I’m a big fan of Firefox, and over time I tend to collect a rather large number of plugins. The problem is, despite all the great functionality they provide, you can get carried away and seriously impact browser performance. As well, not all plugins are created equal as far as performance goes, and not all play nicely together.

My long time friend and fellow Internet Software Developer, Steve Pothoven, has posted a test on his blog which measures your browser’s processing speed. It can be used in two important ways:

1) to address the issue I mentioned in the first paragraph and help you check from time to time how your browser is performing after you’ve added more plugins, and

2) to determine just how much Javascript you may want to place into a user’s browser. His blog post lists a sampling of various computers and browsers so you can see how much various combinations can handle.

As for adjusting your Firefox to improve performance, when I first ran the test on my laptop, I had a .08. I disabled all my plugins and jumped drastically to almost .20. I began re-enabling the plugins one by one, and in the end determined that all were acceptable except two: Firebug and Yslow (which requires Firebug). Those two plugins destroyed my browser performance. For now, I’ve turned them both off, and enjoy a healthy .15 rating. Note: leaving Firebug enabled as a plugin, but disabled within the Firebug’s preferences does NOT improve performance.
Visit Steve’s test page and see what your performance is and where you fall within the sample numbers. Try disabling any plugins you have and testing again to see the difference.

Tip: If you have a large number of plugins, it may be time consuming to disable them all, so start Firefox in safe mode, by doing Run -> CMD and then entering ‘firefox -safe-mode’

I’m a keyboard person. That is, I prefer using the keyboard over the mouse, and I don’t like switching back and forth. If I’m browsing the web, then I use the mouse only, since no keyboard is needed, but when I’m developing, I try to avoid touching the mouse as much as possible. I use keyboard shortcuts whenever there is one available.

But, attempting to open an application on your PC can be difficult without using the mouse. Unless that is, you install SmartStartMenu. I’ve been using SmartStartMenu for several months now, and it’s one of those applications that you install, and then use so much, that you take it for granted and forget it’s not normally installed in Windows. I was reminded of it recently when using a computer without SmartStartMenu, and I attempted to start an application with it.

Upon install and start up, SmartStartMenu loads into the task bar, a small search box (resizable) with a green arrow box on the left, and a drop down arrow selection box on the right. See the figure below. The arrow on the right shows a list of applications from the index, and the arrow on the left allows you to configure SmartStartMenu.

The Win-S shortcut takes your cursor immediately to the search field, and typing in it opens a select box of all matching files, shortcuts, an applications in the paths you’ve configured the software to use. See the figure below. In this example I began typing ‘open’, in order to load an OpenOffice application. After typing ‘ope’, the figure shows what SmartStartMenu has found for matches. The Most Frequently Used (MFU in the config settings) is selected automatically. (There are different settings for Auto-Select.)

From here, you can use the arrow keys to select from the drop down or continue typing to further narrow down the options. Once the item you are looking for is selected, simply hit enter to use it.

You can run executables, batch files, shortcuts links, and urls. You can add any directory to scan for items to be included in the search. These items are cached at startup, but you can refresh at any time to pick up something you have installed or added. You can create extra shortcuts with different names in order to improve the speed of finding your applications.

SmartStartMenu is a great addition for Windows users who prefer using the keyboard whenever possible. You can download the freeware application from the SmartStartMenu web site.

I’ve been using the Web Developer Toolbar for quite some time. It’s a Firefox plugin providing the web developer with some very useful tools. Blogger Christian Watson from Smiley Cat recently wrote an article called, 10 Things You May Not Know About the Web Developer Toolbar. Christian was right, I wasn’t aware of many of the features he outlines, like viewing color information, small screen rendering, populating form fields, marking all links unvisited, and a speed report. Read all ten at his site, Smiley Cat – web design blog.

I recently found this nice and simple Firefox plugin called View Source Chart, created by Jennifer Madden. It is used via the right-click menu, and displays a nicely formatted, color coded, and indented view of the source of the web page. Elements are also individually boxed in various containers, like for paragraphs, making it easy to find your way around the source code. You can also collapse these containers with a simple mouse click.

While comments are certainly an important part of code documentation, and become much appreciated later on during maintenance and support phases of an application, they can be quite tedious to write, particularly in cases where you are documenting the obvious. In some situations you may be able to get away without writing comments for these types of methods, but in some situations your IDE or Javadoc report may still flag those methods as missing Javadoc comments and so it’s best to put them in anyway.

JAutodoc is a super Eclipse plugin for assisting you with writing comments. It comes with customizable method prefix mappings to comment phrases. For example, if your method begins with ‘add’ the phrase ‘Adds the’ will be placed in the comment. Thus, if the method name was ‘addEmployee’ the comment text would be ‘Adds the employee’. If the method were ‘isActive’, the method text becomes ‘Checks if is active’. All of the mappings are customizable from the plugin properties.

It can be set to use the Eclipse comment formatter, to replace the existing Javadoc or to complete it, as well as optionally add a todo annonation to it for future review. It fills out all the parameters passed and return parameters as well.

You can highlight an individual method and right click and choose JAutodoc from the menu, or select the entire source of the class and complete all the javadocs. It saves a lot of time getting the skeleton of your javadoc comments in place, allowing you to focus your commenting time and energy on writing meaningful descriptions where necessary.

To read more about the plugin and download it, see the JAutodoc web site.