Add-ons
Dan_Harkless
About me
| Name | Dan_Harkless |
|---|---|
| User since | Oct. 10, 2016 |
| Number of add-ons developed | 0 add-ons |
| Average rating of developer's add-ons | Not yet rated |
My Reviews
Enhanced Desktop Notifications
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
I was hoping to find an add-on that would fix Thunderbird's broken-by-design email notification popup so that it showed the newest emails first in the list, rather than showing a few recent unread mails, and then running out of room before getting to the latest ones.
This add-on's vague description didn't give me a ton of hope that it could do that, but I figured I'd try it out, since unlike most Thunderbird add-ons, it's been updated to show as compatible with 60.x.
Unfortunately the add-on has no effect on Thunderbird 60.4.0 on Windows 7. Is it even *supposed* to work on any version of Windows? The top Google result for '"notify-send" library' is a source file from the GNOME project, so I'm guessing this add-on is only designed to work on Linux (and maybe Solaris), but the developer simply didn't bother to mark it as such (neither textually, nor with metadata).
I did try clicking on the "Add-on home page" link, but it just takes you to the developer's blog main page, and there are no instances of "thunderbird" or "notif"(ications) on the first two pages of posts.
Font Finder
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
bibbolo may have some other add-on causing a conflict. I use a number of add-ons (no other font ones), and Font Finder 1.2.3 (which was current at the time of the bibbolo review) works great. It also does things that the WebExtension version, Font Finder (revived) 0.1.8 does not. In particular, it has the extra context menu options "Adjust element's [...]", "Replace font (entire DOM)", and "Disable font (entire DOM)".
The WebExtension version claims it, too, has the "Any active element can have any piece of the font's options (such as color, size or family) adjusted inline" functionality, but this does not appear to be true. The only context menu item is "Inspect Font", and none of the fields in its popup are modifiable. I also checked the screenshots and the FAQ (which, BTW, uses the misspelling "Fond Finder" in multiple places), to no avail.
I'm giving this XUL version of the extension 4 stars rather than 5 due to two issues. One is that it didn't actually address the problem I installed it for. The description says "Information Captured: [...] Font family (including actual font being rendered!)", which I was expecting to help me debug the problem I was having on Linux with extremely messed-up scaled-bitmap, all-caps font substitutions (even when the exact TrueType font specified in the stylesheet was installed). Unfortunately it doesn't tell you the "actual font being rendered" — it just tells you the font that the web page *requests* to be rendered. I then learned about running Firefox with the environment variable FC_DEBUG=1, but its output didn't give me any useful information about the incorrect substitution. Luckily after a bunch more Googling, I was able to figure out that going to about:config and setting gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled = false would cause Linux Firefox to go back to the old Cairo-based font rendering rather than the broken Firefox 44+ version.
The other issue with the add-on is that when you restart for the first time with it installed in a given profile, you get into an infinite loop of popups and new windows or tabs yelling at you to install the WebExtension version instead (despite it not replicating all the functionality of the XUL version). Until you get ahead of it and start hitting OK on the popups, it'll keep on spawning more copies of the popup and more new windows/tabs with the WebExtension version's addons.mozilla.org page loaded. The popups are also modal and won't allow interaction with the window they're related to until you hit OK on that window's popup (even trying to close the window is disabled). Finally, that popup actually gives the opposite advice that it means to: it says "Font Finder is moving to WebExtensions! Please give the WebExtension version a try and replace it with this XUL version." Well, yes, that's just what I've done — I tried the WebExtension version and have replaced it with this XUL version.
searx.me 0.9.x
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Thank you so much for making this search plugin available for Mozilla-based browsers! I was looking for a solution to the problem of Google often entering (seemingly) infinite CAPTCHA loops when trying to use it from Tor Browser, and searx.me is by far the best solution I found. I love that you can set which search engines to include in your results (although I wish that in addition to being able to set them via "preferences" in a cookie, that there were the option in an Advanced search to temporarily select a set for a particular search, and to allow setting them via an HTTP GET query, while retaining the setting of sending actual query keywords by POST to avoid logging, so that it'd be possible to retain settings across sessions in cookie-forgetting Tor).
Most search engines other than Google do insane stuff like by default, and usually non-defeatably, assuming that you misspelled query terms (e.g. assuming you meant "or" instead of "Tor"), and/or giving you results that merely include words that include your query terms as substrings (e.g. giving you a paper by someone named Cowling as a top result when you're searching for "cow" articles). Unlike other privacy-centric search engines like DuckDuckGo, you can turn off all the engines that give crazily non-relevant results, and end up with a meta-search that doesn't blithely waste your time.
In my use of Searx so far, I've found that Google is the source of most of the results (after turning off the bogus-results-returning engines), but unlike with using Google directly, they will not be tracking and profiling you, even if you have to be logged in to a Google account due to YouTube or other Google services, since Searx does the querying on your behalf. Also, if you're trying to use Google from Tor, you no longer have to deal with infinite image-recognition-based CAPTCHA loops (or just blanket blocking without even the opportunity to try a CAPTCHA) because of "unusual traffic" from your Tor exit node.
One of my only complaints about Searx other than the lack of ability (unless there's some way that's undocumented) to select search engines for a query via HTTP GET parameters is that unlike when using Google directly, you can't set a preference to get 100 results at a time. Also, the "next page" button doesn't give any indication of how many pages of results there are.
In any case, thanks again to the developers of Searx and this search add-on -- y'all are doing a great service to privacy-valuing users worldwide.
P.S. Avoid the "searx.me" search add-on, which was last updated in 2015 and reportedly stopped working in 2016, and stick with this "searx.me 0.9.x" one (the "0.9.x" refers to the version of the Searx codebase, which is open-source and is hosted on various different instances worldwide in addition to searx.me).
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