Firefox extension face-off

Davey Winder Read more October 7, 2009

Some extensions are so darn useful out here in Enlightened Userland that they made them twice – multiple extensions serving the same basic purpose – so which should you be using? The pat consultant’s answer is “the one that best serves your needs based on a combination of user interface and functionality”, which assumes you have the time to install, review and rationalise numerous options. Most of us instead hit the Mozilla extensions download centre and head for the front of the most-popular queue. This is a shame, because not only is popularity a poor metric for real-world usefulness, but you risk missing up-and-coming new products that work differently and often better. If popularity were the be-all and end-all, you’d never have tried Firefox in the first place. That’s why I’ve been looking at two extensions that claim to change the way Google works, and make it a simpler, quicker and more effective experience.

CustomizeGoogle

CustomizeGoogle (www.customizegoogle.com) has been popular since it was released about a year ago, with dozens of user reviews at Mozilla Add-ons attracting a maximum five-star rating. And with good reason, because it offers what users of alternative tools love best; namely, control. The premise is simple: add information you do want to a Google search page, while removing the information you don’t want. Under “do want”, you have features like adding links to results from competing engines, including news services when searching for news; the ability to use Google Mail and Google Calendar securely via https; adding links to the WayBack Machine; using a fixed font for Google Mail; and quickly adding search-result URLs to a social bookmark manager like del.icio.us or digg.

On the “don’t want” side, CustomizeGoogle will remove all ads from search results, remove the image-copying restrictions in Google Book search, and block Google Analytics cookies. And it’s this “don’t want” stuff that causes some concerns, such as the moral arguments about biting the search engine that feeds you – blocking the already discreet adverts does just that. My concern focuses more on the fact that blocking Google Mail ads could result in the service not working (recently reported by some users) or, more seriously, in Google yanking your account for breaching its Ts & Cs. It’s your call whether removing a handful of small text-only adverts is worth these risks, but ad spamming isn’t something I’d ever accuse Google of.

When it comes to protecting my privacy, though, I’m a little more bolshie. Around 250,000 sites are using Google Analytics (aka Urchin), a cookie-based feature that provides information about your site usage, including your IP address. Since these aren’t third-party cookies but kosher first-party ones, blocking them is an all-or-nothing matter, and wholesale blocking of cookies isn’t a bright idea if you want to retain online interactivity and functionality these days. CustomizeGoogle has an option that just blocks Urchin’s cookies (all of them) on any website, which is fine, but I’m not convinced it provides much more than the illusion of anonymity. Your IP address is still sent to both Google Analytics and the originating website, and if they’re using AdSense there’s a totally separate cookie sent anyway. Surely, you can achieve a more effective result by simply adding 127.0.01 www.google-analytics.com to your HOSTS file. CustomizeGoogle has a lot of options, but in my humble opinion most of them are window dressing in terms of real-world usefulness.
Bumble Search

A new app, Bumble Search (www.bumblesearch.com), has the pun-ridden premise of “cross pollination” or, as developer Andy Mitchell put it to me, “indiscreetly stuffing one page inside another”. You might wonder why you’d want to do that. CustomizeGoogle lets you open a Google search in competing engines with a single click, but takes you away from Google to that new search page. With Bumble Search, says Andy, “Google doesn’t lose visitors to competing search engines”, as the results from the other site are integrated into the Google page. He also told me: “We will not strip adverts from websites. The duality principle is upheld that if we help one site we also help its competitor.”

Now, not only can you compare the two sets of results easily, but you can also compare any two sets of results easily with a single click. The new search IFrame that opens within the original window was, I first thought, rather crippled by being of a fixed, too small size that caused much horizontal and vertical scrolling. However, once you find its lower-right corner hotspot, you can resize it at will. The best is yet to come, though, because cross pollination comes into its own once you step away from Google. Looking to purchase a product at the cheapest price? Bumble Search can stick eBay inside Amazon, Froogle inside eBay, Amazon inside Google and so on. Finding the cheapest price suddenly becomes very easy, and Bumble Search doesn’t even take a slice of the transaction unless you toggle that option on (for Amazon only). Even then, it donates some of its cut to Mozilla and Wikipedia, the rest going to its own ongoing development fund.

If you don’t want to go shopping, Bumble Search will optionally, and very effectively, filter out the comparison engines using the simple keyword-filtering technique I’ve discussed on these pages before. But instead of having to set up your own filter or use a third-party service, it’s done straight from within your standard Google search through Firefox.

A sidebar that gives access to Google and MSN, with a capability to take notes about pages you find, left me cold, but it’s entirely optional, since Bumble Search just works whenever you use Firefox to search for anything. What I do like is the option to highlight keywords on pages reached from a search, in subtle pastel shades that are as inoffensive as they are effective.

However, the page keyword analyser engine is what really floats my boat. This approximates the algorithm Google is believed to use, granting priority to correctly marked-up semantics and hyperlinks, and human readable text. It’s one of the better tools to use when evaluating your own website as regards keyword placement, since it affects search engine results ranking. So Bumble Search is a search engine optimisation utility on top of all its other virtues. It’s British, it’s free, it’s open source, it’s effective and it doesn’t waste your time with unnecessary eye candy. That has to be worth supporting?

Getting the max from ADSL

I was discussing an ADSL tongue twister with a colleague recently. It involved signal-to-noise ratios, attenuation and data rates, and he was hopelessly muddled – and he’s not alone.

This problem usually starts when the time arrives for you to renew your ISP contract and you discover that ADSL Max has arrived at your exchange (as it will have done unless you’re connected to one of the unlucky 155 exchanges that didn’t get upgraded on 31 March). This is a rate-adaptive service – that is, one whose line rate depends on actual line conditions – and that makes predicting what sort of data rate to expect by upgrading to ADSL Max (assuming your ISP gives you the choice) far from easy. Go to an ISP availability checker, which will link to the BT checker, and you’ll get a report saying something like: “Our test indicates that your line should be able to support a potential ADSL Max broadband line rate of 3Mb/sec or greater.” If you’re unlucky, your ISP may interpret all Max-enabled exchanges simply as “a broadband line rate of up to 8Mb/sec”. Neither way is very helpful, which is where services such as www.dslzoneuk.net come in, but these require you to enter your attenuation and noise margin/signal-to-noise ratio figures in order to get more accurate estimates.
You can often get these figures by interrogating your router or modem (the config settings screen is the most likely place to start looking). The signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR, should really be called the SNR Margin and is a figure that goes down as line speed goes up. Higher numbers are better: above 20 is good, above 15 is okay, below ten is problematical. Attenuation is the reverse; here, you’re looking for the lowest figure possible, so anything over 75 stuffs your chance of getting any ADSL service at all, and you need something below 40 to be sure of 2Mb or better service. Think of attenuation as how much the voltage slumps between exchange and router, while the SNR Margin indicates whether the data is strong enough to be heard over the background noise.

While ADSL Max – or, more properly, the BT IPStream Max service on which most ADSL Max products are based (there’s also IPStream Max Premium that increases the upstream rate for business-grade products to a maximum 832Kb/sec) – promises up to 8Mb/sec download speeds. That “up to” is highly significant: promised downstream line rates of “up to” 8,192Kb/sec will in practice be no higher than 7,150Kb/sec, according to leading suppliers like Zen. Indeed, in the real world, chances are they’ll be much less unless your office happens to be inside the telephone exchange. Average downstream rates, according to BT, range between 5 and 6Mb/sec, but clients who’ve upgraded and recounted their achieved speed suggest even this is over-optimistic. Peak-time rates rarely exceed 2Mb/sec, often dipping well below, while off-peak 3Mb/sec is considered high. Upload speeds are equally unlikely to hit that magic 448Kb maximum.

This whole ADSL Max charter of confusion doesn’t end there, as the supportable ADSL Max line rate isn’t set immediately, nor within the “hour or two” some ISPs claim, but is determined during the first ten days of use, after which a maximum stable rate (MSR) will be set by BT. This MSR figure establishes at what point a drop in line rate should be considered a fault by BT, and that point is 30% or more below the MSR. The other important factor is called – aptly enough considering how difficult it is to keep “abreast” of it – the BRAS Profile. Your Broadband Remote Access Server Profile regulates the maximum data rate you can get over IPStream Max. New connections are established at 2Mb/sec, assuming the line rate achieves more than 2,172Kb/sec, but it isn’t unusual to see this rise and fall during the ten days of profiling.

A rule of thumb is that BRAS will settle upon your maximum data rate between 75 minutes and three days, although this depends on dynamic line management (DLM) changes. DLM is an umbrella term for numerous systems used by BT to monitor line performance and stabilise it by applying interleaving to provide error correction (which can create higher latency and screw up the lives of online gamers) or by simply reducing the maximum speed. If you’re still experiencing rollercoaster data rates after the ten days of profiling, chances are your BRAS Profiling is at fault and the ISP will have to intervene.

The advice I give anyone who asks me about ADSL Max has been, and will remain for now, don’t be tempted by bottom-line data-rate figures. Even without the “up to” problem, a happy broadband relationship isn’t only about how fast you can go, but also about things like customer service, capping and contention. Make sure your decision is influenced by all these factors, and change only if the new service will guarantee a faster line, at a lower cost, without affecting customer service. If you can’t be sure of this, stick with what you’ve got, as the chances are you don’t really need more than 2Mb/sec.
My final word on ADSL this month follows on from my advice in issue 140 about extension cables. I was contacted by reader Richard Watson with additional information that’s worth repeating verbatim, as it also addresses boosting SNR figures that might just see an increase in your data rate:

“Commonly, home extensions were wired with pins 2, 5 and 3 connected – 2 and 5 being the phone lines and 3 the ring signal. With ADSL, this can cause interference and decrease the signal-to-noise ratio. The wire on pin 3 acts as a long wire antenna that picks up any noise in the vicinity, and the capacitor in the master socket couples this to the phone line where it clashes with the ADSL data. Removing the wire from pin 3 in all my sockets improved the signal-to-noise ratio by 20dB, which allowed the maximum bit rate to increase from 2Mb/sec to 5Mb/sec. A similar result was achieved with my neighbours. Our previously poor and erratic ADSL connections are now much healthier and all our phones still work. A plug-in extension as you discussed would probably also have this problem, as generally all pins are connected through.”

Obviously, if you make these changes, you do so at your own risk!

Reader feedback

My recent offer to share a seemingly bottomless supply of Google Mail invites proved something of a success, to the extent that all 100 were distributed within 48 hours. Apologies to those who didn’t ask in time, but hopefully Google will top me up before long and I can continue to dispense invites. Not everyone was concerned about missing out, though, and Paul Philpott explained why he opted for Yahoo Mail instead:

“I came across an article on disposable email addresses, which revealed that the Yahoo AddressGuard feature allows you to create up to 500 alias addresses, delivering responses to either inbox or personal folder of your choosing.”

Certainly, this offers an ideal method for quickly creating disposable spam-trapping sign-up email addresses to help track and trace the root of spam, while protecting your real webmail address. This is simple to achieve by only sending email from your protected address to trusted contacts, and using a separate base-name and keyword for all the disposable addresses. That way, even if a spammer sends junk to basename@yahoo.co.uk instead of basename-keyword@ yahoo.co.uk, it doesn’t matter because that address doesn’t exist and it will get bounced back to the ether where it so richly belongs.