Macworld loves Firefox. They never miss an opportunity to sing the praises of the browser, and routinely ignore the fact that Opera exists. A few months ago they did an article “Firefox extensions for geeks” by Joe Kissell.
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is a great tool for surfing the Net. And thanks to a growing number of free Firefox extensions, it’s an especially good tool for people who want every possible ounce of browser power—and who are willing to tinker with their Mac to get it.
I’ve dug up 10 of the best extensions for Firefox (4.5 mice). Some of these are designed to make surfing easier or safer, while others are specifically geared toward Web developers. All are free, and you can easily configure or remove them in Firefox by going to Tools: Extensions.
Since I’ve never used Firefox much, I’ve never gotten much into extensions, but I thought this was a good place to start. So I ripped the page out of the magazine and stuck it on my To Do pile.
This week saw the release of Firefox 2.0, after much beta testing and 3 “Release Candidates”.
So I decided to download Firefox 2, and to test out those “Power User Features” discussed in the article.
5 out of 10 of them are not compatible with Firefox 2.0.
Now apparently there is a way that you can trick Firefox into using Extensions that aren’t compatible with a certain version. If you edit the extension you can have it say “I know I said I was only compatible with 1.5 but really I’ll work with 2.0.”
Of course, you don’t know if really will work or not, and I’m not convinced that it’s a good idea to subvert the version checking like that (after all, if it doesn’t really matter what version the extension says that it is compatible with, why bother including a version check at all?
This is just a random sampling of 10 assumably popular extensions, and they can’t get their compatibility checked before a new major version is released?
Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?