Chickenfoot
David MacIver drew my attention to Chickenfoot today: “a Firefox extension that puts a programming environment in the browser’s sidebar so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing.” It sounds like a slightly better Greasemonkey (although I must admit I haven’t touched Greasemonkey for a long time and it has no doubt changed since then.)
Being unable to install it was the final straw in making me decide to upgrade firefox. I’ve been running the default debian version out of a combination of laziness and paranoia about security but in the last few months I’ve really began to notice how out of date it is. More and more sites have been crashing my browswer. Fewer and fewer extensions have been working. But like the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water, I have noticed all this happening but failed to jump out.
Turns out it was very simple to do. I just added backports my /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://www.backports.org/debian sarge-backports main
then
apt-get update && apt-get install firefox -t sarge-backports
Now I’m finally able to install Chickenfoot but I haven’t played with it yet because I’m catching up on the 1000+ unread posts in bloglines that I haven’t been able to read for months since the sites last upgrade made it crash my browser.