Unsought Input

Had to rebuild my desktop at work this morning, which meant re-installing the RAW Viewer. Why Microsoft never saw fit to natively support RAW files in XP is beyond me. Then there’s the whole “Windows Genuine Advantage” validation routine they make you go through to actually download the viewer. But that’s another post for another day. I found something interesting while downloading the viewer from Microsoft’s website:

See it? No? How about a closer look:

Lookie there - the Firefox logo on the Downloads pane. So whoever wrote up the downloads page didn’t check their browser before grabbing their screenshots.

At one point, I followed the statistics of how many people used first Netscape Navigator, then later Mozilla, then Firefox. At one point, I watched closely what market share they had versus Internet Explorer. Lately, it seems all those figures are up for debate and scritinizing. But it sure says a lot when Microsoft’s own employees prefer the competition’s browser.

Firefox is a great web browser. If nothing else, the large number of people switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox convinced Microsoft to finally update IE. When Firefox added inline spell checking with version 2.0 they boosted the writing quality of every blogger, wiki contributor, and forum post on the Internet. What more can you ask for?

Actually, the best thing about Firefox is its extensibility. Anyone with some programming skill and some free time can add features and functionality by building plugins and extensions. There are well over 2000 extensions listed at Mozilla.org, so where do you start? You can find a lot of “top 10″ lists around the web, but I thought I’d add my two cents as well. Here is a list of some of the best Firefox extensions.

1. Adblock Plus - Adblock is a controversial choice because it allows users to block out the advertisements that many websites rely on for income. This website, for example. But again and again I find myself thanking the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Adblock. Some sites fill their pages with flash-based ads that flash, flutter, crawl across the pages, etc. And those are the ads I inevitably block.

2. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the web. Click on the Stumble button and you’ll get a new web site - give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and StumbleUpon will suggest sites more to your liking. I should warn you, though, that this extension is very addictive and a terrible time-waster.

3. Procrastato - Now that I’ve ruined your productivity with StumbleUpon, I’ll give you a little bit back. Procrastato watches for notorious time-wasting sites like Digg, MySapce, and YouTube and reminds you every few minutes to get back to work.

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