The Internet has been commanded by Internet Explorer since…well, since the beginning. Although Internet Explorer has certainly slipped in recent years paving the way for a host of other browsers to grab their share of the internet it is still the predominant workhorse with nearly 65% of users loading Microsoft’s venerable browser. However, deviantART is another animal altogether. Here, we are ruled by firefox. Nearly 55% of you use firefox in the world’s biggest online art community.

There are number of reasons why we all love firefox but most will tell you it’s all about the users ability to modify it. One of the ways to do that of course is “Extensions”. Most of us love our extensions and could not imagine our browsing experience without them. It is one of the reasons firefox has seriously carved into Internet Explorers dominance. And while extensions can certainly add to the experience of deviantART in a number of ways, they are also a source of user issues in many cases.

One of the things we are trying to do here is identify and correct bugs in the fastest way possible. It is one of the reasons that my QA position was created. Identifying bugs is not as easy as it sounds since so many users surf dA under different circumstances. It is quite possible that the bug you believe you discovered is in fact a unique experience to you because of any number of things. Instead of a widespread bug your firefox extensions could be jacking up your user experience.

This is not to say that you cannot use your extensions here on dA. As I said, most of us could not imagine our life without them. However, understand that your extensions could be the culprit for many issues. Before filing your help desk ticket be sure to see if your extensions are indeed part of the problem you are having. This will vastly reduce erroneous help desk reports and streamline our bug searching on an issue that is user related rather than site related. It will also free up time for the hard working Devious Technology department.

Common extensions that are not deviantART friendly are the skype extension, adblock plus and noscript.

So remember to check your extensions to see if they are affecting your deviantART experience. To do so go to "Tools>Add-Ons and click the "extensions" tab. From here you can disable them, reload firefox and check if the problem persists.