Have you ever done anything and thought “oh, (insert expletive) I should have known better”? I did that recently when signing up for an account with one of the social media sites. I won’t say who since they are not the only ones who are guilty of this behavior.

 

I use Firefox as my browser and one of the things I particularly Iove about it is all the great plug-ins that are available. There are some that I now consider essential to my work doing web development, such as Firebug. The unfortunate thing about the plug-ins is that they all take up real estate in the browser window making the area that shows websites smaller. However, I am willing to sacrifice some of that for something that is going to make my life easier. 

 

When I signed up for an account with this provider, I was doing so because I thought what they offered would be a convenience for me. I’m sure it will be in the long run once I figure out how to get what I want out of it. However, when signing up, the site detected that I was using Firefox and suggested that I download their plug-in for the browser. Nice of them to make a suggestion, right? I had that split second of thought – “wow, this could be bad or it could be good but there is no way for me to preview it.” So I took a chance.

 

I expected to just have a couple of new icons that would make it easier to access my account and maybe a tool or two, but instead my browser got taken over. I got a side bar that takes up a couple of inches in the left hand side of the window and a new tool bar row that takes up room across the top. I also got this set of three icons in the footer and in the tool bar next to my home button. Plus, there is a new drop down just for this in the top most tool bar. Over kill? Yeah, just maybe. I mean, come on, I can see the tools in one spot, I don’t need them in five! The browser isn’t that big and I haven’t decided to dedicate my life to posting on this site. Plus, they have now taken up so much valuable real estate it just makes me mad. A little consideration for the user would be nice and would go a long way to creating loyalty.

 

So, what do I do about this? The side bar has an “x” to close it and after a couple of times it has finally given up and gone away. In the drop down menu that was added, there was actually a way to disable all the other tools. It took off all but the icons next to the home button. This is more reasonable and has given me my space back with just a couple useful tools. But what if I really just want something completely gone? In the top menu, under the “Tools” drop down, there is a choice for “Add-ons”. Here, in an easy to use interface, I can scroll to the plug-in and click one of the buttons associated with it to either disable or uninstall it. This is so very nice and easy and adds to my love of Firefox.

 

There are add-ons for Internet Explorer and I would imagine that they have the same problems. In IE they can be disabled by also going to “Tools” in the menu. From there, go to “Manage Add-ons” and “Enable or Disable Add-ons” in the fly-out menu. This will bring up a dialogue box that lists all the add-ons. Find the add-on and click on the name. This will enable the Settings box that has choices to enable or disable the add-on. If you want to uninstall one, you are on your own.