Have you tried Firefox 2.0? It’s da shit, yo!

It’s bright, shiny, and has all the bells and whistles. It’s almost the perfect browser. Almost. I’ll post a full review when I’m done giving it the once over, nice and thorough like.

If you’ve never tried Firefox, Firefox became famous for its “tab browsing” functionality, which allows users to browse in multiple tabs within one window. Like windows within windows, or a file folder with multiple tabs that you browse through.

This made the browser preferable to many power users to Internet Explorer. In addition, supposedly Firefox and Mozilla wares in general are supposed to provide a more “secure internet experience” (whatever that means) than Internet Explorer, familiar to many in the blogmos as a gaping virus hole in a browser costume.

Recently, IE released version 7, which supposedly is more secure blah blah yawn etc. And it bit Mozilla’s tab browsing functionality, albeit with a much lesser degree of sophistication and finesse. And with all these “changes” IE still sucks giant yak balls, and remains inferior to Firefox in every conceivable way. When compared to Firefox, IE remains its jealous, prematurely balding, erectile dysfunction stricken little brother.

But…there’s always a but, right? But, the thing about Firefox that makes it so wonderful and yet at times so incessantly frustrating – like that girl you can’t forget – is the ability of the user to add “extensions” to Firefox to expand its functionality.

You can get all kinds of extensions. I’m sure some enginerd* somewhere is probably working on an extension to autonomously masturbate you where you sit, by sensing your arousal level as you browse porn sites.

I so love these extensions that I have twenty five – you can see some of them in the screen shot below – and I’ll probably get more when I have some time to browse the newest extensions. But one of these, alas, broke my heart, as it was the one I really really really wanted the mostest and bestest – the CorporateSnitch Notifier.

an actual screen shot from my actual computer

Ordinarily, I would not be associated with anything remotely connected to the word “snitch” – damn, I just grew a hive on my left tit just typing the word – and only this one time in the history of forever will I make this exception. Here’s why.

Aldave cares, you see. When the world is cold, and dark, and you feel so alone…err…ok. Let’s rephrase.

I care about shit that goes on in my world cuz I don’t want to die from some scary gub’ment made disease or from being stabbed in the neck by a meth head trying to steal my new printer/fax/scanner/copier combo.

So I get involved with my community and try to do my part to change this world from a world of tears, a world of fear, to a world laughter, a world of hopes because there’s so much that we share and its time we’re aware its a small world after all. Ahem.

So when I found out abut the CS Notifier I was excited because basically it gives browsers the chance to see, on each and every web page, that company/identity’s eco dirt, and then some.

Among the types of info CorporateSnitch will give you about any web page you visit, is whether or not that entity does animal testing, whether they have profited from the war in Iraq and the subsidiaries owned by that entity.

Below is a screen of how it looks on a web page, using this Amazon page for Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda as an example.

corporatesnitch, minimized

corporatesnitch, full size

And it works, too, which is a good thing. The fact that it totally fucks with your browser by making the every url the freakin’ same in every tab you have open is not!

A pain in the arse for anyone who copies urls on a regular basis, like um…bloggers and most developmentally advanced primates. This sucks!

And it’s not a matter of conflicts with other extensions. I disabled all of my extensions except for CorporateSnitch and to my horror this tiny extension with so much potential totally rendered my address bar virtually useless. WTF!?

So, with a chagrin I uninstalled it. When they fix this really annoying bug I’d love to re-install it. I believe if more people could see what the companies they support with their money are up to, they would make more earth friendly choices.

*Term “enginerd” lifted from this great blog.

*UPDATE: 12.23.2006 – 3:13 am – A new version, 1.1 came out after I wrote this. This version also does the same thing. It also makes some urls completely disappear from the address bar…so I uninstalled.