Talkings of a Tyrant

Cookies are little pieces of information that sites give to your browser for a variety of reasons. They are usually used to track you through the site (find out if a large enough number of people who like pancakes also like berries, etc.) or to keep you logged in. My habits tend to be that of: “I want to stay logged in to Gmail, but I want all the other cookies to go when I quit Firefox.”

If this is what you want, then CookieCuller is the extension for you!

CookieCuller allows you to “Protect” specific cookies. These cookies won’t be deleted unless you do it manually from Firefox’s built-in cookie manager, or unprotect it. Under the extension’s options, you can tell it to delete any unprotected cookies at Firefox’s start up. Strangely, that is the only option, but it still has its own menu. It would probably be simpler to put the option in the main CookieCuller dialogue rather than on its own. Maybe there is a real reason for it. I don’t know…

Keep in mind that Firefox’s built-in cookie manager takes priority over CookieCuller. This means that if you’ve set your cookies to expire at the end of Firefox’s session, then any cookies placed will expire at the end of the session, regardless of whether or not the cookies are protected.

Make sure your options look something like this:

CookieCuller is a great extension for control freaks like me and power users in general. It is easy to learn and easy to use, though sometimes figuring out what exactly a cookie does is confusing. However, that isn’t really the extension’s fault, as cookies are generally confusing. If you would like more information about your browser cookies, I would suggest “Are Cookies Dangerous?” by Dave Child.

Download CookieCuller
CookieCuller website
Get Firefox 1.5

I’ve been accepted as an extension/theme reviewer at Addons.Mozilla.org.

As one of many extension/theme reviewers, I approve/disapprove extension that are queued for approval. When an extension is finished, the creater sends it off to addons.mozilla.org where, hopefully, it will be approved and hosted by the AMO website. If it is buggy or doesn’t do what it says, it gets sent back.

I also have to review comments that have been reported by AMO users. There are a lot of those.

I’ve finally found my calling for how to help Firefox. It requires very little coding knowledge, and yet I get to play with cutting edge extensions. Granted, I’m probably going to have to back up and back up again my Firefox profile, but…

There have been several implementations of the new features that Firefox 1.5 brings.

Some notable new features are canvas support and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support. I’m only going to discuss two implementations, but keep in mind that there are several more.

Canvascape

One such site is Canvascape.

Canvascape is a clever implementation of the canvas tag and javascript to make a game that runs completely in Firefox. No Java, Shockwave, or Flash. Just CSS and javascript.

It doesn’t do anything, yet. They’re currently working on porting the original Doom to this form. It is a tech demo, yes, but it is very promising.

Canvascape

Moon Orbiter

The second example uses SVG and javascript.

This site allow you to interactively test the three theories for the creation of the moon/how the moon got into its orbit. It is nicely done, and give credence to all three theories.

How Did The Moon Get Into Orbit?

These sites are another sign that Firefox is stepping up as a major contender against Microsoft. They are starting to be the powerhouse. The ones that are the ones that push the web standards into acceptance.

Slightly wishful thinking, but hey! Let a fanboy dream!

Greasemonkey is one of the top Mozilla Firefox extensions for the web. It is the ultimate in customization.

Greasemonkey allows users to customize websites (yes, other people’s websites) to your likings. Don’t like the ads? Get rid of them. Hate the colors? Change them. Redirects wasting your time? Remove them. Simply install a userscript and Greasemonkey gets to work.

However, it isn’t quite that simple. If you’re not a skill javascript programmer (which I’m not), you and I have to rely on other people’s userscripts. Luckily, there is a large directory of user scripts over at, guess what, http://www.userscripts.org/.

Let’s take one example

If you use Gmail (Google Mail for UK users) and you don’t have a mail client on your computer (such as Thunderbird), then you probably get annoyed every time you see a mailto: link that opens up crappy Microsoft Outlook/doesn’t do anything.

However, there is a userscript that will automatically rewrite mailto: links into Gmail links.

First, go to Mailto Compose In GMail’s Userscript.org site.

Then you need to click in the box at the upper right, and click “Install this Script”.

The link should bring you to the direct code. Greasemonkey 0.6.4 is kind enough to pop up with a nice bar at the top instructing to simply click “Install”.

Then you go to any site with a mailto: link. One of my favorite sites is Lifehacker, so we’ll go there.

In the sidebar there should be this contact information.

Where before, “Email” under Gina Trapani’s name led you to “mailto:tips@lifehacker.com”, now with the magic of Greasemonkey, the URL is “https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=tips@lifehacker.com” Now your browser is truly set for the web!

Analysis

This is but one example of what Greasemonkey can do. It is a very powerful extension, and can give the right users almost complete control over what they view in their browser.

Greasemonkey is one of the ultimate extensions when it comes to customizability power. Seeing as I’m a control freak when it comes to web surfing, this is an excellent extension!

Download Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey Website
Dive Into Greasemonkey, a guide for beginning Greasemonkey programmers.
Download Firefox 1.5

SearchPluginHacks is a Firefox extension by the same extension developer as previously reviewed FoxyTunes. As such, the quality of this extension is about as good as FoxyTunes (and that’s a good thing).

SearchPluginHacks is, by far, the simplest extension I’ve reviewed, but it is still very useful. It takes much of the hassle of Firefox’s search box out of the picture.

What SearchPluginHacks does is allow you to delete one of your search engines from inside the browser itself. That’s it. No other features, no flashy lights, nothing except simplicity. It is only 4 kilobytes too!

While this extension comes with about no documentation, it doesn’t really need any. All you do is right-click on the search engine you don’t want, then delete it. That is it.

While Mozilla is trying to (and succeeding at) minimizing what features get installed with Firefox (for good reasons), this feature really should be part of Firefox by default. For most users (anyone who doesn’t want to take a trip to their profile folder), this extension is extremely useful.

Download SearchPluginHacks
Closest thing to an Official Website
Get Firefox 1.5