firefox extension bullshit

First off, update notes.  Firefox has a nice button that will show what the extension author provides for update notes when there's a new update.  However, some fucktarded extension developers like Firebug's just say "oh lol you can read update notes here" and give a URL.  That isn't ever clickable or selectable.  Then they have the nerve to add "oh I understand that you can't actually do anything useful with the URL we put here, but tough shit".  Well, not that exactly, but that expresses the sentiment I feel.  Fuck you.  Put the fucking update notes in the fucking box they're supposed to fucking be in so I can fucking read them to see whether or not I fucking want to update your fucking extension.  Until then, I'm not updating.

Second.  I updated DownloadHelper and NoScript just a few minutes ago.  When Firefox actually appeared, some of Tab Mix Plus' settings had been changed.  Specifically, my tab bar had a close button instead of it appearing on a tab when I hover my mouse over the tab. The tab bar had scroll buttons.  Lastly, the all tabs dropdown was visible.  Going into TMP's options they were still set the way I had them, which makes me think it was something else entirely.  Changing them and then changing them back made it revert back to the way I wanted it.  I know that TMP has some issues with Classic Compact/Classic Compact Options that are as of yet unresolved, but I thought those were mostly due to the fact that the two have conflicting settings.  I set both of them to the same settings and went on with life.

Third, why does Mozilla permit extensions to open web pages on install/update?  I've got all the call home pages blocked using BlockSite, but I shouldn't have to do that.  The fact that extensions can do this is kind of a security hazard, especially if the extension has some extremely obfuscated malicious feature.  At least NoScript doesn't do that (well, it does, but it can be disabled in about:config, set noscript.firstRunRedirection to false), seeing as how its developer likes to update anywhere from once a week to four times a week.

There was this whole thing a while back with AdBlock Plus and NoScript.  NoScript's author has always tried to make sure his sites' ads are visible.  To further this, his four sites and his advertisers are in NoScript's default whitelist (along with a bunch of other questionable default whitelist entries).  It used to be much more difficult to remove them because they were marked as "protected" and you had to dig around about:config to remove the fuckers, but enough people bitched at him (including me) that he conceded.

Then he got his panties in a bunch about AdBlock Plus blocking his sites' ads and decided to fuck with AdBlock Plus instead of taking, you know, an ethical route to a solution.  For a while, every time you started Firefox with AdBlock Plus and NoScript installed, NoScript would add exception filters for its developer's site.  He eventually got pwnt by Mozilla and forced to remove his malicious code (which he had run through an obfuscator), but he still blamed the entire thing on AdBlock Plus even though he made the first move.

Firefox really needs a secure extension model.  One where each extension can't fuck with other extensions unless those extensions define a set API.  In the current extension model an extension can basically do anything it wants.  I encountered this issue a while back when I was still using Tabbrowser Preferences.  It makes some questionably legit changes to Firefox that, among other things, result in GMail becoming unusable.  These changes persist even after the extension is uninstalled.  To revert them you have to reinstall Firefox.  Luckily there's Tab Mix Plus which does everything Tabbrowser Preferences ever did and more.

As far as my compact setup goes, there are a few things I still want:

• The ability to collapse the tabs to just the favicon
• If I had this I'd use a tab bar close tab button
• Firebug won't let me inspect the browser chrome... Perhaps its only weakness? I could make a style for Stylish to do exactly this if I used the DOM Inspector
• I mean, I can cheat and load chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in the location bar to inspect it, but everything's just congealed into a single tabbrowser element and I can't get at the tabbar element at all
• Automatic grouping of tabs into a menu by domain or subdomain
• Should be configurable per-tab
• Each tab would have a dropdown arrow to show the menu
• If the tab is clicked instead it should show the last site on that domain/subdomain that was shown instead of showing the menu
• You can kind of do this if you cheat and load chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in a tab, but it's not at all what I'd like