Apr 27 2009
Toolbar Bonanza
We’ve done Firefox extensions before, and we’ll do them again. Add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird come out daily, so there’s always something new and great.
The Toolbars:
Now that Firefox has gained some ground in the browser wars, the first of many official toolbars are coming from the web’s largest portals.
- Amazon’s A9 This toolbar keeps track of your browsing history, stores your bookmarks online for anywhere-access and even sports a diary
- Ask Jeeves gives you easy business listings search, saved pages and images and local news
- Yahoo! Toolbar Beta promises ‘Anti-Spy’ soon, but delivers easy access to My Yahoo! feeds and more already
This easy to miss extension opens up a whole new world of ‘user scripts’ that change the way you interact witn web pages. The Script Repository (server can be flaky: Google cache, text) houses heaps of small add-on scripts managed within Grease Monkey. These scripts can accomplish anything from FOAF detection and display to removing Michael Jackson headlines from Reuters and Bloglines.
Find tweaks for delicious, Orkut, Technorati, Gmail and more. While many scripts work on any page, with simple instructions you can even write your own scripts. Oh, there’s a dev blog too.
Keep in touch with happenings from Macromedia with this extension. It lives on your status bar, and changes color with new updates. This is a great way to keep up with the inner-workings of Macromedia from inside Firefox or Thunderbird.
This extension uses your IMAP account as if it were an Exchange account, synchronizing your contacts and events (via the Thunderbird Mozilla Calendar extension) between clients. This extension is still young, and speed may depend on your IMAP server. Events are buggy, but updates happen frequently.
Last stop for this week. Mass Installer catalogs your installed extensions. From an exported file, you can use the extension to reload all your favorite extensions to a clean profile or second browser. This is a must for extension-junkies who find themselves always reinstalling the same add-ons on different computers.
With extensions, Firefox has banished the boring from browsing. I had fun, hope you did too.