Sunday, July 10, 2005

Mad for Firefox Extensions: InfoLister

I will admit it; I am a Firefox extension addict. I currently have 52 extensions enabled for Firefox, and I would say that I use about 75 percent on a daily basis to search the web.

I see numerous posts on popular websites referring to the "top-ten" extensions or the "best," but mainly these articles are just showing gimmicky features that do not add to the browsing of the interweb. In an attempt to make myself post more often, I am beginning a series focusing on my favorite Firefox extensions and how they enrich the web-browsing experience. This list will be in order of preference, but I will begin with the obvious first choice for the extensophile: InfoLister.

InfoLister is an extension that lists the information about what extensions, themes and plug-ins are currently enabled in Firefox (or Thunderbird or NVU). I was going to highlight significant snippets regarding the extension, but their website has some mal-formed XML. Here is the homepage anyways. Maybe it will be functioning by the time anyone reads this article.

Thanks to the power of Google to turn anything to HTML, I was able to visit the homepage and obtain this awesome info:

Features:

      • High customizability

      • HTML, plain text and XML output.

      • Quick access: toolbar button and “about:info”” in the Location Bar.

Honestly, this extension is pretty much useless for most people. Firefox has a splendid extension manager that will allow you to obtain this information easily, and actually manipulate the settings.

The only reason that I even have this extension is so that I can easily show people what extensions I have enabled. You can also upload it to an FTP or do other wonky shit, but I just go into the extension manager, click on options then choose "show information" on the General tab. This opens a window that displays the information about extensions and such. After Highlighting the contents and using CTR-C, the pasted info looks like this:

Last updated: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 19:00:41 GMT
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Plugins (13)

  • Google VLC multimedia plugin 1.0
  • QuickTime Plug-in 6.5.1
  • Mozilla Default Plug-in
  • Shockwave Flash
  • Shockwave for Director
  • RealJukebox NS Plugin
  • RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnect-Enabled Plug-In (32-bit)
  • RealPlayer Version Plugin
  • MetaStream 3 Plugin
  • Java(TM) 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 Update 4
  • Adobe Acrobat
  • Microsoft® DRM
  • Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library
After going to the Google HTML-ized version of the homepage, I realize that I could have simply put "about:info" in the URL bar. This clearly shows that, although I enjoy the added functionality of extensions en masse, I am still using only a fraction of the potential that these extensions add to Firefox.

You can download InfoLister from their website or at the Extensions Mirror (an excellent website for extensions updates and tips).

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