Improve Firefox's performance by turning off plugins

This is a bit off-topic, but if you're a Firefox user, it may be helpful. Like many Firefox users, I've installed many extensions, but since those extensions are essentially separate programs, they bog the browser down. Eventually, I go through and turn off or uninstall all but the essential extensions. However, that doesn't always fix the performance problems.

There's another category of Firefox add-on that most users pay much less attention to--plugins. Media players, such as those for Adobe Flash and Apple Quicktime, are installed into Firefox as plugins, but there are many other applications that silently add plugins to Firefox. You can uninstall an application, but its plugin may be left behind.

To review and clean up your plugins, go to the Tools menu, select Add-ons, and then click on the Plugins icon. Turn off all the plugins for media formats and applications that you no longer use. If you see a plugin that you don't recognize, you can turn it off, and if it causes problems with viewing certain content or running applications, simply turn it back on. Depending on the number of plugins you've got, you may see a significant improvement in Firefox's performance.

Hulu Part 2: At war with everybody

Paul Yanez, a talented developer who had previously written a clone of Joost as a Flash application, recently released a program called MyMediaPlayer to provide a desktop interface for Hulu. This app uses Hulu's published, public specifications for accessing and displaying videos. It uses the Hulu player, doesn't strip out any advertising, doesn't introduce any advertising of its own and is free. Nevertheless, Hulu has repeatedly come up with ways to block MyMediaPlayer, and it appears that after five rounds of reworking the application in order to get it working again, Mr. Yanez has given up.

In the same vein, Boxee was able to reestablish support for Hulu by connecting to that company's RSS feeds, the same feeds used by Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Nevertheless, in just a few hours, Hulu blocked Boxee's access to its RSS feeds. As I write this, Boxee claims that it has worked around Hulu's changes and can again access the RSS feeds. Perhaps the best thing that Boxee could do is to change its browser user agent to look like Internet Explorer, so that Hulu would have to effectively shut down the RSS feed to block Boxee.

I don't know why Hulu is doing this, but it's only making itself look idiotic. All of its blocks will eventually be worked around, and its content isn't so precious that it's only available in one place. As I've written before, its actions are encouraging, rather than discouraging, piracy. Every time I see one of its commercials, I see a company that doesn't get it trying to act cool. Perhaps the people who called the company "ClownCo" weren't wrong, just premature.

Apparently, I'm a Spammer...

Ever since I started this blog a few years ago, I've been asked to complete a CAPTCHA (that distorted graphic you sometimes see that's supposed to differentiate between a computer and a real person) when creating new posts. I didn't think anything of it until the most recent revisions in Blogger's draft.blogger.com site, which consistently hides the Captcha word verification box and buttons and makes it impossible for me to post entries (I've tried both Firefox 3 and IE 7, with no success.) So, I switched back to the old-style Blogger, and then clicked on the little "Why do I have this?" link, which explained that Google's massive computer arrays think that this is a spam blog. (I suppose that whether or not my writing constitutes spam is in the eyes of the beholder, but in this case, the beholder is a server with a dual-core processor.) They think that my blog is spam, but it's perfectly good to sell AdWords on. Hmm...

On July 3rd, I asked Google to review my blog and turn off word verification. They apparently forgot to look at it, because I just had to ask again. I'm getting close to moving the blog to my own website--no great loss of traffic for Google, of course, but a good example of how relying on algorithms rather than human reviews and common sense can sometimes result in unintended consequences.