Extend My Firefox Please

4 comments

This is an open call out there for a skilled (or not-so-skilled as I'm not so sure how complicated this is) Firefox extension programmer who'd be interested in doing the world some good.

I'd love to see a really simple Firefox extension that recognizes special link types and at the very least gives a warning "Do you want to continue?" dialogue before the link takes action. A more sophisticated extension might change my cursor when I hover over a special link to indicate what will happen, but the simple option works fine for me too. I'm particularly thinking that this would be useful for links to PDFs and mailto links that open a new email message. It's incredibly frustrating when you click on a blind link and all of the sudden your computer freezes for thirty seconds while loading the behemoth that it is Acrobat Reader.

If it needs some interface elements, I'd be glad to help out. Any suggestions? Any takers?

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Daniel Burka -

Thanks for the link Jake. I can't believe I haven't seen that before. That's a pretty good extension and is very close to what I was hoping to find. Something that's not invasive on the website's UI would be nice though. This is still awfully close to what I was looking for. Nice.

David Schontzler -

http://www.stilleye.com

You should be able to just change your userContent.css file in the /profile/chrome directory. I don't remember the CSS selectors exactly, but it's something like:

:link[href~=.pdf], :visited[href~=.pdf], etc etc {
cursor : crosshair !important;
}

Adam Bramwell -

http://www.octapod.org/adam

There's plenty of articles on hacking Acrobat Reader down to the bare essentials, which really helps on load time. Worth doing regardless.

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Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm one of the founders of Milk Inc.. For several years I was the creative director at Digg and previous to Milk, I was the director of design at Tiny Speck. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

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