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A big reason for the growing popularity of the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser is the amazingly creative and abundantly useful add-ons that are being created for Firefox. My three new favorites let you ax the ads on a site, see the tracking pixels on the current page, and gain a wealth of options when you select and right-click text in your browser.

Browse faster by blocking ads
Wouldn’t you like to watch TV and listen to the radio without having to sit through the ads that pay the freight? Or dismantle the billboards that line the freeways? I can’t help you with TV spots or roadside distractions, but you can kiss Web ads good-bye. Just download and install Wladimir Palant’s Adblock Plus extension for Firefox.

After browsing with Adblock Plus enabled for a while, I started to wonder how I ever managed to surf without it. I noticed an immediate increase in the load speed of many of the sites I visit frequently, such as ESPN.com and CNN.com. And it’s so much easier to find the information I’m looking for on a crowded page without all the ads getting in the way.

When you restart Firefox after installing Adblock Plus, you’re given the option to import a set of filter rules or create your own rules. I took the easy route and opted for the canned filters, which do a good job of removing the ads from the sites I frequent.

You can view the number of blocked items on the current page by hovering the mouse pointer over the “ABP” icon in the top-right corner of the Firefox window. Or click the down arrow to the right to access the extension’s preferences and other options.

View the number of blocked ads on a page by hovering over the ABP icon.

(Credit: Wladimir Palant)

Some ads manage to slip past Adblock’s filters, but you block them in the future by right-clicking the ad and choosing Adblock Image. There are a wealth of other options in the program; visit the developer’s FAQ page for more information.

Know when you’re being tracked
I’m usually not very curious about which of the Web tracking services may have planted a pixel in the Web pages I visit, but knowing which sites use which tracking services gives me a little more information about what I can expect from the people behind the site. Jan Bogutzki’s Counterpixel detects the presence of tracking pixels from 19 different services, including Google Analytics, Webtrends, and Sitemeter.

Counterpixel doesn’t block the trackers; it merely alerts you to their presence on the current page. This might be more information than the average Firefox user needs, but the add-on is a great way to find out a little bit more about the sites you frequent.

Get more right-click options for selected text
I’ve been using the Hyperwords extension for only a few days, which is not near enough time to learn all the text tricks this program performs. The first Hyperwords feature that caught my eye was the Translation option, which lets you convert the selected text into more than a dozen languages.

Customize the right-click options that the Hyperwords extension adds to Firefox.

(Credit: Hyperwords Company)

Other Hyperwords context-menu options let you search for the selected text at various reference sites and view other occurrences of the text on the page by sentence or paragraph, among other alternatives. You can also save the selection as a text file or send it directly to your printer.

It’s a mystery to my why more people still use Internet Explorer than Firefox or any other competing browser. But I don’t get the success of American Idol either, so it must be me.

Originally posted here:
Three super Firefox add-ons

Here’s a fun extension from the experimental section of Mozilla’s Firefox add-ons site. It’s called Puzzle, and once installed lets you turn any image from a page you’re on into a sectional puzzle with pieces that can be moved around. Upon completion you have the option to ramp up the difficulty, which goes all the way up to a 15×15 grid. It’s also able to re-size larger images into smaller, laptop-friendly versions.

To toggle it on you simply right click on an image and select which difficulty you want. It then open up the image (in puzzle form) in a new tab.

I didn’t have any luck getting it to work with Firefox 3.1 beta 2, however it worked fine in the current public build of Firefox 3. As with all experimental add-ons, you’ll need to be registered with Mozilla to download it.

With Puzzle installed you can take any photo and turn it into a quick game.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Source:
Puzzle extension turns any Web image into a game

Google has published its plan to build into Chrome what is arguably its most requested feature: the ability to accept extensions that can customize how the open-source Web browser operates.

And guess what? Google’s dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

The Chrome extensions document, spotlighted Saturday by Google programmer Aaron Boodman, doesn’t include a timeline, but it does shed light on why the project is a priority for Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome.

“Chromium can’t be everything to all people,” according to the document. “User-created extensions have been proposed to solve these problems: the addition of features that have specific or limited appeal; users coming from other browsers who are used to certain extensions that they can’t live without; bundling partners who would like to add features to Chromium specific to their bundle.”

When Google launched Chrome three months ago, it promised a Chrome extensions framework. Extensions are a popular feature of Chrome’s most likely rival, Mozilla’s Firefox, and one very popular extension is AdBlock Plus.

And AdBlock makes a specific appearance on the list of extension uses that Google said it would like to support eventually:

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We have been keeping our eyes on the browser wars for quite some time here at CMSWire. While the battle has been heating up on desktop platforms, the new and cool thing is mobile browsing.

Mozilla has been lagging behind in the mobile arena, but that may have changed with Mozilla’s latest mobile browser — Fennec. Fennec enables the very things that made Firefox so popular: extensions. The first extension has been released and things are moving quick.

Original post:
Browser Wars: Mobile Firefox with Extensions?

TYPO3 Extension Development by Dmitry Dulepov, a TYPO3 core developer, is a recent book from Packt Publishing. It is aimed towards those looking to get their hands dirty with — unsurprisingly — TYPO3 extension development.

The book takes its readers from the beginning process of planning a TYPO3 extension to writing the documentation that will allow others to better understand the developer’s hard work. The book won’t make anyone an award-winning TYPO3 extension developer overnight, but it can help provide a solid foundation to build upon.

Read the rest here:
Web CMS TYPO3 Extensions: Dissected and Explained