Firefox Plugins that are sure to Make Webmasters Hate You
I’ve run across this a few places, where a webmaster actually BEGS users NOT to use a firefox plugin or addon when visiting their site. So, I thought it might be interesting to compile a list of those plugins that will have webmasters really disliking you, hating you, banning your ip because of abuse and otherwise marking you off their Christmas Card list.
Speed Dial – can reload a page frequently looking for the latest content. Seriously – there’s something called the refresh button. If it’s too hard to use you don’t need to know what the latest content is. The problem – if people leave their browsers up and forget and leave this switched on… loading a page every 60 seconds can be annoying if it’s one person – imagine if it was 1000, 10000, etc. Server melting…
Overaggressive Ad blocking plugins. Let’s face it, if content is free online then the only way webmasters make money off of it is by advertising. It’s the same thing with broadcast tv. The ads pay for you to be able to see the content for free. I found this webmaster pledge to not host annoying jiggling/bouncing/distracting ads to be an interesting read. The truth is, without the motive to make a bit of money for the VAST hours of time people spend on their sites, many would dry up and quit. Mozilla’s Adblock extension is listed as a GOOD example of configurable ad blocking software.
Fasterfox and any of it’s variations that use pre-fetching. Bandwidth HOG. One of the things this plugin does to make the internet faster is that it starts prefetching EVERY link on the page that you’re currently reading. Which means on this site one page visit would equal about 260 page loads. (One for each article link on the main page, categories, pages, up and down the sidebar, etc. etc. etc.)
As a general rule you can evaluate whether an add-on is going to put you on a blocklist from a webmaster by the following questions: Does it load more than one page at once from the site? Does it repeatedly load pages from the site? Does it neuter advertising content without user control? If the answer to any of these questions is YES, take a serious reconsideration about using the plugin. Certainly there’s some grey area. But I do know of some webmasters that ban users that 1)don’t allow the display of ads or 2) use excessive bandwidth.