Note from possible248 (main author of CodingExperiments): freezewarp is a new author here. You won’t find much info on him by Googling his nick because he recently abandoned his old one. If you want to guest post on this website too, send me an email at possible248@gmail.com.

Intro

One advantage Firefox has in the web browser world is the large community of developers all contributing to Firefox by building extensions for it. Most of these developers post their extensions on Firefox’s official extension homepage. Here you will nearly 5,300 extensions, referred to as addons, though this is an unfair count. On the whole 600 are themes, 3,000 have no support for Firefox 3, and 600 do not work with linux. Though this means that some users will not be able to utilize all Firefox extensions, they will still be able to the best.

Best Addons

Adblock Plus

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 480,000

Best Suited For: Pretty much anybody.

Last Updated: July 17, 2008 (Version .7.5.5)

Works with: 1.5 - 3.0.x (Older versions having support for Firefox versions as early as .7)

Summary: Adblock does one thing, and it does it better than anyone else, it blocks adds. Be it pop-ups, google adds, or the annoying flashy adds, it blocks them all.

Snapshots:

The Adblock extension in action.

Video Download Helper

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 390,000

Best Suited For: People who want their favorite content to go right with them.

Last Updated: July 22, 2008 (Version 3.2)

Works with: 1.5 - 3.0.x

Summary: Download Helper gives you the power to download embedded videos from almost any site. In more recent versions you even have to power of instant video conversion through FFMPEG or MEncoder. Using it on older versions of Firefox with little memory, however, can else be troublesome.

DownThemAll

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 280,000

Best Suited For: People with a slow internet connection and those who download excessively.

Last Updated: June 07, 2008 (Version 1.0.3)

Works with: 2.0.8 - 3.0.x (Older versions having support for Firefox versions as early as 1.0)

Summary: DownloadThemAll is simply a download manager. It integrates directly into Firefox, allowing faster downloads in the default download manager in addition to many features in the newly existing one, such as page download and integrity checking with MD5Hashes.

Snapshots:

The Downthemall extension.

Better Gmail 2

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 95,000

Best Suited for: People who use GMail online.

Last Updated: August 20, 2008 (Version 0.6.1)

Works with: Firefox Versions .8 - 3.0.x

Summary: Better Gmail 2 adds a better look to GMail that will make it sleeker and often easier to use. Functionality wise you won’t see a change.

Snapshots:

The BetterGmail2 extension in action.

WOT

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 80,000

Best Suited For: Pretty much anybody.

Last Updated: August 11, 2008 (Version 20080811)

Works with: 1.5 - 3.1a2pre

Summary: WOT is a relatively new extension to me, though so far I’ve founded it to be nothing but exceptionally good. In turn you are the one powering it as it ranks sites based on what users think of them. Anyone can rate a site on four aspects, trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, and child safety. This means that you now can make important transactions and ensure your child is safe on the Internet rather easily. If in the case a site has poor reliability, it will bring up a warning screen questioning if you would like to continue to the site or go back. Here are some examples of sites that have been rated:

Snapshots:

WOT warning you of the danger of the page you are trying to view.

The WOT danger level icon beside search results.

Web Developer Toolbar

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 70,000

Best Suited for: People who develop the web.

Last Updated: May 19, 2008 (version 1.1.6)

Works with: 1.0 - 3.0.x

Summary: The Web Developer Toolbar adds many great features for all users, though as the title would imply, it is best employed by web developers. You can easily gather information about a web page’s source, structure, style sheets, scripts, and other miscellaneous attributes of a page. Additionally, validation of a web page, from its HTML to its accessibility can be done instantly. If your a regular user you can also easily reap the benefits of showing hidden passwords, disabling images, styles, JavaScript, Java, and pop-up blockers, and magnifying the page.

Snapshots:

The Web Developer Toolbar.

FireFTP

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 55,000

Best Suited For: People who frequently use FTP.

Last Updated: August 15, 2008 (Version 1.0.2)

Works with: 3.0 - 3.0.x (old versions support Firefox versions as early as 1.5)

Summary: FireFTP integrates a mediocre FTP client directly into Firefox. I find it to be a good choice as its often easier to view the changes your making as you make them. It offers standard FTP access, though with the addition of SSL Encryption, SFTP, filtering, file hashing, and other features. None the less normal desktop FTP clients do tend to have more features, and so may be a better choice for people who want the most out of an FTP client..

Snapshots:

The FireFTP extension in action.

ScrapBook

My Rating: 5/5

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 20,000

Best Suited For: People who want their favorite content to go right with them.

Last Updated: June 28, 2008 (Version 1.3.3.7)

Works with: 2.0 - 3.0.x (Older versions having support for Firefox versions as early as .9)

Summary: The Scrapbook extension has the general purpose of archiving web pages to your local computer. Though it lacks features it is great as what is does. Simply enter a number of links to spider and the content to store (images, CSS, JavaScript) and it will download every page it finds. Unfortunately large loads can do a computer in that lacks memory in.

Snapshots:

The ScrapBook extension dialog for advance downloads.

NoScript

My Rating: 4/5

Why I Rate It Lower: It can be very tiresome having to allow scripts for every site you go to.

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 350,000

Best Suited For: People who prefer to be security conscious, such as those working for large companies.

Last Updated: July 15, 2008 (Version 1.7.7)

Works with: 1.5.0.4 - 3.1a1 (Older versions having support for Firefox versions as early as 0.7)

Summary: Noscript also ensures security like with WOT, however rather than simply warning you, it stops scripts, such as JavaScript, Flash, and Java cold, while still allowing you to view all the content of a page. Naturally this does come at a price, though. Since all it does is prevent scripts, harmless scripts are blocked just the same. Even worse you have to allow scripts for every site one by one. This means that on many sites you will have to click allow multiple times, once for the local site and the rest for embedded content. For many people who have constant problem or malware this is a small price to pay, but if you’ve never had to deal with malware then you probably don’t have much need for it.

All-in-One Sidebar

My Rating: 4/5

Why I Rate It Lower: AiOS often closes or opens unexpectedly, making it harder to use.

Community Rating: 5/5

Weekly Downloads: 130,000

Best Suited for: People who are often unorganized or those who find FireFox confusing.

Last Updated: June 24, 2008 (Version 0.7.6)

Works with: 2.0 - 3.0.x (Older versions having support for Firefox versions as early as 1.0)

Summary: All-in-One Sidebar is nothing greater than a sidebar that acts as a control panel for all of Firefox. By combining downloads, history, bookmarks, page info, add-ons, and more all in one place it makes Firefox much simpler, easier, and quicker to use.

Snapshots:

The All-in-One Sidebar.

A few other good addons you may like if…

You are big on Internet Relay Chats: ChatZilla

You are big on Podcasts: FoxyTunes

You like to be in tuned to the weather: ForcastFox

You never type the URL right: URL Fixer

I had cause of late to convert an integer into a string in C.  My research indicated that there was no standardized function to do this, and thus the most portable thing to do was to write my own algorithm.  After fiddling with numbers and masks and such things, I came up with the following core algorithm:

#define CONVERT_DIGIT(mask, n, offset)    (( n/mask - ( n/(mask*10))*10) + offset )

This algorithm may not be as efficient as it could be, but I’m fairly happy with it given that normally I dodge anything with even a distant correlation to mathematics as if it were the plague.  mask is a power of your number system base b; most of the time, this is going to be a power of 10.  n is the number you want to convert.  offset is used to offset the resulting integer to an ASCII equivalent; this could actually be hard-coded as 48.

Given that the number of digits in n is L, you need to initialize mask to b^L-1.  Then run a loop that for each digit in n runs CONVERT_DIGIT( mask, n, 48) and then divides mask by b for the next iteration.

Caveats

While the algorithm itself should be O(L), the actual output is going to have some worthless zeros at the start for most values of n that may have to be stripped.  In addition, I’m not going to explain how to create a string in C, or how to implement this in other languages.  You’re on your own there.

Also note that while the premise should be solid and I haven’t seen a situation where it fails, I disavow all responsibility for algorithmic failures and weaknesses.

EDIT: Daniel Bruce informed me that the function sprintf() would do the job just as well, only should also work for floating point numbers and is more flexible.  I wish I had known about that before I had spent the time to write this algorithm.

We’re no strangers to algorithms.
You know the syntax, and so do I.
You know pointers are what I’m thinking of.
You wouldn’t get this from any other app.
I just want to tell you how I’m coding.
Gotta make you understand.

Never gonna give C up!
Never gonna let C down!
Never gonna run around and write Python.
Never gonna throw an error.
Never gonna corrupt files and hurt you.

I’ve known C for so long.
Your heart’s been aching, but you’re too shy to say.
You wanna see my source code.
You know the language, and so do I.
And if you ask me how’s my coding,
Don’t tell me you’re too blind to see.

Never gonna give C up!
Never gonna let C down!
Never gonna run around and write Python.
Never gonna throw an error.
Never gonna corrupt files and hurt you.
Never gonna give C up!
Never gonna let C down!
Never gonna run around and write Python.
Never gonna throw an error.
Never gonna corrupt files and hurt you.

Never gonna give, never gonna give
give C up.
Never gonna give, never gonna give
give C up.

I’ve known C for so long.
Your heart’s been aching, but you’re too shy to say.
You wanna see my source code.
You know the language, and so do I.
I just want to tell you how I’m coding.
Gotta make you understand.

Never gonna give C up!
Never gonna let C down!
Never gonna run around and write Python.
Never gonna throw an error.
Never gonna corrupt files and hurt you.
Never gonna give C up!
Never gonna let C down!
Never gonna run around and write Python.
Never gonna throw an error.
Never gonna corrupt files and hurt you.
Never gonna give C up!
Never gonna let C down!
Never gonna run around and write Python.
Never gonna throw an error.
Never gonna corrupt files and hurt you.

I wrote the above song today after a funny IM conversation. It doesn’t actually make much sense, but I think it is funny, and I know this blog needs some funny posts.