extensions [spugbrap’s blog]

January 22nd, 2008

Firefox crashes when I close gmail, so I tried out Safari

This has been going on for way too long. It definitely started after Google released the new interface for gmail, but it didn’t happen immediately. Now, I’m not blaming Firefox, and I’m not blaming Google. I’m 95% certain that it’s the result of conflicts between one or more of my extensions. I’m always changing up my extensive (hehe) lineup of extensions, and many of those extensions dramatically impact the way the browser works. I love web development extensions, debugging tools, power toys, etc.

Thankfully, I recently read an entry on Mishoo’s blog, which started out describing some [presumably completely unrelated] Firefox performance issues, and ended with a short, positive review of Safari. I decided to give it a try, for curiosity’s sake. I tried Safari when the Windows version was first released, and I remember not being impressed, to say the least. I don’t remember what I didn’t like, but I do remember uninstalling it immediately, so it must have been pretty bad. I don’t use Opera every day, but I do respect it enough to keep it installed and reasonably up-to-date.

Anyways, I tried the newest version of Safari, version 3.0.4, and was pretty impressed. The interface was attractive, simple, and fairly intuitive. Just what one might expect from Apple, I guess. I’m not a big Apple fan; I do not own an iPod or an iPhone, I don’t use iTunes, and have never owned a Mac. But even I know that Apple has a reputation for attractive, simple, and intuitive products.

Using Safari hardly felt different from using Firefox, to me. Almost all I do miss my Firefox extensions, though, and Safari’s Bookmarks menu leaves a lot to be desired. But it is fast, and I almost all the websites I’ve been to have looked and acted just fine. Best of all, it doesn’t crash when I close gmail!

So, where I had been using Firefox for 99% of my personal browsing and Internet Explorer for 1%, I now find myself splitting that 99% pretty equally between Safari and Firefox (and IE for 1%, since some sites just demand it).

One of these days I’ll probably try running Firefox in Safe Mode, and if closing gmail doesn’t crash it, I’ll start disabling one extension after another, until I find the culprit. For now, though, I’m content using Safari part of the time.

November 8th, 2007

Firebug can make Gmail slow

I love the Firebug extension for Firefox. It’s one of those few extensions that I actually use every day. I raved about it when I first found out about it, last year, and I still love it now.

I’ve been noticing that Gmail has been pretty slow, recently, but I assumed it was just related to their recent rollout of IMAP support, or their recent UI improvements.

Then, this morning, I saw this message at the top of my Gmail page (image has been scaled to fit blog content area width):

The “Fix this” link took me to a Gmail Help page: Firebug can make Gmail slow

Google offers two suggestions:
- just disable Firebug for mail.google.com
OR
- turn off XMLHttpRequest logging and network monitoring

A little while later, I was reading Ben Simon’s blog, and saw that he ran into the slow Gmail problem a couple days ago, as well. It appears that he figured out that Firebug was the culprit, even before Google started showing the warning message that I saw. Ben’s solution was simple:

A quick right mouse click on the green checkmark in the bottom right hand corner of my browser, and selecting Disable Firebug is all it took to get reclaim my browsing speed.

I can’t decide which solution I prefer–Gmail’s selective-disabling approaches or Ben’s total-disabling of Firebug. At first, I thought disabling Firebug completely was just crazy talk. But then I started thinking about it, and realized that it would probably speed up my web browsing in general. I could just enable Firebug on those specific occasions when I’m actively debugging webapps.

But, I often find myself using Firebug on sites that I did not specifically go to for debugging purposes, and it’s nice to have Firebug already loaded and ready to let me hack away. So, I think I’ll start with Google’s first suggestion, and try disabling it specifically for the gmail site. While I’m at it, I think I will disable Firebug on iGoogle, too, since it seems to be very Javascript-intensive.

**Update**:
I just noticed that Firebug lets you specifically set which sites you DO want to use it on, as well as the ones you DO NOT want to use it on. Just right click the little green check mark in the bottom right corner of your browser window, and select ‘Allowed Sites’. That pops up a little dialog, which lets you specify whether to Allow or Block Firebug for each site in the list. Neat.

December 5th, 2006

Firebug: My new favorite Firefox extension!

I use a lot of Firefox extensions, but there’s a handful of them that I couldn’t do without. I now have another to add to that list (a list which I’ll post about here, another day): Firebug

This extension provides all sorts of useful features for web developers, and in the first 2 minutes of using it, I managed to track down a problem in a DHTML application that I’ve been working on for the past few months. I’ve been wrestling with some performance problems for the past few weeks, and have been getting increasingly frustrated as I tried one thing after another to optimize my code, but still ended up with unacceptable performance. Firebug provides a powerful Profiler feature, which clearly pinpointed the current source of my performance problems.

It’s also got a nice, big area for running arbitrary javascript code, has Watch capabilities, network performance info, realtime view of HTML, CSS, Script, or DOM, and all sorts of other features. The interface seems pretty usable and packs all sorts of power, without getting in my way when I don’t want to use it. Plus, there’s a new “Firebug lite”, which provides a small subset of the functionality (javascript console/logging) for non-Firefox browsers like IE and Opera. I haven’t tried that out yet, but I will soon.

Thanks go out to Stickman for posting about it on StickBlog this morning!

November 29th, 2005

IE Tab Firefox Extension is great!

The IE Tab Firefox Extension is awesome! It allows you to open the current page in a new tab, rendered by the Internet Explorer engine.

Although most sites work fine in Firefox, it’s an unfortunate fact of life that some sites are designed to work with Internet Explorer only. To deal with this, I’ve been using the IE View Firefox Extension, which allows you to open the current page in an Internet Explorer window.

It allows you to define a list of sites that will always open in IE, which is useful if you use Firefox as your primary browser, but frequently need to use some IE-only sites.

This new IE Tab extension allows you to configure the same kind of list.. sites that will always open in an IE Tab. It even supports Ctrl-leftclick to open the current IE Tab into a new Internet Explorer window, using the IE View extension! I highly recommend both of these extensions.

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