Posted 10/08/09 at 08:05:17 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Developers of the Firefox Add-on, SkipScreen, had a bit of a rude awakening recently when Mozilla said they’d received a takedown request. The request was made by file hosting site, MediaFire. They claimed that SkipScreen violated their terms of use. To their credit, Mozilla asked the SkipScreen devs to respond before they’d pull the add-on down. Mediafire contends that SkipScreen “bypasses the MediaFire website and steals costly bandwidth”. They also claimed that SkipScreen displays content from other pages.

SkipScreen allows users to bypass the tedious wait times on sharing sites like MediaFire and Rapidshare. This ingenious little add-on will automatically click through whatever hoops necessary to get to the actual download page. Then it will extract and execute the code for the download link. This is how it bypasses those screens that force you to wait ‘X’ seconds, unless you register. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote SkipScreen’s response. They rightly pointed out that the add-on doesn’t technically bypass any screens. It just automates the process of finding a download link. The EFF also pointed out that SkipScreen does not present content from another site. MediaFire has probably just brought more attention to SkipScreen by going through with this complaint. Apparently, they’ve never heard of the Streisand Effect. So… the add-on is still available on the Mozilla site, get it here.

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Posted 05/18/09 at 11:00:00 AM by David Murphy

Just like the Spy pulling a fast one over on the Sniper for this week's Team Fortress 2 update, I'm not going to be profiling a list of freeware applications this time around. Nope. Not a single program. I'm going meta with this update. Instead of tossing a list of superior apps your way, I'm going to give you a list of the top five Firefox extensions that will take your power downloading to untold heights of awesomeness.

Now what does that entail?

Are you sick of having to sort through your expanding download directory just to find and organize the new files you've picked up? Boom. There's an add-on for that. Does it frustrate you every time you have to wait for a countdown on one of the free file hosts before you can grab the file you want? Oh-ho-ho: There's an add-on for that as well! Do you hate the very act of clicking on multiple links on a page to download files? You might be a little lazy on that one, but no hate here. Yes, there's an application to make even this most-mundane of tasks easier.

If you aren't using Firefox, well, I can't say much to that. But check out this list anyway -- I bet you'll be tempted to switch over once you realize all the additional functionality you can pack into this foxy browser. Click the jump (no, an add-on won't do that for you) and let's get started!

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