

Web Browser Wednesday









Earlier this year a guy installed 100 Firefox extensions without any problems. Well…I decided to try and top that. I picked the nice round number of 200 for a few different reasons. First and foremost because Firefox “2” was recently released but also because back in August Mozilla celebrated 200 million downloads of the fantastic browser! Right now they are past 263 million but this is kinda like a belated celebration.

A discussion about Firefox extensions also started over in the forum which is the whole reason I decided to do this. Hey Chris, hope you have Guinness on hold. :D

I don’t just have one screenshot to show you either… I have several to show you what installing all of these extensions does to your menus as well. Prepare to be amazed!

Installing the Extensions

To install the extensions I went through the Mozilla Extension page one by one, like any normal person would be doing. I went through the top Firefox extension page until I had all 200 installed. I did install repetitive extensions (such as the three versions of Forecast Fox) because I wanted to see if they affected each other, but there weren’t too many extensions that overlapped in functionality. The only ones that I really skipped were the dictionaries which there happened to be quite a few of.

After I had installed 50 of them I decided to restart the browser to see how things were going. It took about one minute to startup but everything looked like it installed correctly. Then I moved on and after about an hour I had all 200 installed and was ready to restart the browser. I didn’t think that it was going to work but to my surprise it did…

The Overall Result

Ahhh…the beauty of Firefox is in the eye of the beholder and let me say that it looks pretty sweet when running in Vista. It took 6-minutes to start Firefox with the 200 extensions installed but it worked! Not only that but there are the popup windows that you get for certain extensions right after they are installed…yeah…I received 47 of those. That also seemed to delay the initial start time but I didn’t sit there filling out information for all of the options, otherwise that would have taken me hours.

It was quite a site to see and there was a very limited viewing area for websites because of the toolbars. On my 24″ widescreen monitor I had about 2″ of viewable area at the bottom of the browser. But hey, it was still usable. Here is a screenshot of the overall result of a Google search that I performed:



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It is also pretty amazing what the Google website looks like when I have all of those extensions installed. Not to mention how funny it is when you type a search in the search box and press “Enter” just to see it replicate itself amongst all of the toolbars. That was probably my favorite part about the whole experience. ;)





Extensions That Were Installed

The All-in-One Sidebar decided to replace the default Add-ons page in Firefox with its own sidebar module. That was fine except for the fact that it couldn’t handle all of the extensions. It didn’t show a listing of anything that I had installed and in the title it said “undefined [0].” I was a little worried at first because I wanted to show a listing of the extensions that I had installed…but have no fear because there was another menu option that listed them without any issues. Here are the several screenshots of the extensions I installed:



Click any of the images above to enlarge them

Using the ListZilla extension that I installed (which is the only one that I installed that isn’t in the top few hundred according to Mozilla) I also generated an HTML listing of all 200 extensions. See, some extensions do have a purpose. ;)

Tools Menu

Many extensions will put some sort of “helpful” link in the Tools menu when you install it. Well, I can confirm that nearly all of them put something in the menu. You don’t even want to know how long it took me to find the “Options” in this disaster:



Click any of the images above to enlarge them

Possible Toolbars

I wanted to conserve some space so I ditched the Bookmarks toolbar that is included with Firefox. :) After all, it is all about the extensions, right? Here is a listing of all the toolbars that are available to choose from but I didn’t setup Weatherbug which is why it’s not shown:



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Possible Sidebars

Thank goodness that in Firefox you can’t have a bunch of sidebars open at the same time, because I would have absolutely no website viewing space! Here is a listing of the possible sidebars that could be shown:



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Other Less-Altered Things

Here are a few more screenshots of things that didn’t get hit quite so hard by the extensions hurricane…

File Menu



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New Menus



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Options Screen



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Memory Usage

Firefox is notorious for its memory leaks but it didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought. By the time Firefox would start after a few minutes it had climbed up to 145MB but it capped off around 195MB. I didn’t use it as much as I typically use a browser to see if memory leaks would really start to kick in but it was running for quite awhile. I did however find that it would become sluggish or become unresponsive pretty frequently but it only crashed once in the two-hours that I had it up and running. Here is a screenshot of the memory usage at the end of that two-hours:



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Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed this because I know that I sure found it interesting. I thought about uploading my profile to a file-sharing site but it would have taken way too long since it is over 120MB in size. It was definitely an experience and I was thinking about naming this the “Firefox 200!”

What are you still doing here? Go download some extensions. :D

You should also stop by the forum and share what extensions you are currently using.