Greasemonkey and local files

I'm a big fan of the Javadoc Search Frame userscript. Today's apperent outage of the Javadoc page has forced me to use a local copy of the documentation. I did some poking around on the Greasemonkey mailing list and found that if you still want to run this userscript (or any other userscript) on local files, you will need to edit your about:config. An update changed the default greasemonkey.fileIsGreaseable in about:config from true to false for security reasons. If you want to run Greasemonkey on local files, simply change that value to true.

Also, if you're using the shiny new Scriptish, the value to set to true is extensions.scriptish.fileIsGreaseable.

Cheers!

Firefox vs Chrome Performance: A language difference?

Like many folks, I've been pretty blown away by the speed of Chrome (especially with respect to running JavaScript intensive sites). Currently, I use both Firefox and Chrome (depending on what I'm doing), but primarily Firefox as there are still some addons I can't live without.

Though I am excited to see the Out Of Process (OOP) Electrolysis project (which is now in beta) and the upcoming JägerMonkey JavaScript engine, I've begun to wonder if some of the performance differences we're seeing are more deeply rooted. Now I do know there are things that are supposedly not possible with Chrome's extension support, and of course with greater functionality comes reduced performance. But I've lately been wondering if the differences are at the language level. Does the language each was written in greatly alter performance? Have a look at this graphic

Source: Ohloh

Just look at all that JavaScript! While some sources favor JavaScript as a "first-class language" (and maybe I'm misinterpreting their meaning here), I'm not convinced that makes sense for desktop applications. There are some advantages to having portions of Firefox be in a web language, it makes it easy for web developers to extend & theme. But I'm not sure it makes sense to use it as extensively as they appear to have done.

For example, it would seem that the addon manager (nsExtensionManager.js) and session storage (sessionStore.js) are both JavaScript. How do I know these are their names? I didn't look at the code, but apparently I was putting Firefox under a bit too much pressure and I got the message saying these scripts had stopped responding (not at the same time). (Though this does happen less often with my portable Firefox, so maybe I need to clear out the profile).

It will of course help when we have the content and the UI in separate processes, and maybe help some more when Firefox gets a faster JavaScript engine, but I wonder if you can ever get really good performance from a language like JavaScript. I'm not saying to write the thing in assembly, I'm just saying maybe it makes sense to write the lower level components in a lower level language. What do you think?

As two somewhat unrelated sidenotes: What do you think the impact on Firefox's future will be with the loss of their tech lead? And do you think Google will finance Mozilla now that they're in some competition with each other?

GoogleMonkeyR and SkipScreen Incompatibility

I'm a user of the GoogleMonkeyR userscript, and for a few months I had been thinking that Google had changed something that caused the script to have the first result right-aligned instead of left-aligned. It turns out, the problem is actually because I'm also a user of SkipScreen. The problem lies in the 'search refinements' setting, it must be disabled for GoogleMonkeyR to work properly, either do this from the GUI SkipScreen options dialog, or change the value extensions.skipscreen.searchrefinementsactive to false. Hopefully, this saves someone else some confusion.

Vaccuum Your Firefox

This has been blogged about in the usual places already, but for those who haven't seen it:
There's an addon for Firefox that defragments its sqlite database, called Vacuum Places. I recently gave this a whirl and was pleased with the results. The responsiveness of my address bar was noticeably improved. Now, bear in mind that I use Firefox a lot. I have over 4000 bookmarks -- its kinda getting out of control. Those who don't use it as much probably won't notice much of a difference, but give it a whirl and see what it does for you. Note that there is a disclaimer saying to backup you profile (easily done with MozBackup), but I haven't had any issues with it.

Some other addons you might want to check out:
Adblock Plus - never see another ad
SkipScreen - auto waits on file upload sites
DownloadHelper - download youtube videos, a page of images at once, and more

DownThemAll! - download everything on a page, based on filters (all pdfs, all images, etc)
Greasmonkey - run custom javascript in website to do all sorts of nifty things (use Greasefire to light up when scripts are available on the current site or get some here)
Stylish - loads custom css into sites (get some here)

Tab Mix Plus - one of the biggest reasons I use it is for the 'duplicate tab' option, but the 'close other tabs', 'close right tabs', and 'close left tabs' are pretty nifty too.