Firefox Extensions Part 3
Posted by jerothe in 
I read today that there is somewhere around 400 extensions for Firefox now available. Pretty amazing. I continue to come across really useful extensions, making me fall in love with Firefox all the time and hating Microsoft more for not allowing me, the user, the most important person, do what I need with my own browsing experience.
Google Preview – Thumbnails in your google searches
Simple and straight forward, this extension gives you the power to see a small version of what a website looks like before you actually visit. Kind of like searching for images where you get a small thumbnail view first, here you get a small thumbnail of the homepage for your search results. Check out the screenshot I took below. I searched for “Really cool computer cases” and this is what my screen looks like;
Rating : 10 of 10
Cool just because. But seriously, I like to see whether I am visiting a crappy designed site, or a reputable site with good information. Funny how things like that can even be read into at a small scale.
How do I customize my Windows Startup menu?
This was the question I had the other day when I was looking to rename some of my menus. By default, Windows has a strategy for organizing and naming all of your startup menus depending on the programs that are installed. After awhile you get a mess of unorganizing programs, and I found the following tip to be really helpful.
I like things alphabetized, because that helps me find things faster. In your startup menu, you can actually click, drag, and hold down a menu and drag it to another place to organize it how you like. So here are your steps;
1. Turn on your computer.
2. Click on the “Start” button.
3. Roll your mouse over “All Programs”.
4. Click and hold down on one of the program sections like the image below is demonstrating.
5. Drag the section to a new area. A thin black bar will indicate where you can drop the section, usually between two others.
Customizing the start menu.
Now, to customize the start menu to have the programs or shortcuts that you want, follow the first two steps above.
3. Right Click on the “Start” button. Choose “Open All Users“.
4. Double Click on the folder called “Programs“. You should have this folder, but if you don’t, try any folder that you see.
5. These folders correspond to what is in your “All Programs” list. You can now add, delete, or change the links and names of any of these programs to best suit your needs.
What I was looking to do was add a shortcut to the list. In order to do that, these are the steps. It is just like making a shortcut normally, telling a link to point to where the program actually is located.
1. Click on “New” and Choose “Shortcut“.
2. Click on “Browse” and then look for the program that you want to link to. Usually it will be located used My Computer > Local Disk C: > Program Files > (Program Name) > (Program).exe. It will almost always be an .exe or executable file, the file that runs the program.
3. Your shortcut is done. Drag it into the folder you want inside “Programs“, make a new folder, or just leave it where it is.
4. Click “Start” > “All Programs” and you should now see your new shortcut in the list.
I hope this was helpful.
Yahoo Mail Expands to 1 Gig
Your expectations of free email are changing daily.
I debated on where to put this information. But I decided on software because a mail program, although very common, is a piece of online software that most of us take for granted. And because of Google’s push into the free email arena, the capabilities of email are growing daily.
As of last count, my gmail account has almost 2.2 Gigs of space. Everyday that email space keeps growing as Google adds more and more servers.
This amazing amount of free space for email is a new idea. Only a year ago Google Mail was in beta, and all of the other free email players, Hotmail, Yahoo, were still in the dinosaur age, offering anywhere from 10-25 MB of free space. Not more than a few months later Yahoo mail extended to 500 MB, and Hotmail much later to 250.
But as Google expands, Yahoo has been trying to keep up. I am sure still bitter that Google didn’t just work explicitly for their needs back in the days when Google powered search results in Yahoo. At the beginnging of May, Yahoo extended their free email service to 1 Gig.
What I am going to do now is compare the two. I use Yahoo as my primary email, and google as another account with some random people to keep it active. But I have chosen to keep on using Yahoo, read below exactly why.
Address completion
Just like Outlook, Yahoo will complete an email as I type it. I am not one of those people that is good with remembering exact email account addresses. People change their email all the time, and it is hard to keep up. A standard UI option has been to have a “Nickname” which would be a shorter way of remembering an email. Type in the Nickname, the program would know to use the email you assigned to that nickname.
But essentially, it is still the same amount of info to remember. You still have to remember exact nicknames for everyone, and even if you keep it as simple as their first name, what happens when you have two friends named “Steve”?
Well, in the last 6 months or so, Yahoo has implemented this auto completion, where you type anything in the address bar, and it will enter not only a list of possible nicknames, but email addresses as well.
If you notice, this is something that Google Mail also does. It just doesn’t do the nickname part, which is probably a holdover from the original idea. Until I looked just now, I didn’t know Google Mail autocompleted. So Yahoo and Google come in a tie here.
Notifiers
Google has what is called the “Gmail Notifier”. This is basically a little program that runs out of your windows system tray and will tell you when you have new mail. You can set it up to log you in when you boot up the computer, or when you feel like it. This eliminates the need to have a browser open at all times.
Yahoo also does this, but does so in a little bit more cumbersome way. You have to have their messenger and their messenger when notify you will a little tiny popup, like Google, from the system tray that you have gotten new email. I do not factor in a the seperate program anymore now that I use Trillian ( a program that combines all your instant messengers like MSN and AOL into one, a later article.)
In my opinion, they come out even here too.
Email shortcuts
I am only reviewing things that I use here, and shortcuts are one of them.
In Yahoo, you can press Ctrl+Shift+P and you can compose a new message. There are a slew of other shortcuts, like Ctrl+Shift+C to check mail, and Ctrl+Shift+F to browse your folders. I used to really like Yahoo’s shortcuts, but then Google did them one better.
Google’s shortcuts are an option that you can turn on. This means you can use them if you want to, but you don’t have to. Google’s email shortcuts are even shorter, and a touch faster (both are faster than a button click). Compose in Gmail is “C”, and “N” and “P” for next and previous email, to browse through each one.
My main complaint for this one is that you have to click “Settings” in the upper right and then “Learn More” under Keyboard Shortcuts to figure out what they are. I am a lazy internet user, and that is two click too many. Why can’t they have them pop up when you hover over a link if you want, or be on the button options like they are in Yahoo?
For those reasons, I think that Yahoo and Gmail come out even again.
Bottom Line!
Until I wrote this, I hadn’t gone that deep into Gmail, or used it frequently enough to know. All I knew is that I didn’t like the “reply” option being at the bottom of the message. That is unusual for me, and something that will take some getting used to. But Gmail is so fast, using a lot of DHTML and CSS to function.
From what I have seen, Gmail is much more powerful as well, from searching email down to those user options and settings for customizing your email program to fit you, which is a new concept. Why didn’t anyone give us this before. Also, if you use Google for searching, which you should, it seamlessly integrates into all of their other programs.
I am having the two break even, but largely because I have so much time vested in Yahoo now. But after doing this comparison, I am going to try to use Gmail to see more about their features and how they work.
Coolness Rating
Yahoo Mail
Gmail
Firefox Extensions Part 2
Last month I discovered how many extensions are available for Mozilla Firefox. Today I went looking again and here is a list of some more that I found. Granted, there a A TON! But these are ones that I found useful for my processes, or could be useful for people I know.
The ones I couldn’t get working
Dictionary Search
This basically would give you a right click option to look up any word on a webpage that you don’t understand. I don’t think this works in the most recent releases of Firefox. It didn’t give me the options in my right click menu that the website said it would, demonstrated in the screenshot it gave. But at least it didn’t give me an error message in the extension installer box. So maybe I did something wrong.
miniT – Tab Organizer
For about a month now I have been periodically checking to for a newer release of the miniT extension. Today I found a more recent version, previously I was only able to find a version that worked with Firefox .8 and prior (Version 0.3). I did find a miniT version that should work with 1.0, but when I tired to install it, the extensions manager said it wasn’t compatible (Version 0.4).
Basically, the idea behind this extension is that you can drag and drop your open tabs into a certain order so when you are cycling back and forth through them with shortcuts, you can go back and forth between certain pages easily, no matter what order you opened them.
The ones I did get working, mostly.
Firefox Calendar
I knew about this extension for a long time, as it is developed by Mozilla directly I believe. But I didn’t really know how to install and work extensions until recently so I gave this another shot. It is a really useful calendar system very similar to the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. Adding a calendar to Firefox just streamlines your tasks that much more.
Rating : 8 of 10
Mostly because it seems cool, if I had a day to day use. Even though I probably don’t, that doesn’t mean I won’t in the future.
Foxytunes
This is one of the top 15 extensions downloaded for Firefox, or so I read. It is basically a music controller you can use in your browser and puts all of the player controls in the footer bar in the lower right of the browser.
Rating : 3 of 10
If someone figures this extension out, let me know. I didn’t get it. I started my Windows Media Player and tried to control music through the browser, but all the extension seemed to do was slow my response time in my browsing, and the controls were even worse in response time. And the controls I tried, didn’t work. But that is five minutes of evaluation, and it seems to have a heavy following. So try it out for yourself. There seem to be shortcuts to hit without having to control your music with mouse clicks, so that is cool too.
Quicknote
The Quick note extension will give you the ability to leave yourself stickies through your browser. With a ton of customizable options, including number of stickies up to four, this is a cool little extension.
Rating : 6 of 10
This is another extension that seems cool, and even though I don’t have a use for it, I know people in the office that may, so it is good to try it out.
Duplicate Tab
Simple, and straight to the point, this little extension gives you the option to copy the address of your current window into a new browser tabbed window with one shortcut Ctrl + Shift + T
Rating : 10 of 10
New Browser Version – Firefox 1.0.4 Released
Last week two large security holes were exposed in Firefox 1.0.3 publicly. Who knows how long they had been there.
But like always, the mozilla team responded quickly with a new version to fix those problems in version 1.0.4.
The Microsoft loyalists have used this opportunity to point out how IE is better than Firefox because now it is “unsafe”, or was briefly. But the fact of the matter is, the new release came out within a matter of weeks, not months or years. The browser is so much better for those creative personalities who like to be able to customize everything and make it their own, and the fact of the matter is, more people are getting it for this reason.
I have seen usage statistics at somewhere around 25%. Now, granted, there have been other browsers that had a largely following and crashed. Time will tell if Firefox will do the same. But there would not be so many security flaws being discovered if hackers didn’t think that the browser was widespread enough to spend their time trying to find holes.
Face it. Firefox is going to be around for at least another year, if not forever.
Grouper 1.4 for file Sharing!
Time to think about Peer to Peer (P2P) in a whole new light!
Chris came across this program a couple of weeks back, and now I am smitten with this program.
Grouper is a peer to peer program for sharing your files that allows you the explicit control of who you want to share files with. So, you would set up a group in “Grouper” and then you would invite a friend to join your group. Then you would be able to choose the files from your hard drive that you want to share and vice versa and you can easily swap them.
The interface is amazing!
You have so many options. You can fully customize your profile with cool icons, you can add comments to your files, you can browse the most popular files downloaded by your group, and so much more.
Some of the other awesome features
Tabbed transfer, group, and directory of files windows.
Built in encrypted chat functionality just like an instant messenger with people in your group.
A log of what files have been accessed and are currently being browsed.
A media plater to check out any music your friend is sharing, with playlist capabilities and more.
For a more complete list of capabilities, check out the Grouper website.
Now, you are not able to actually share music using Grouper. They save you from yourself for all of the copyright infringement stuff that happens when you give music to your friends. But from what I have read on the forums, there are ways around this, like zipping up your files to download in a different format, or temporarily renaming the files to download.
Here is a view of the interface.
Bottom Line!
If you ever share files with friends, but don’t want to be limited by email, this is a great program for you. Cool loading screen and all around slick and smooth interface, easy to setup and get moving, Grouper is for the hobbist who just wants to share photos with family or video, to the geek who wants to be able to control ever aspect of their P2P activities.
Coolness Rating