Unsought Input

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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Hitting strange errors when trying to execute long-running PHP processes, like large file reads, generating static HTML pages, file uploads, or CURL calls? It might not be just bugs in your code.

Are you getting pages that seem to load, but then nothing shows up in the browser? When you go to a page, does your browser sometimes ask, “You have chosen to open something.php which is a : PHP file. What should Firefox do with this file” or possibly “File name: something.php File type: PHP File Would you like to open the file or save it to your computer” Do you get internal server errors at random intervals?

Depending on what you are trying to, you could be running into timeout issues, either in PHP, in a particular library, in Apache (or IIS or whatever web server you use), or even in the browser. Timeout issues can be a real pain because you don’t run into them very often and they don’t result in clear error messages.

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