easy to extend, but it can be dangerous

Of the popular browsers, Firefox has certainly joined those ranks recently and rapidly. But its appeal is not just to the user. Reyes explains how it was made from the ground up to be easily extensible by programmers. He illustrates this at length, with over 150 hacks developed by its fans. These are grouped into sections like performance, menus and navigation.

But you may want to try and thumb through the detailed contents and then through the hacks, to see if any catch your fancy. Because the book can be used in two ways. Firstly, to get ideas about new extensions, by seeing what has already been done. (A lot!) Secondly, to scope out if any of that earlier work is worth installing on your machine. To either end, the book naturally refers to websites where the extensions can be found. The book is a hardcopy portal.

You should also be careful. The very flexibility of Firefox can mean trouble if you go to a computer at a publicly accessible place and use it there. Think of a library or cybercafe. Several of the extensions can be used by a phisher to mislead what you see when browsing. Firefox on your machine can help protect you, and the book talks about this. But on an unknown machine, some extensions can be turned against you. The book never talks about this aspect of Firefox. It's not the fault of the author. He's part of the Firefox community. They are all so fired up about it. Which is cool. But they largely neglected to consider that its ease of programming can be a weapon turned against the unwary user.

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• easy to extend, but it can be dangerous
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