Or maybe you don’t feel inadequate. Maybe it’s just unbearably annoying. Yeah, let’s go with that one.

Either way, if the baby photos are your big Facebook peeve, a new Chrome extension has you covered. It’s called Unbaby.Me and it promises to remove all traces of your friends’ children from your otherwise pleasant news feed by replacing them with pictures of cats, or cars, or bacon, or whatever you want that’s not babies.

The way it works is pretty simple. Upon installation, you’re met with a list of trigger words. If the extensions sees any of these words, it’ll know to replace the photo attached to those words with something else. Here’s the default list of trigger words, but you can add any word that you want to the list:

year old, so adorable, our family, just learned to walk, years old, month old, months old, so adorable, pajamas, eating solid foods, crawling, so cute, is precious, is too cute, look at those cheeks, cutest baby ever, newborn, and mommy, looks like dad, toesies, just like mom, looks like mom, mother and, father and, cute baby, can’t wait to meet, gorgeous baby, infant, new addition to the family, first ballgame, day old, bundle of joy, birth, ultrasound, baby feet, lbs oz, toddler, carriage, cradle, gave birth, little one, baby boy, baby girl, 1st birthday, is growing up, diaper, diapers, tiny toes, all snuggly, binky, pacifier, bib, onesie, sockies, gerber, such an angel, what an angel, little angel, little princess, daycare, tantrum, won’t stop crying, is finally napping, first steps, carseat,

They suggest adding the name of any new baby your friends have.

The application’s default is to replace the baby photos with cat photos from an Instagram feed, but on the option menu you can add any new feed that you want – as long as it’s photo-heavy.

Here’s what it will look like on your news feed:

I’ve tried it out, and I can tell you that it works just like they say it will. The only thing you have to decide now is this:
If you’re really someone’s friend, shouldn’t you want to see photos of their most-adored creations? If the answer is no, maybe you should think about removing them from your friends list.

[via AllFacebook]

The Mozilla team announced today that Firefox users have downloaded a cumulative 3 billion add-ons. The add-on was introduced in 2004 as a way of extending the Firefox experience beyond what we have to come to expect. Add-on downloads got another boost in 2009 when Mozilla introduced them for the mobile version of Firefox.

One reason as to why add-ons are so popular could be that over 85 percent of all Firefox users have at least one installed. Add-on users also have an average of five add-ons installed. As for most popular add-ons, it’s a cavalcade of regulars – AdBlock Plus, Firebug, NoScript, Personas Plus and VideoDownloaderHelper.

To celebrate this undoubtedly momentous occasion, the team at Firefox has created a lovely infographic. Check it out:

One of the major problems with current builds of Firefox is that some add-ons can cause massive memory leaks that forces the browser to consume a lot of memory. This slows down your computer which slows down your browser and then you switch to Chrome because you’ve had enough. The team at Mozilla is going to fix that problem in Firefox 15.

You may be familiar with the MemShrink project that has sought to address the issue of older apps leaking memory let and right. That project is going to be integrated into Firefox starting with Firefox 15 according to Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote. The change should make Firefox 15 faster and less likely to crash.

It’s good news for Firefox users because Mozilla has found that a lot of the most popular add-ons for Firefox have suffered from memory leak problems in the past. Popular add-ons like Adblock Plus and GreaseMonkey suffer from the problem. Nethercoote points out that the developers have fixed these leaks in the apps, but not all apps have been fixed. That’s what this patch in Firefox 15 is developed for – to fix the leaks when developers can’t.

So what kind of benefits can we hope to expect with the release of Firefox 15? Nethercote did a test of Firefox 14 and 15 coupled with a known leaky add-on and then ran MemBench, a memory benchmark tool. The difference between the two is pretty drastic:

As you can see, Firefox 15 is much better at handling memory and preventing memory leaks caused by add-ons. It should be going into beta soon now that Firefox 14 is out, so look forward to it then to start getting a faster Firefox experience. If you can’t wait, you can grab the Aurora release which contains the fix.

Fortunately for us, Nicholas Nethercote, a Firefox team member, turned us on to a patch from Kyle Huey that should fix the problem. It prevents what’s called an “add-on zombie compartment” which saves a ton of memory in the long run. During Nethercorte’s tests, he found that the patch not only fixed the problem, but sped up Firefox with a four times reduction in memory.

The patch should effectively make Firefox faster in slower machine and stop pauses in Firefox on higher end machines. The latter would definitely help me out as I’ve run into long pauses in the past that completely cripple all the momentum I’ve built up while working.

Unfortunately, it appears that the patch is not all inclusive. Add-ons built using older versions of the Firefox add-on SDK are immune to the effects of the patch. They still cause all kinds of nasty memory leaks. In fact, the patch made them leak even more making the problem much worse. Nethercote says the problem could be widespread because a lot of add-ons were built using the old SDK.

The only solution the team can think of is to encourage add-on creators to rebuild their apps using the new version of the add-on SDK which you can find here.

This couldn’t be made at a better time with Mozilla recently detailing all of its release channels. It’s these kind of problems that they need developer help with on the Nightly builds. Using the patch and the new version of the add-on SDK are a quick fix for now, but testing out new features in Nightly are the only sure fire way to permanently fix these kind of problems from happening again. If you have Nigthly, Nethercorte wants developers to monitor about:compartments to see if add-ons are causing more leaks.

[h/t: @mattcutts]

The update, as we reported yesterday, brings new features to the browser, but nothing worth celebrating over.

The update features extension improvements with most extensions that work on Firefox 4 working on Firefox 10. It includes support for full-screen Web apps and anti-aliasing for WebGL applications.

Firefox 10 also debuts the new “Extended Support Release” for businesses. This allows the browser to only download necessary security updates so businesses no longer have to deal with a new browser update every six weeks. The ESR version will change every seven releases, so November will be the next update for those users.

For those unaware, Firefox changing versions so rapidly is due to Chrome being on the same release schedule. While Internet Explorer is still the most used browser on the Web, Chrome and Firefox are battling neck-and-neck for the number two spot. The sped up release schedule is helping Firefox remain competitive.

Firefox 10 will be released as a silent update to current users today. If you haven’t used Firefox yet, now is a good time to try it out. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux today.

PC Mag is reporting that the update will apply to the desktop formats as well as the mobile edition for Android. For those “people,” who never upgraded to Firefox 4, version 3.6 will be updated to version 3.6.9 which only adds security and stability fixes.

During a meeting today, Firefox announced a new hire for Mozilla’s marketing team. Pete Scanlon, who previously worked for Google’s campaigns for Chrome, is now working for Mozilla.

As with the past few full version updates to Firefox, there’s not much going on for consumers. The new capabilities are mostly for developers.

A big improvement from previous versions is how Firefox 10 handles extensions. Instead of rejecting extensions not specifically made for Firefox 10, it will assume extensions are compatible unless otherwise noted. Most extensions compatible with Firefox 4 will work fine on Firefox 10.

Interestingly, Mozilla reported that 75 percent of all extensions in use were not acquired from their own addon site. They have updated the browser to support those extensions as well.

The update will also allow users to hotfix update extensions themselves to address minor issues.

The Android version of Firefox 10 will get multitouch gesture support. Firefox Sync will also be updated to allow users to sync their phone or table with Firefox without having to be at their desktop computer.

The changes for developers are more robust featuring enhancements to code editors and anti-aliasing for WebGL content. CSS3D Transforms will bring 3D animation to 2D objects. They will also add in support for full-screen Web applications.

Firefox 10 will also be the first Extended Support Release version. The program was made for enterprise IT professionals who were concerned that the more-frequent Firefox updates were unsupportable in a business environment.

Firefox 12, which is a few more weeks out, will finally add a tab page that users of Chrome and Opera enjoy now.

The Fire Gestures add-on allows you to perform different Firefox operations with a simple gesture of the mouse. For example, you can open a new tab by holding a right click and moving left and right from anywhere in the window.

You can perform a lot of functions with different gestures, which are completely customizable via the add-on’s options. You cans set up which gestures you want to perform each operation.

The add-on is similar to other mouse gestures add-ons, but this one is compatible with Firefox 3.5.

2. Add to Search Bar

The Add to Search Bar add-on is incredibly useful if you do a lot of searching in your day-to-day tasks. Instead of having only the few default search engines to choose from, you can right click on any search box on the web and add that to the list of search engines in your search bar.

3. Drag & DropZones

The Drag & DropZones add-on makes the previous add-on even more useful. With this, you can highlight any text on a page and simply drag it to bring up a series of windows – one for each search engine from your search bar. This is also fully customizable. It can be more convenient than going up to the search bar, finding the correct search engine from the pull-down menu, and then searching.

4. Workaround Bug 489729

Ever since I downloaded version 3.5 of FireFox, I have encountered an extremely annoying issue where something I was doing was somehow taking the tab I was in and sending it to a different window. The problem was, I could not figure out what I was doing to cause this.

Eventually, I was directed to this Workaround Bug add-on, which took care of the problem. It turned out to be that clicking a tab once and then moving your mouse in a downward motion caused a new window to open – something I apparently, inadvertently do a lot.

This add-on allows you to disable this function.

5. IE Tab

The IE tab function allows you to convert the page you’re on to Internet Explorer view. This can be helpful for checking pages to make sure they look ok in both browsers.

Also, when you happen to come across a page with some issues, you can switch over to IE with the click of a button, and see if it works better there.

6. Shareaholic

The Shareaholic button is convenient for those who like to share a lot of content. Basically, you can send any page to any social network of your choosing by right clicking and choosing the one you want to use from the menu. There is also a button that is added to the top of your browser. It is customizable so you can choose your preferred networks.

7. Smart Bookmarks Bar

The Smart Bookmarks Bar is one of my favorites. It eliminates the text from the bookmarks in your bookmarks bar, and leaves only the favicons. This means it frees up a whole lot of space, and you can fit a lot more bookmarks on that bar.

This way, all of your most-frequented sites can always be no more than a single click away. Just make sure you know your favicons.

8. TooManyTabs

Finally, the TooManyTabs add-on allows you to create multiple rows of tabs. If you frequently have a lot of tabs open, and would prefer to be able to see what they all are, this add-on will be of particular use to you. You can always send specific tabs to different rows, which can also be useful.

Wrapping Up

There are many add-ons available, and I’m sure I have barely scratched the surface of ones that can contribute to your productivity. What are your favorite add-ons? Share them here.

"As Firefox hit 1B downloads last week, the VideoSurf extension brings sophisticated video search technology to what has become one of the most ubiquitous browsers available," a spokesperson for VideoSurf tells WebProNews.

Although Twitter has been cracking down on the posting of malicious URLs, they probably can’t catch them all, and this could be good for that reason alone. The following video shows how it works. 

The add-on does more than just display videos on Twitter though. It also adds to the user’s experience in Google search results. Video results will display visual summaries and related videos will appear on the page. VideoSurf pulls videos from a variety of video sources.

With all of the add-on’s video displays, you can hover over the videos and they will begin to play, allowing for a similar preview experience to what Bing offers in its video search (you know the one that got people talking about watching porn at work when Bing first launched).

With the add-on installed, you also get some extra stuff when you visit YouTube, including results from other video sources beyond YouTube. You also get the visual summaries that YouTube doesn’t offer on its own.

This feature allows you to open different pages when you open a new tab, so you don’t just get the standard blank white page. Now you can bring up one of your favorite pages or one that you recently viewed. You can choose from up to 9 different thumbnails you have stored as well as recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs:

"You can edit the thumbnails, and all this data remains locally on your browser, which means none of the information about your most viewed sites or recently closed pages will be sent back to Google," explains Software Engineer Sergey Ryazanov of the Toolbar Team. "If for whatever reason you don’t like this updated new tab page, you can always change it back to a blank page or to the website of your choice through either your Toolbar or Firefox settings."

To edit your thumbnails, simply:

1. Open a new tab to view the new tab page.

2. Click the Edit thumbnails link near the bottom of the page.

3. Click the X icon for each thumbnail you wish to remove.

4. Click the Done button.

The second new feature of the latest toolbar release is the ability for Hebrew and Arabic-speaking users to access Toolbar 5, which includes right-to-left text support. Google also notes that some widely reported bugs have been fixed, though they don’t go into specific detail on that.

I’m sure you’re familiar with search suggestions. All the major search engines have them. You start typing and it gives you a list of possible queries.

"The list of suggestions refreshes as you continue typing or when you change the query," says a post on the Live Search Blog. "You can click the suggestion that best matches what you were searching for to speed you to your results."

The add-on, based on the Open Search standard, can be downloaded here. It uses the JSON interface supported by Firefox to get its autosuggestions. It is available in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland,  Australia, New Zealand, India, the Philippines, and South Africa.