Web Browser Wednesday
Earlier this year a guy installed 100 Firefox extensions without any problems. Well…I decided to try and top that. I picked the nice round number of 200 for a few different reasons. First and foremost because Firefox “2″ was recently released but also because back in August Mozilla celebrated 200 million downloads of the fantastic browser! Right now they are past 263 million but this is kinda like a belated celebration.
A discussion about Firefox extensions also started over in the forum which is the whole reason I decided to do this. Hey Chris, hope you have Guinness on hold. 
I don’t just have one screenshot to show you either… I have several to show you what installing all of these extensions does to your menus as well. Prepare to be amazed!
Installing the Extensions
To install the extensions I went through the Mozilla Extension page one by one, like any normal person would be doing. I went through the top Firefox extension page until I had all 200 installed. I did install repetitive extensions (such as the three versions of Forecast Fox) because I wanted to see if they affected each other, but there weren’t too many extensions that overlapped in functionality. The only ones that I really skipped were the dictionaries which there happened to be quite a few of.
After I had installed 50 of them I decided to restart the browser to see how things were going. It took about one minute to startup but everything looked like it installed correctly. Then I moved on and after about an hour I had all 200 installed and was ready to restart the browser. I didn’t think that it was going to work but to my surprise it did…
The Overall Result
Ahhh…the beauty of Firefox is in the eye of the beholder and let me say that it looks pretty sweet when running in Vista. It took 6-minutes to start Firefox with the 200 extensions installed but it worked! Not only that but there are the popup windows that you get for certain extensions right after they are installed…yeah…I received 47 of those. That also seemed to delay the initial start time but I didn’t sit there filling out information for all of the options, otherwise that would have taken me hours.
It was quite a site to see and there was a very limited viewing area for websites because of the toolbars. On my 24″ widescreen monitor I had about 2″ of viewable area at the bottom of the browser. But hey, it was still usable. Here is a screenshot of the overall result of a Google search that I performed:
It is also pretty amazing what the Google website looks like when I have all of those extensions installed. Not to mention how funny it is when you type a search in the search box and press “Enter” just to see it replicate itself amongst all of the toolbars. That was probably my favorite part about the whole experience. ;)
Extensions That Were Installed
The All-in-One Sidebar decided to replace the default Add-ons page in Firefox with its own sidebar module. That was fine except for the fact that it couldn’t handle all of the extensions. It didn’t show a listing of anything that I had installed and in the title it said “undefined [0].” I was a little worried at first because I wanted to show a listing of the extensions that I had installed…but have no fear because there was another menu option that listed them without any issues. Here are the several screenshots of the extensions I installed:
Click any of the images above to enlarge them
Using the ListZilla extension that I installed (which is the only one that I installed that isn’t in the top few hundred according to Mozilla) I also generated an HTML listing of all 200 extensions. See, some extensions do have a purpose. 
Tools Menu
Many extensions will put some sort of “helpful” link in the Tools menu when you install it. Well, I can confirm that nearly all of them put something in the menu. You don’t even want to know how long it took me to find the “Options” in this disaster:
Click any of the images above to enlarge them
Possible Toolbars
I wanted to conserve some space so I ditched the Bookmarks toolbar that is included with Firefox. 
After all, it is all about the extensions, right? Here is a listing of all the toolbars that are available to choose from but I didn’t setup Weatherbug which is why it’s not shown:
Possible Sidebars
Thank goodness that in Firefox you can’t have a bunch of sidebars open at the same time, because I would have absolutely no website viewing space! Here is a listing of the possible sidebars that could be shown:
Other Less-Altered Things
Here are a few more screenshots of things that didn’t get hit quite so hard by the extensions hurricane…
File Menu
Click for Fullsize
New Menus
Click for Fullsize
Options Screen
Click for Fullsize
Memory Usage
Firefox is notorious for its memory leaks but it didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought. By the time Firefox would start after a few minutes it had climbed up to 145MB but it capped off around 195MB. I didn’t use it as much as I typically use a browser to see if memory leaks would really start to kick in but it was running for quite awhile. I did however find that it would become sluggish or become unresponsive pretty frequently but it only crashed once in the two-hours that I had it up and running. Here is a screenshot of the memory usage at the end of that two-hours:
Conclusion
Hope you enjoyed this because I know that I sure found it interesting. I thought about uploading my profile to a file-sharing site but it would have taken way too long since it is over 120MB in size. It was definitely an experience and I was thinking about naming this the “Firefox 200!”
What are you still doing here? Go download some extensions.
You should also stop by the forum and share what extensions you are currently using.
Your insane.
Wow, I would have expected the memory leaks to cripple your system.
6 minutes to start. LOL. Thats awesome tho, great screenshots.
After flicking through the screenshots, I’m quite impressed with this Ryan!!
Did you find any good extensions that you want to keep? After uninstalling them, how F***ed is your profile????
Glad everyone is enjoying this.
Being the smart intellectual I am (well, close enough) I created a separate profile to do this in. So once it was done I could just ditch the profile. I didn’t even want to know what the uninstallation process would have been like.
Oh, and the All-in-one sidebar is kinda cool so I was thinking about installing that into my real profile.
You have way too much free time. (not that I’m not thinking about trying it myself)
That’s why the postings were a little lite yesterday because it took me several hours to get everything situated (with a total of 11 restarts which equals about an hour in itself).
Did you try to capture some video? You can use Demo Studio for example.
I’m at home all day (homeschooled)
So maybe i’ll try to beat that one day
Nice job btw
I did try to capture some video but performing an action in Firefox would cause the CPU to rise to 100% (even doing a simple search in the Search Bar). That then made the screencast software freeze so the video was horrible.
If you beat it, let me know…I’ll gladly post about it here.
Now that is just insane…cool but insane!
(Offtopic)
Ryan, how did you manage to get app descriptions into Windows Task Manager? Is that a Vista-only thing?
Yes, that is a Vista-only thing. Makes it a lot nicer for figuring out what processes belong to what.
Looks like someone [downloadsquad.com] about this and then it got [digg.com]
Ha! That’s awesome. I’m very proud of Firefox for holding up. If one was able to install extensions in IE, it would probably crash after like 10 of them…
And this is on Lifehacker too.
Yeah I saw this for a second time on [mozillalinks.org]!
What theme is installed?
I am glad other sites are finding this as amusing as I did.
I am running Vista with the standard Firefox 2 theme.
I blogged about your success last night and a great blogger and mate over on WordPress dot com let me know about a hack to stop memory leaks in Firefox. You might like to try that before you install everything and see if it makes a difference. Given that you should still be able to do it after the install of the extensions.
[engtech.wordpress.com]
his insane what?
hobbies: get one.
WoW! Wasn’t expecting that!
99 over projection!
Lol, the whole Firefox interface looks crazy.
Since you are experimenting, I wonder how long it would take FEBE to back them all up? You could also use CLEO to package them all up (and offer them for download) so others will idle hands could play with it.
if you check the virtual memory usage, you will probably aww a ton of usage
I’m not sure I want to make my computer useless for another 5 minutes while Firefox starts back up. If I did backup the files it would still be pretty large, probably around 100MB which is more than anyone would want to download.
You are, my friend, either very crazy, or very crazy, or maybe both.
I have 39 extensions currently installed, that I use.
When FF3 comes out (the proper release) try and go for 300.
I will no doubt be giving it a shot.
yeah, good point. You’re insane. Perhaps. Maybe we are all insane. Who knows?
I’ve tried with 300 ahah
I’m sure it is possible with 300 and having worked with a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaks for Firefox I was able to figure out any problems what I was having. It just takes some patience.
Lol your insane! 200?! How could you even see that fox?!
I’ve tried 300 and go on trying moz exts. Coz prepare Moz add-ons sites:)
I’m confused at what you were saying? Did you actually get 300 to work?
you are very insane. ahuauhauha
This is one sure way to freak out IE users who think now they have Tabs they’ve caught up on the feature list.
I guess I’m not the only one who goes crazy with Firefox extensions.
You have taken this to a new level! I do run about 40 extensions all the time..
40 extensions all the time? That’s quite a few and on a regular basis I normally only have 5 or so.
Hi,
Without knowing, i did the same thing as you dit toady, with firefox portable. But i f*ed up the hole browser. My menu’s where hidden, and i couldn’t disable add ons. Fortunately, I could start in safe mode, and disable a lot of them.
I was searching for some ui improvements. And i found out, how to put more sidebars in firefox.
WOW, this is amazing, you are really a genius
Stumbled!
Added to TopStumbles:
[topstumbles.com]
Is there an extension which automatically installs all available extensions?
Not that I’m aware of.
Was the test done with FF 2? I tested this with ff 1.x i think and it crashed after 30+ extensions or so… Progress…!
Yes, it was done with Firefox 2.
ahahah great article! But just as nogg3r5 said, your insane.
Wow!
That’s amazing you got that far. Wonder if this qualifies for the Guiness World Nook of Records.
I had 187 running for ages, and only took 1 minute to load Firefox, but loads conflicted, and trying to find the dodgy one when anything went wrong was insanely time-consuming!
So now I’m down to about 50
This is a great and creative post Ryan. When I read the title and started reading the first paragraph, I thought you myself “You’re asking for trouble here!” Thanks for the laugh.