Rankin’ on Google in Firefox
Last year when I got back from my annual escape from electrons, I noted that Julian Bond was likely to be eaten by trolls for talking about it not being too difficult to hack Google’s Toolbar PageRank URLs.
There’ve been web page forms to get around it for quite a while now, but I was still in the habit of starting up Internet Explorer on those rare occasions when I really wanted to know, security be damned, since I’m used to it being a browser-feature, not a web page feature.
Shortly before I left this year, thinking about a Firefox extension, I bookmarked Philipp Lenssen’s post talking about how Alex Stapleton had figured it out. I can’t get to Alex’s site right now, but I’m sure that doesn’t mean that Google’s troll-lawyers have eaten him. Probably. In any case, once I got back, I discovered that Stephane Queraud had done a Firefox status bar PageRank extension. Very, very nice!
Of course, now the lawyer-trolls know every site I visit thanks to PR requests (you can just click the statusbar icon to disable it, but who remembers?), so chances are they’ll have the hard decision of whether to turn me over to the authorities or just eat me…
I normally don’t run extensions on Firefox, but this is one that I just couldn’t pass up! I’m loving it! I have a great PR web tool bookmarked, but I find that seeing it in my browser is far more convenient. Thanks for the pointer!
This is exactly what I’ve been looking for! I’ve been craving the switch to Firefox or Mozilla, but I needed the toolbar. I’ve used older versions of multi-window browsers before these alternatives became popular, and I liked them, but they were riddled with problems. Plus, the RSS integration would be so much better then just relying on My Yahoo. I guess I’ve gotten lazy, but in any event, I think I’ll go ahead and mess around with Mozilla and PRGooglebar, against FireFox and the code you referred me to. Thanks for the info. Sincerely, t