extension

Web browsers are ground zero for Internet security threats, and the debate over responsibility for preventing those threats has resulted in a Gordian knot. The people behind the new add-on for Firefox called Cocoon (download) want to cut through debate by serving the entire Web to you via proxy. (Cocoon is also available at GetCocoon.com.)

Made by Santa Barbara, Calif., start-up Virtual World Computing, Cocoon's goal is to put the Internet on a server to prevent individual users from having to touch it, Cocoon Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Jeff Bermant said in an interview today at CNET'… Read more

The future of Firefox's add-ons arrived in Firefox 4 with the introduction of "restartless add-ons." Based on the new Jetpack API and Add-on SDK, restartless add-ons--also known as bootstrapped add-ons--don't require a restart to be used or removed. Not coincidentally, they also provide Firefox with a venue for competing directly with other browsers, which use add-on frameworks that were created after the technology that supports restartless add-ons was created.

Firefox doesn't offer many restartless add-ons just yet; at the time of writing, there were only 143. Also, there's been documented problems by existing add-on … Read more

Google has launched one of its first experiments aimed at fighting back against content farms, asking the public to help identify the worst offenders.

Chrome users can now download an extension from Google called Personal Blocklist that will allow users to block certain domains from appearing in a personalized list of search results. Google will also track the domains that users flag "and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results," wrote Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google and a prominent anti-spam spokesman for the company, in a blog post.

For several weeks Cutts and Google have been acknowledging frustration … Read more

Mozilla has barred a Skype extension for Firefox, accusing it of causing 40,000 browser crashes a week and of dramatically slowing page-load times.

"We believe that both of these items constitute a major, user-facing issue, and meet our established criteria for blocklisting an add-on," Mozilla said in a blog post yesterday. Because the extension is installed by default when Skype's main software is installed, a "large number of Firefox users who have installed Skype have also installed the Skype Toolbar, knowingly or unknowingly," Mozilla said.

Mozilla is in contact with Skype programmers and will … Read more

Download accelerator and manager DownThemAll gives a swift kick in the pants to Firefox's download manager, providing the browser not only with heightened downloading chops, but with an effective tool for sniffing out media content on Web pages and getting it on your hard drive quickly.

New in version 2 are some sweet tools for making it all happen faster. While support for Firefox 4 was essential to the add-on's continued life, the granular controls over download speeds are a welcome surprise. You can now set different maximum download speeds by individual download, by server, or as a … Read more

There may be instances in OS X where devices that require a third-party driver (such as input devices and cameras) will not properly load at bootup. While a device may load when attached to the system after bootup, it may not be recognized properly when attached at during startup. When this happens, it is usually a problem either with the system's boot caches, or a problem with the developer's configuration of the driver being used for the device.

One way developers create drivers in OS X is to start with a generic driver class (i.e., a "… Read more

Leaving your computer running all the time isn't good for its performance or for your electric bill. Sometimes, though, you don't want to sit around waiting for a large download to finish so that you can turn off your computer before you leave or go to bed. Auto Shutdown - InBasic is a Firefox add-on that will automatically shut down your computer when your downloads are complete, provided you're using Firefox's download manager.

The extension installs easily, and once we'd made the required restart of Firefox, it appeared as a small power button icon in … Read more

Bulk Image Downloader is an application that lets users download multiple images from a Web site all at once. Bulk Image Downloader Firefox Extension is an add-on for Firefox that adds Bulk Image Downloader options to the Firefox context menu. The extension works just fine, but potential users should be aware that it's made to work with the Bulk Image Downloader application; it won't download any images on its own.

The extension installs without issues, though we could only guess at how it worked, because it had no instructions and no options within Firefox's add-on menu. We … Read more

Mobile Opera may be driving the Norwegian browser company's growth, but that doesn't mean that the desktop browser is getting ignored. Debuting today, Opera 11 for Windows, Mac, and Linux has only gotten more stable since the beta version of the browser launched last month.

The most requested of the new features is the lightweight extension API framework, which brings to Opera a long-missing capability to directly add to and customize the browser. Having launched while the browser was in beta, there are already several popular extensions available, including ad-blocker NoAds; YouTube downloader FastestTube; Image Preview Popup for … Read more