The Trouble With Firefox
Jun 11
Posted: under Technology.
I love Firefox, but I’m seeing a major problem with it. The problem is that there are WAY too many options. That is to say, there are perhaps way too many extensions. Mozilla update has 492 extensions listed for Firefox just now.. Just pick your favorite one or three.. I remember back when firefox was in beta and there was closer to 70 or 80 extensions out there. I actually looked through all of them to see what was available. There’s no way I’d do that now.
Of course the real problem isn’t that there are too many extensions, just that there are too many choices. It’s good to have a variety of choices, but at some point it just becomes overwhelming. Some of this can be solved by organizing the extensions into different categories, but even that becomes difficult. I know that there are some categories on mozilla update that span 10 pages or more.
But when it comes right down to it, it would be great if Firefox was used by the masses. That means not just the computer savvy but everyone else, age 8 to 80, who often don’t much care about all kinds of details and just want things to work. There are all kinds of plugins that are useless to this group of people because they don’t care about this little thing or that little thing. To them, trying to wade through the sea of extensions to get some basic extended functionality is nearly pointless. Even for the savvy, there are some rather basic things that firefox doesn’t natively support that have multiple extensions that are very similar. I use the all-in-one mouse gestures extension. Why? Because I wanted mouse gestures and when I went to the “navigation” category it was listed first since it shows everything in alphabetical order. I pretty much use two gestures all the time and rarely use anything else. It doesn’t much matter to me what extension I use for gestures.
Anyways, that said, I think the solution (or at least a solution) is to create firefox distributions, just like we have for Linux. The bare-bones Firefox is perfectly functional, but throwing in a handful of extensions (like mouse gestures for example) would make it all that much better. For most people out there, this would be much a much easier and more attractive solution than downloading firefox and trying to find this extension and that extension, all the while missing out on a couple of others that would be useful but that they didn’t even make it far enough to see.
This just occurred to me last night, and I wondered if anyone else had thought of it. A quick check on google only found one mention of it. It doesn’t look anyone has really done it.
So now I’m temped to do it. To create a Firefox distro. I’m sure I could do it, it would just take time to get everything figured out. My first thought even is that for security reasons, Firefox probably won’t let you just install extensions automatically (without user input). I don’t know. Maybe I’ll pursue the idea and maybe I won’t. I think someone should though.
