SPDY indicator for Firefox 11+
Firefox 11 will be supporting the SPDY protocol for faster webpages. (Firefox 11 beta seems quite stable and I have been using it for a month now.)
Unfortunately there is no clue to when SPDY is actually working in Firefox because the only way to know is to examine the response headers for X-Firefox-Spdy.
However Cheng Sun has come to our rescue by whipping up a SPDY indicator extension inspired by a similar plugin for Chrome that shows an icon in the address bar.
SPDY is not on by default in Firefox 11, you have to go into about:config and change network.http.spdy.enabled to true.
Then watch for green lightning bolt the extension adds to the url address bar by visiting most google services or now Twitter.
Now available on mozilla.org! Here is a proper XPI version of the extension
Here are some SPDY enabled sites to test it on
(more…)
Firefox plugin to detect when website sessions in use?
update: presenting my very first firefox plugin!
http://bbshowcase.org/firefox/website-sessions-detector.xpi
Detects if any of several session types are in use on a website. It has some room for improvement but the fact that it works at all is good start…
—–
I dislike the use of sessions to track users between web pages because it slows things down on active websites and if cookies are disabled, they can create a mess when they get appended to the URL. They are also useless across multiple servers if they aren’t stored in a common memory pool (memcached, etc).
Here are some common session names:
ASP uses “ASPSESSIONID”
PHP uses “PHPSESSID”
.NET uses “ASP.NET_SessionId”
JSP uses “JSESSIONID”
ColdFusion uses “CFID”
(let me know if you are aware of others)
I try to avoid using sessions in my bbPress plugins but there are two (Human Test & OpenID) where I’ve been too tired (aka too lazy) to come up with a complex way around them that would involve mysql tables, etc. However I try to make sure that sessions are not activated when not needed (in most cases, only during registration. But there is a popular third-party plugin that I’ve taken over ownership for (bb-topic-views) that uses sessions all the time when reading topics to prevent re-counting on multiple pages of the same topic.
best firefox plugin ever – install it now, seriously
I’ve been using this plugin for a couple years now and it’s saved my arse at least half a dozen times when Firefox corrupts one user file or another for some reason:
http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/?addon=bb
It’s called “Bookmark Backup” but it does SO much more.
If you open the options you can tell it to also save your history and more importantly your password files among many other files.
(more…)
