloaded the extension in Zip format and installed it manually. That seemed to work, but for new Firefox users, this may present a problem. 

The extension, as I said before, is a great application (yes, application) written in a great browser language. There is also a remote application you can test drive before installing the extension.

Everyone have a great weekend. Any comments? Contact me directly.

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