Do NOT Use Firefox 'Speed Dial'

Science | Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:53:08 pm PDT

We posted this last month, but the problem is getting worse. We just checked our automated flood protection log, and 5 IPs have been blocked today because of the following problem. If your IP is blocked for this reason, we can’t spend any more of our time to find and unblock it. The “Speed Dial” program is a menace, and should be removed from the official list of Firefox add-ons.

Here’s our post from September again:

There is a Firefox add-on called Speed Dial, that lets you set Firefox to automatically load a certain web page over and over at specified intervals, presumably to keep up with what’s going on in semi-real time.

This is known as a very bad idea—one of those bad ideas that sounds like a good idea. If you think about it, it’s actually very rude to do this to your favorite web sites. It’s a constant bandwidth drain. People forget and leave it running 24/7, or set the interval to one minute. Imagine if you have a couple of thousand people “speed dialing” every 60 seconds. Hamster revolt.

And one of the LGF spam blocking mechanisms has been identifying these repetitious hits from one IP, and adding them to the blocked list — so if you suddenly see a ‘Forbidden!’ message, and you’re using this add-on (or one like it), that’s why. Of course, if you’re seeing the ‘Forbidden!’ message you’re probably unable to read this explanation too. Now do you see why this is a bad idea?

Don’t use this add-on, and you won’t have to not see any explanations about why you’re not seeing explanations.