Plug-in's and browsers

Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror) tweeted earlier: “On Firefox: ‘add-ons aren’t a big draw for me – I just need a browser, not a circus.’”. I don’t know whether this was a quotation of himself, or someone else; but it’s something that I’ve heard mentioned before.

Just because they’re there, doesn’t mean you have to install them.

A plug-in model in your browser allows you to install as many, or as few, plug-ins as you need. A lot of them are useless, but if there’s one that can boost your productivity, isn’t that worth it? I’d rather have a browser with a plug-in model, and one really useful plug-in, than a browser without both.

A prime example is FireBug, I couldn’t live without that plug-in. I feel stranded in IE or Safari when it comes to interrogating pages.

FireBug possibly highlights a hole in the developer support from the Firefox development team itself, but with a plug-in model you can fill that hole yourself rather than relying on their team; like we’ve had to do for years with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

/rant off