Firefox extensions ,known as ADD-ONs,enhances your browsing experience without any nasty side effects.But some extensions are "bad" in unapparent ways, or just don't provide enough benefits to be worth running because either they crash your browser or suck up all your CPU power) either get fixed quickly or simply vanish.So lets have a glimpse of these ADD-ONs
1.Fasterfox/Cooliris
This Web accelerator has a "pre-fetching" mechanism.While your system is idle, Fasterfox silently starts following links and downloading the destination pages. The idea is that if you then decide to click on one of these links, the page is already cached on your local machine and will pop up very quickly.This is an waste of bandwidth.
2.NoScript
This extension is hugely popular and works as advertised, giving you control over which JavaScript, Java and other executable content on a page can run, depending on that content's source domain. You whitelist the sites you consider safe and blacklist the sites you don't.But for the average Web surfer, constantly having to whitelist sites so that scripts can execute in order to give you a fully formed Web experience gets tedious very quickly.Most typical Web surfers who install this extension remove it after some time.
3.PDF Download
PDF Download lets you control how Firefox handles PDF files when you click on them -- you can display a pop-up box that lets you choose whether to download, open or view the file as HTML.The extension can run into trouble when it tries to handle certain PDFs. Some Web sites send you to a "silent interstitial" page for tracking purposes or some other reason, then redirect you to the PDF. In these cases, the extension won't work. Usually when this happens, PDF Download just gets bypassed, but we've had Firefox freeze up when dealing with redirected PDFs.
4.VideoDownloader
The problem is that the extension has to connect to a Web site in order to work, and more often than not, you'll find that instead of a download window, what you get is "Service Temporarily Unavailable." When it does finally work, the download is infuriatingly slow.Perhaps the extension is a victim of its own success, but until the server issues are addressed, save yourself some aggravation and skip this one.
5.Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey is a really nifty extension to use, as long as you know what you're doing with it. It can potentially get you in trouble because it allows JavaScripts written by other people to run in Firefox. If one of those scripts is malicious, your system could be at risk.To stay out of trouble, you should use Greasemonkey only with scripts you know are safe, either because you're familiar enough with JavaScript to satisfy yourself or because the script has enough comments at userscripts.org to indicate that people are using it with no ill effects.
6.ScribeFire
This falls into the category of extensions that seem pointless. What we have here is a browser-based tool for writing blog posts. But don't most blogs already have a browser-based editor that works just fine? If you do happen to be using blogging software without a decent editor, ScribeFire would be a fine addition to your extension toolbox.But until we come upon such a case we'd rather skip the overhead of an extension and stick to our blogging software's built-in editor.
7.TrackMeNot
The technique used in TrackMeNot is questionable. The extension runs in the background while you surf, and sends random search queries to AOL, Yahoo, Google and MSN search engines. What a waste of system resources for both you and the search engines you rely on!
8.Tabbrowser Preferences
The problem is that if you uninstall the extension, it doesn't reset your tab settings, leaving you with tweaks that you have to undo by going to the about:config page, which many users don't understand or even know about.If you uninstall an extension, you do so for a reason, and once it's uninstalled, the browser should be reset to its default state.
Links to check -
Computer World
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