How an Add-on Played Hero During an Industrial Dilemma

A few months ago Noit Saab’s boss at a nanotech firm came to him with a desperate situation. They had just discovered nearly 900 industrial containers held corrupted semiconductor wafers.

This was problematic for a number of reasons. These containers were scattered across various stages of production, and Noit had to figure out precisely where each container was at in the process. If not, certain departments would be wrongly penalized for this very expensive mishap.

It was as much an accounting mess as it was a product catastrophe. To top it off, Noit had three days to sort it all out. In 72 hours the fiscal quarter would end, and well, you know how finance departments and quarterly books go.

Fortunately for Noit—and probably a lot of very nervous production managers—he used a nifty little add-on called iMacros to help with all his web-based automation and sorting tasks. “Without iMacros this would have been impossible,” says Noit. “With the automation, I ran it overnight and the next morning it was all done.”

Nice work, Noit and iMacros! The day—and perhaps a few jobs—were saved.

“I use add-ons daily for everything I do,” says Noit. “I couldn’t live without them.” In addition to authoring a few add-ons himself, like NativeShot (screenshot add-on with an intriguing UI twist), MouseControl (really nice suite of mouse gestures), MailtoWebmails (tool for customizing the default actions of a “mailto:” link), and Profilist (a way to manage multiple profiles that use the same computer, though still in beta), here are some of his favorites…

“I use Telegram for all my chatting,” says Noit. “I’m not a big mobile fan so it’s great to see a desktop service for this.”

Media Keys, because “I always have music playing from a YouTube list, and sometimes I need to pause it, so rather than searching for the right tab, I use a global hotkey.”

“And of course, AdBlock Plus,” concludes Noit.

If you, dear friends, use add-ons in interesting ways and want to share your experience, please email us at editor@mozilla.com with “my story” in the subject line.