Webware

This past year felt like a rebuilding year for Firefox add-ons, with two new frameworks implemented to help guide the future of extensions. Personas gave Firefox on-the-fly theme-switching, and users can expect it to be part of the stable version of Firefox 3.6 when that gets released. Jetpack takes a similarly-minded approach to feature add-ons, allowing programmers to create feature-rich add-ons from little more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Expect JetPack to eventually be part of Firefox by default.

In no particular order, here are eight other of our favorites:

Weave Sync gets added to your Options menu.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Weave Sync is another project from Mozilla Labs, although it's not as clear whether it will eventually end up in Firefox as a default feature. This homegrown tool for synchronizing Firefox across computers and devices introduces incremental syncing and a more-streamlined, less-obtrusive experience, fitting in smoothly in your Options pane. Although it still conflicts with some extensions, including the massively popular and arguably more essential AdBlock Plus, in general it works well and brings a long-missing feature to Firefox.

Multi Links is simple in purpose, but so effective that it's one of the best add-ons of the year. Right-click in a browser tab and drag it, highlighting multiple links in the box. By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links, just in case you're into that sort of thing.

Originally known as SmarterFox, FastestFox is a multitasking fiend that helps make searching, pasting, surfing, and downloading faster. Highlight a word or phrase on the Web page and FastestFox will display a bubble filled with search engine icons. After a few seconds of inactivity, the search bubble fades away. The add-on automatically merges linked pages into one, which some users prefer for reading long articles, and it also allows you to check other search engines from any single engine's results page.

Users with WebReview installed can see a slew of links when they load up their browser, including their most visited pages, along with suggestions of what they should read based on past browsing history.

(Credit: WebReview)

Whether you're looking for an unobtrusive panic button, or your just need to clear your screen of those 153 tabs for moment, HideTab can help you out. You can hide all of them at once, or merely one--just don't forget that the hidden tabs are still running in the background.

WebReview makes your start page smarter and more suggestive based on past browsing habits. It's a bit like the Speed Dial feature in Opera, Chrome's new tab page, or Top Sites in Safari, but Firefoxified. It tells you the last batch of tabs you had open, along with most visited pages. But it also shows you a group of sites you visit daily, along with a suggestion of sites you may be interested in going to. It sorts these out by what day it is, along with the time.

WebReview also offers a replacement history tracker, allowing you to search by domain or number of visits. Sites in the WebReview history come with thumbnail previews. Lastly, there's a Graph View, showing the breadcrumb trail of how you went from site to site for that entire session. You can also go back to specific days and see a large graph for the entire day. It's visually appealing and exploratory at the same time.

FastestFox can be a bit of overkill, and one of our favorite features from it is available separately. PageZipper takes stories split over multiple pages and "zips" them into one. It's a bit wonky, and doesn't play nicely with Flash- or JavaScript-based photos, but in general works well. It's also designed to be inoffensive to publishers, who often have legitimate reasons for splitting content into multiple pages. The "zipping" loads the next page in full below, including ads, so their potential revenue goes unharmed. The reader, on the other hand, benefits from significantly less stop-and-go clicking.

Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.

(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Wikipedia Diver hooks deep into your Wikipedia browsing to provide a fascinating look at what you've been researching. It organizes your Wiki searches down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries. Fortunately, all this data is kept on your local computer and not in the cloud, so there are no privacy issues. The reasonable offshoot of that is that it doesn't track external links you click on from within a Wikipedia article, but that's a small price to pay.

I use URL Tooltip in conjunction with several other, not-new-in-'09 add-ons to maximize my screen real estate when browsing. URL Tooltip is new this year, and is quite savvy for those with larger monitors. It reveals a link's full URL as a mouse-over tool tip, thus allowing you to hide your status bar at the bottom of Firefox if you've got nothing else in it. Along with Personal Menu and the Stop-or-Reload Button, and removing the search bar, I've been able to see more of what I want to be looking at on my screen when browsing.

Have a suggestion for the best new Firefox add-on of 2009? Or think I just got it all wrong? Tell me about it in the comments below.

Even without extensions, Google Chrome's market share grew phenomenally during its first year. Now that the No. 1 most-requested feature comes baked into the Windows (beta and development) and Linux (beta and development) versions, it's time to look at some of the best extensions available for the upstart browser.

Google Chrome's extension manager.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The No. 1 extension on my list is the No. 2 most-requested feature for Chrome: RSS support. The RSS Subscription Extension allows Chrome to automatically detect RSS and Atom feeds on a page. It's not entirely clear why this isn't a default feature since it's part of every other browser, but at least now there's a way to add it.

There are a host of Google-service related extensions, all based on letting you know at a glance if there's an update for you to check in on. The Google Alerter covers Gmail, Wave, and Google Reader, although there's also individual support for them as the Gmail Checker, Google Wave Checker, and Google Reader Checker. There's a Google Calendar Checker, too.

The Google Translate extension adds a slick pop-up toolbar.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The Google Tasks extension hides your tasks behind a button that opens a list of them when clicked. The most useful Google-related extension is for Google Translate, which will offer on-the-fly translation of a site that doesn't appear in your default system language.

Expect security to be as big a subcategory of extensions for Chrome as it is for Firefox. Popular and effective secure personal password storehouse LastPass provides a safe and near-universal way to manage your passwords, making them easily accessible without compromising their integrity. LastPass also supports Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, making it an excellent one-stop solution. When Chrome's extensions get activated on the Mac version, the reasons for using LastPass will become even more compelling.

LastPass options in Chrome.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Also cross-browser, Web of Trust evaluates Web sites based on consensus. It may sound counter-intuitive to some, but it's proven in the past year to be an especially effective tool for determining whether you can trust that sketchy link you're thinking of clicking on.

UnShorten.com is one way to see what that shortened URL is hiding, but ChromeMUSE is another. This useful extension not only can shorten URLs via several different shortening services, it can also expand embedded short URLs automatically.

FlashBlock is a good way to kill Flash and Silverlight-based content. It leaves a blank spot where the ad or embedded video would've been, which you can then selectively load by clicking on it.

Despite the name, AdBlock+ should be avoided. It's not made by the same publishers who manage AdBlock Plus, the popular and effective ad-blocker for Firefox. This is actually a fairly serious problem with Chrome's extensions, where unknown entities are appropriating identical or similar names to well-known and trusted Firefox add-ons for what amount to nefarious purposes. So far, the ad-blocking extension that most users seem to be trusting in Chrome is AdBlock, but don't be surprised if it causes more problems than it solves until there's more consensus on these name-squatters.

AniWeather offers an animated weather pop-up.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

On that note, there are some excellent Firefox add-ons that have been ported successfully to Chrome. Bookmark synchronizer Xmarks has a beta version for Chrome, as does IE Tab for viewing rendering sites with Internet Explorer's engine within Chrome, and the resource-heavy but still-fun way to view visual media Cooliris.

Facebook for Chrome simplifies Facebook access, putting news feed and status updating in your toolbar. YouTube Downloader grabs Flash video embeds and saves them to your hard drive but interestingly doesn't come from Google itself. AniWeather is another, providing those without windows an excellent way to see what meteorological events are going on outdoors. iMacros will run Greasemonkey scripts and allows users to create their own solutions for repetitive data entry and tasks. The one I can't live without is another name-squatter, AutoCopy. It will copy any text to your clipboard when you highlight it. Unlike the Firefox version, it doesn't open any options when you finish highlighting, so it's a bit hard to tell if it's working as it should.

TooManyTabs cleverly secrets away tabs you want to keep handy but out of your active memory.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

TooManyTabs isn't TabMixPlus for Chrome, but it does something that TabMixPlus can't because Firefox doesn't yet support it. TooManyTabs manipulates Chrome's tab process isolation in a useful way, so you can move tabs to a holding dock where they're no longer eating memory, but they're still easily accessible. Click on the toolbar button and it opens up a window that displays your active tabs. Arrows next to each one let you move it to the nonfunctional area. A helpful indicator on the toolbar button tells you how many active tabs you've got. Conspicuously missing is drag-and-drop, so hopefully that's coming.

Aviary Screen Capture is another extension that offers Chrome-only features. It lets you take a screenshot of any Web site you're looking at and then automatically opens it in Aviary's image-editing Web suite to streamline your work flow.

The lack of a status bar in Chrome means that the management icons for extensions, if they have them, get added to the navigation bar, something that may annoy users who prefer Firefox's greater level of extension-placement customization. However, it's definitely a more visible placement, and may encourage users to keep their installed extensions to a utilitarian minimum.

More extensions can be downloaded from Google's site or Download.com.

Currently, extension support hasn't been activated in the Chrome for Mac, but that's expected no later than January 2010. There's also some notable popular Firefox extensions that aren't in Chrome yet, such as FoxyTunes. If I've skipped a favorite Chrome extension of yours, or if there's one for Firefox that you're dying to get in Chrome, tell me about it in the comments below.

There's no reason to take the Web as it comes. Not when there are Firefox add-ons that turn Web pages into putty that you can shape as you wish. These three--Zotero, MashLogic, and RSVP Reader--let you gather and store all or parts of Web pages, open a customizable info box for whatever topics you encounter, and convert a block of text into a string of phrases that flash in a box at a speed you control.

Turn your favorite pages into collections
A few days ago, I wrote about three add-ons that go bookmarks one better by letting you customize the Web pages you save. Zotero is like bookmarks cubed. Not only can you save text, images, or entire pages, you can annotate and categorize the information for easy retrieval.

My only complaint is that the Zotero window takes up half the screen and can't be resized. Fortunately, it's easy to close the window to get a full view of your browser. To reopen the window, click the Zotero button in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Save all or parts of Web pages and categorize the content with the Zotero Firefox add-on.

(Credit: Zotero)

Zotero's capabilities go far beyond collecting and tagging Web pages. It's designed for researchers and lets them attach files and notes to items, take a snapshot of the page, and add bibliographic references. All entries are time- and date-stamped, and you can even open a mini-text-editing window. I sure wish I had one of these when I was a student.

Add-on lets custom search tag along
If you can get past the tiny blue dots the MashLogic add-on places below text and links, the add-on comes in handy. Hover over the dotted item and a small window pops up with information about the item from the sources you specify.

The MashLogic Firefox add-on opens an info box with customizable content related to the item.

(Credit: MashLogic)

Click the MashLogic icon that appears to the left of the address bar to select the sources supplying the add-on's information. Your choices include Wikipedia, New York Times, Twitter, Yelp, and Guardian UK, as well as such categories as movies, books, music, shopping, and news and feeds. You can also suspend the dots for all sites or disable them for the site you're currently on.

Convert a page's text into a video stream
I was hoping to report how much faster I plowed through Web text with the RSVP Reader add-on, but I just couldn't get used to reading words as they flashed in a small box one, two, and three at a time. I still get a kick out of the novelty of a page's text appearing in bits and pieces.

RSVP Reader appears as a toolbar with buttons for making the text larger or smaller, and positioning the text in the box. In addition to the standard Play, Pause, Stop, and Rewind, buttons, you get buttons to speed up or slow down the text playback.

See a page's text by the word or phrase at your choice of playback speed with the RSVP Reader Firefox add-on.

(Credit: RSVP Reader)

I tried reading several text-heavy pages with different types of content (news, literature, even poetry) with RSVP Reader and the old-fashioned way, and even after experimenting with different text-playback rates, it didn't feel like I was going through the material faster the flashing-text-box way. I was disappointed that I couldn't reposition the text box, which is at the far right of the toolbar. But the add-on does offer a totally different way to browse.

Web pages aren't getting any smaller, but there are usually not more than a few paragraphs or a couple of images of particular interest on any given page. Firefox add-ons ICyte (also available for IE), Wired-Marker, and Trails let you save all or sections of Web pages and share your snippets with others.

ICyte makes sharing easy
Most of the time, sharing Web content means sending someone a link via e-mail, chat, or phone. The ICyte add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer lets you highlight the important content on the page before you share it, or you can save and send portions of the page rather than the whole enchilada.

You must provide your name and e-mail address to use the service. After you download the add-on and restart Firefox, two buttons are added to the left of the address bar. Click the left button to create a Cyte for a new or existing "project." Here you can assign tags or a note to the Cyte. Click the button on the right to open your Cytes in the sidebar.

Annotate Web pages before you save and share them with ICyte.

(Credit: ICyte)

The Cyte entries in the sidebar show a thumbnail of the page, its name, the name of the project, and its comments and tags. When you click a Cyte to reopen it, a banner appears at the top of the main browser window showing the same information along with the date it was saved and a Live View button that returns to the original page. You can hide this banner to view more of the page itself.

Click the gear icon that appears when you hover over a Cyte in the sidebar to open its drop-down menu with options for editing the Cyte name and other data (but not the page itself), creating a copy, deleting the Cyte, sending it to someone via e-mail, or embedding it in a Web page. You can also share the sites you designate as public with others via RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, though I didn't try these features.

... Read More

There's no way to reduce to zero your risk of picking up some piece of malware while browsing. You need layers of security to keep viruses, Trojans, and botnets at bay—the more layers, the safer your browsing. (Of course, the more layers, the slower your browsing, too, so don't get carried away.)

Much emphasis has been placed on the enhanced security features of the latest versions of the popular browsers. Whether one is any safer than another is anybody's guess, but no browser gives you more ways to thwart a Web-based attack than Firefox via its wealth of security add-ons.

Link checkers add warnings to search results
Search results are often difficult to trust, even when the URL looks familiar. Phishers are adept at planting dangerous links that look like harmless ones. Link checkers provide you with an indication of the trustworthiness of sites before you click their links. (Note that several of the products are available for Internet Explorer as well.)

Some of the programs, such as McAfee's SiteAdvisor, give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on a single company's research. Web of Trust (WOT) bases its recommendations on the collective intelligence of a network of volunteers. LinkExtend is a link-check aggregator that combines the analyses of eight different services.

McAfee SiteAdvisor adds a safety indicator to Web search results.

(Credit: McAfee)

While the recommendations of link checkers are helpful in identifying safe sites, you can't take their yeas and nays as gospel. For example, sites that offer downloads of system utilities may be flagged as dangerous because the programs require access to the operating system and thus could do major damage in the wrong hands.

Track the trackers
You know popular Web sites download software that tracks your activities on their sites, but do you know who's doing the tracking? Find out with the Ghostery add-on that pops up the names of the trackers as the page opens. The program puts a small "ghost" icon in the bottom-right corner of the Firefox window that turns orange when trackers are present. Click the link that appears to the right of the icon to find out more about the trackers and block them individually or entirely.

The Ghostery Firefox add-on lets you know who's tracking your activities on the site.

(Credit: Ghostery)

View encryption specs
When you open an encrypted Web page, a lock icon appears in the bottom-right corner of the Firefox window and the URL in the address bar begins with "https." But there's more than one form of encryption, and knowing which type and strength of encryption in use can be handy.

The CipherFox add-on puts in the bottom-right of the Firefox status bar the Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) cipher and keysize currently in use. Double-clicking the entry opens the CipherFox dialog box, where you can disable RC4 encryption and display partial SSL/TLS. (Note that the developer accepts donations to support the product.)

Take charge of Web password management
Firefox's built-in password manager lets you create a master password and remember passwords for specific sites, but if you want to get serious about managing your passwords, get LastPass, a password manager that provides much more granular control over your sign-ins.

After you download and install the add-on, an icon is placed in the top-right corner of the Firefox window. Click it to open the LastPass menu, which lets you manage your identities, open the LastPass Vault, jump to favorite sites, and generate secure passwords. You can also import or export sign-in IDs, compose and print secure notes, and assign keyboard shortcuts for specific actions.

In addition to Firefox and IE, LastPass is available for Google Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers. LastPass backs up your passwords by storing an encrypted copy on its own servers. And because you can access your passwords via the Internet, you can use LastPass on any Web-connected device, although use of LastPass on an iPhone or other smart phone requires a Premium membership, which costs $1 a month. (You can also put LastPass on a USB thumbdrive for use with Firefox Portable and other portable apps.)

(Credit: Mozilla)

It's been just under four months since Mozilla launched its pilot program for contributions, a way for users to donate to add-on developers for their time and effort.

The program was launched in tandem with a redesign of Mozilla's add-ons site that gave developers their own profile pages. Many add-on makers were already running donation programs through their own sites, but wanted the option to show up in Mozilla's catalog too.

Already it appears to be working, but on a smaller scale than some developers might have hoped. For the half dozen developers that CNET News talked to, none has made enough from it to, say, quit their day job. While Mozilla would not reveal specifics on which developers are getting the most contributions, it did provide us with the total amount given: around $20,000. An organization spokesperson said that most of that came in September and October.

Of the 500 or so developers who are participating in the program, the average contribution falls somewhere between $5 and $6, with the largest thus far being $150. All have gone through PayPal, which is the sole way to pay through Mozilla's add-on site. PayPal then gets a small fee out of each transaction, something that comes out of the developer's pocket, although this varies based on how much the user gives.

Other ways to make money

Some developers believe Mozilla has gone about the payment problem in reverse. With the current contributions program developers are given the chance to ask for money before the user even downloads the free add-on. So why not give them a way to ask for a contribution after a user has downloaded and installed it?... Read More

Facebook's "like" feature has been around since February, but the massive social network never provided users with a way to quickly voice their opinions going the other way. French developer Thomas Moquet took matters into his own hands by creating a cute (albeit useless) Firefox extension that adds a dislike button to Facebook, letting users who have it installed mark things they don't like.

In order to make the tool work, Moquet had to use his own servers, which keep track of every item that's disliked as well as who clicked it. Any other Facebook users who have the extension installed can then see who disliked it right next to the usual like list.

Feeling grumpy? Add a "dislike" button to Facebook.

(Credit: CNET)

There are a few very clear downsides to this system, one being that if the dislike servers ever go down, you won't be able to see what you or others have marked as not liking. It also cannot be seen by other users who don't have the extension installed. Nonetheless, it fits in quite well with the rest of the Facebook interface, peacefully coexisting alongside the likes while adding a bit of snark.

It's worth noting Facebook's exclusion of a dislike button was under the pretense that likes were added as a quick way to replace simple one-word comments. By adding a like button the hope was both to better surface content in its news feeds, as well as cut down on throwaway comments like "this is great!" or "cool."

Facebook dislike is an experimental add-on, meaning you'll have to grab it from Mozilla's add-ons site. See also the competing Facebook Dislike Button add-on, which goes one step further and will actually send the person who's news item it is a Facebook note saying that you didn't like what they posted. Ouch.

Mozilla on Friday disabled a Microsoft plug-in for Firefox called the .Net Framework Assistant because of a security problem--then scrambled to give people with patched systems an override option.

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, announced the first step late Friday night on his blog. "It's recently surfaced that it has a serious security vulnerability, and Microsoft is recommending that all users disable the add-on," Shaver said. "Because of the difficulties some users have had entirely removing the add-on, and because of the severity of the risk it represents if not disabled, we contacted Microsoft today to indicate that we were looking to disable the extension and plug-in for all users via our blocklisting mechanism. Microsoft agreed with the plan, and we put the blocklist entry live immediately."

This warning sign greeted Firefox users after Mozilla blocked use of a Microsoft add-on.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The .Net Framework Assistant add-on lets Firefox use Microsoft's ClickOnce technology for installing applications that run on its .Net programming foundation. The add-on already was something of a thorn in the sides of some Firefox users: it was automatically installed via Windows Update with the .Net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 without telling the user the add-on was being installed or giving an option. More hackles were raised because it wasn't compatible with Firefox 3.5, Shaver said, and because removing it initially required people to edit their Windows Registry--a technically onerous task for most people.

Firefox checks a Mozilla server periodically for a list of add-ons to avoid. Although Mozilla's blocking move was intended to protect users, it caused other problems. Shaver indicated that Firefox's changed behavior irked some system administrators.

That led Justin Angel, a former Silverlight program manager at Microsoft, to tweet, "When business users can't use their core business functionality--they uninstall stuff."

One issue was that Mozilla's add-on blocking technology couldn't tell if people had patched their software and so weren't vulnerable anymore. "We can't distinguish patched from unpatched, so we're blocking it while we sort that out," Shaver twittered. Over the weekend, Mozilla worked to remedy the situation.

"Pushing a change to our blocklist software that will let Firefox 3.5 users override the blocking of .NET FA/WPF plugin if they're patched," Shaver tweeted Sunday. But a few hours later, he added, "We're still working on the blocklist tweaks to help enterprises override the blocking of the WPF plugin, stay tuned!"

Update 6:47 p.m. PDT: Crisis partially averted, apparently. At about 6:10 p.m., Shaver tweeted, "MSFT confirmed that the .NET Framework Assistant is not exploitable, so we've removed it from the blocklist; one down!"

Update 8:34 p.m. PDT: There's still another blocked Microsoft add-on that's vulnerable, one that concerns the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which also is installed with the .Net service pack. Shaver said it was more serious.

"We're hard at work on improving the experience for (especially enterprise) users who wish to override the blocking of the WPF plugin before we remove it from the blocklist," Shaver said in a Sunday night blog post that announced the other plug-in had been removed from the Firefox blocked add-on list.

The key feature in Mozilla's Weave add-on for Firefox is the ability to synchronize tabs, bookmarks, history, and other browser-sourced, data-rich fields. The latest update, Weave version 0.7, gives a big overhaul to the synchronization component, redoing the setup and configuration interface, and adding incremental download support.

Mozilla Weave's new My Account page, which opens in a new tab.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Compared to previous versions, the installation process on your first computer has been greatly streamlined, though the security questions asked remain the same. The wizard that guides you through the process has been redone to present the information through a tab-specific black overlay.

According to Mozilla, the incremental download support will grab your data in bite-size chunks to spread out, and reduce memory and network usage. To redo the synchronization settings, you still need to load the Preferences via about:weave, and then go to the Tools drop-down menu on the tab that opens and choose Start Over. I was unable to synchronize many settings, but that might be because of a conflict with an installed add-on.

The development of Weave, first introduced at the end of 2007, didn't really begin to take off until earlier this year. Since then, Weave has introduced multiple useful features that other browsers, such as Opera, have had for a while. Weave can also sync data between Firefox and Mozilla's mobile browser, Fennec.