Top 10 Firefox extensions to avoid

By Peter Smith

April 10, 2007 12:00 PM ET

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Greasemonkey

Hey, wait just a minute. Wasn't this on our list of best extensions? Well, yes it was. Greasemonkey is a really nifty extension to use, as long as you know what you're doing with it. It can potentially get you in trouble because it allows JavaScripts written by other people to run in Firefox. If one of those scripts is malicious, your system could be at risk.

To stay out of trouble, you should use Greasemonkey only with scripts you know are safe, either because you're familiar enough with JavaScript to satisfy yourself or because the script has enough comments at userscripts.org to indicate that people are using it with no ill effects.

If you're not willing to do your homework, skip this extension altogether.

ScribeFire (formerly Performancing)

This falls into the category of extensions that seem pointless. What we have here is a browser-based tool for writing blog posts. But don't most blogs already have a browser-based editor that works just fine?

Perhaps there's a blogging system out there that needs this kind of helper app, but we're not familiar with it. Until we come upon such a beast, we'd rather skip the overhead of an extension and stick to our blogging software's built-in editor.



WordPress' built-in editor on the top, ScribeFire on the bottom. Do you need both?

Don't get us wrong, ScribeFire is a nice piece of software. We just don't see a need for it at this time. If you do happen to be using blogging software without a decent editor, ScribeFire would be a fine addition to your extension toolbox.

TrackMeNot

This is another of those extensions for the overly paranoid. The developers apparently became concerned with search engine profiling -- the process in which search engines track your queries and build a demographic profile of you based on those queries -- after a list of three months' worth of search queries from 657,000 AOL members was released on the Web.


	A small section of a log file of searches performed by TrackMeNot.

We don't mean to downplay privacy concerns, but the technique used in TrackMeNot is questionable. The extension runs in the background while you surf, and sends random search queries to AOL, Yahoo, Google and MSN search engines. What a waste of system resources for both you and the search engines you rely on!

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