SillyDog701

[James]

By Ryan Paul

Add-ons behaving badly: the challenges of policing the Firefox ecosystem
Firefox is frustrated with misbehaving add-ons

Firefox's powerful add-on system is arguably one of the browser's best features, but it is also occasionally a source of problems for Mozilla. Policing the add-on ecosystem to ensure that third-party code doesn't degrade the quality of the Firefox user experience is a major challenge.

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UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2

[James]

Another problematic add-on that was recently called out by a Mozilla employee is the McAfee Site Advisor, a product that integrates with the user's Web browser and displays safety ratings for websites. Nicholas Nethercote, who leads Mozilla's MemShrink project, issued a warning about an "appalling memory leak" in the McAfee browser add-on.

He investigated the add-on himself after seeing reports from users about inflated memory usage. He found that it has a severely negative impact on Firefox's memory consumption and is so bad that can potentially impacts the browser's performance and stability.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2

[Fulvio]

I am sure that some addon is misbehaving, but, considering that addons are not integral part of the browser, they can go as fast as they came, and, as a rule, I do not accept stuff that comes with other downloads, like the various toolbars. The Add-on Compatibility Reporter allowed me to use unsupported addons and themes. It is a moot point with Firefox 10+, but the use of add-ons, with no problems is a shot in the dark.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120216 Firefox/10.0.2 SeaMonkey/2.7.2