Monday, September 01, 2008

When Open Source Sucks Part II: Firefox Extension Annoyances

I wrote my original “When Open Source Sucks” post on August 15 to rant about one of my favorite Firefox extensions falling into apparent vaporware status. To be honest, a lot of things about Firefox drive me nuts, yet I can’t replace the things that I like about Firefox and its extensions easily. I tried running IE 7 as my default browser because Firefox is eating up too much overhead on my laptop, but IE 7 is too slow for regular use. It takes forever to open a new tab and load a new page. I gave up quickly.

There is an annoyance about Firefox that really bugs me. I use some useful extensions such as NoScript. I’ve been using it for years. It really bugs me when, every time an update is released, I have to suffer through a tab being opened. This is really bad when 6 or more extensions that like to self-promote get updated at once.

It would be nice if the maintainers of these extensions could accept that they don’t have to constantly promote their extensions to their loyal users. This is as bad as when Microsoft, in it’s Windows Mobile email newsletters, constantly likes to include articles such as “Top Reasons to choose Windows Mobile.”

 

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Figure 1: Why do Firefox Extensions have to open browser tabs to their pages every freaking time they update?

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