Quitomzilla

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on November 22, 2010

Everybody knows how hard it is to quit smoking cigarettes, and how important it can be to succeed. Now there's an app for that, or an add-on, to be specific. Quitomzilla from Quitometro is a free Firefox add-on that can help smokers kick the habit by counting down the time until or since Q-Day; by telling them how much money they're saving or could be saving by not buying cigarettes; and by nagging or bragging on themselves with paste-in messages.

Quitomzilla installs and configures like any Firefox add-on. We installed it, restarted Firefox, and clicked Add-ons on the Tools menu. We selected Quitomzilla and clicked Options, which called up a properties dialog containing the program's settings. The Quit date features drop-down selectors for the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second (to get in those last few puffs). Interestingly, the year goes back to 1990 but only goes ahead one year from the current date: encouragement not to wait, maybe? In the next section, we entered cigarettes per day and cost per pack in currency (dollars is the default). The Paste Text feature adds an entry to the Firefox context menu that lets you paste your Quitomzilla message into Web text fields. We could customize the statistics presented in the message by double-clicking entries in a list of macros for time, cigs, money, and so on. We clicked a check box enabling Milestone alerts, clicked OK, and then hovered our mouse cursor over the Quitomzilla icon on the Firefox toolbar, which in our browser is the lower right-hand corner. A small pop-up showed totals for Cigarettes, Money, and Time since we set the program: about 22 minutes and counting; 0.16 cigarette not smoked; a few pennies saved; no Milestones yet. Next we browsed to our local newspaper's Web page, clicked Letters to the Editor, and right-clicked the text field. We selected the Paste text entry with the Quitomzilla icon, and it pasted in our text message, complete with up-to-date statistics.

We should confess that we don't smoke--we test software--and we can verify that Quitomzilla holds up its end of the deal. Ultimately, whether it works or not can't be coded; it's up to the individual. Quitomzilla certainly worked as advertised, though, which is more than we can say about cigarettes.