mozilla extensions

I've been wary/skeptical for a long time about mozilla/firefox extensions. Firefox is a memory hog as it is, and there are some hard to isolate weird CPU hogging things in there too. So, while I love the browser, I go out of my way to NOT make it any more memory/cpu hungry. And in general, for complex things that have weird behaviors, I prefer to keep things as simple as possible so that problem isolation is easier, or at least that the chances of tickling a bug are lower.

Late though, and strangely enough, because I saw a link to an article that discussed how to make firefox eat less memory and use less CPU, I followed another link and decided to install a few very conservatively chosen extensions. I'll add links at some point, for now, just discussion.

NoScript is great. I have it block all javascript by default. And then, for sites that need scripts, I turn javascript on either temporarily (current session) or permanently. Very nice since most of the time I don't want javascript and it just slows things down anyway.

AdBlock works pretty well. Some ads get through and it's not convenient to point them out to AdBlock, but all in all, it's great. I wish I could *unblock* google ads. They're not intrusive, no moving graphics and crap like that, and they're generally relevant, although I rarely click. I'll figure out how to do that at some point.

Tab Mix Plus is great. There are lots of features there, most of which I don't know how to use. The main thing for me is that it has tab memory like Opera has. That is, it's possible to configure it so that when the browser starts, it will auto-load the tabs that were there when the browser was last closed. It also saves tab status while browsing, so that firefox and crashes (rare, but not completely eradicated) don't completely wipe me out. If I've downloaded 15 tabs to view, then tab memory will bring them all back up when I restart firefox. It seems to work better than Opera's memory, but I haven't used Opera in 2 years. I'm sure Opera has made their tab memory much more robust by now, although it was already a great and wonderful feature when I used it back then.

PDF download is convenient since I've never been able to stand acrobat reader displaying itself in the browser and then taking up so long to start. Not that I have acrobat reader on this computer anymore, or any computer I use, but the extra control over PDF downloads is nice. This is a relatively low profit item for me though, I may drop it.