Tag Archives | addon

Hide Firefox’s Find Bar After the Job is Done

Feb/03 in Add-ons Reviews

1227892988 Firefox’s find bars (yes, there are two of them) are often classified as the good one that is hard to remember, and the not so good one that is easy to remember. 

The good one nobody remembers, is hitting the “/” key while browsing a page.  If you hit Ctrl+F you get the not so good one that is easy to remember.  This is the one that we all use most often.  The Hide Find Bar add-on for Firefox merges the greatness of these two searches into one.

How does it do that?  It is very simple.  It allows you to hide the find bar after a certain interval of inactivity has elapsed.  So, when activity in the find bar has been idle for a certain interval it will automatically disappear. 

You can try it out for yourself, all you need to do is download the Hide Find Bar extension from the Firefox Add-ons site.

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Searching Inline with Select-n-Go

Jan/30 in Add-ons Reviews

Want to be able to browser for information from a page without leaving that page to go to a new tab?  If you want to save space or have easy access to a slew of search tools – you may want to look into adding Select-n-Go by Cleeki to your own Firefox installation.

To use it, all you have to do is highlight some text on the screen.  Then you get this cool window in a window effect. The main purpose here is to:

  • Minimum annoyance: no change of web page appearance, no unwanted tab switching, no unpleasant popups, etc.
  • Maximum efficiency: minimum operations, seamless connection, easy activation/hiding, etc.

You can do Google, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon.  If that is not enough for you – you can extend it even further by adding your own channels to it.

Select-n-Go Preview

In a nutshell, the add-on launches a browser window inside of your browser window. 

Now I promise though, that is not as annoying as it might sound.  True, it might not be the most visually appealing thing, however it does reduce your tab switching (back and forth) when searching for information Online.  You can pick up Select-n-Go by Cleeki on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

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Force Firefox Menus to Stay Open

Jan/28 in Add-ons Reviews, Usability

Stay-Open Menu is an add-on for Firefox that will keep menu items open, even if you click elsewhere.  It is a pet peeve for some, to have to do all this re-clicking if you need to access more than one thing from the menu.  This extension enables multiple selections from bookmarks menu, history Menu, or address bar dropdown list, without reopening menu or using sidebar.

Stay-Open Menu Add-on for Firefox

When you middle-click a bookmarked item in the bookmarks (or in the history) you will open that web page up in a new tab, and the menu stays open, so you can do more clicking inside of it.  You can then click all the links you need to click and open up.  Once you are finished, hit the Esc button to close the menus (or you can click somewhere outside the menu, as well).  Here is one more handy tip from the developers:

Toggle the about:config value of extensions.stayopenmenu.useCtrlMeta from false to true to enable usage with Ctrl-click. See the homepage for more detailed instructions on how to turn on the Ctrl-click option, and further information about using with the Smart Location Bar.

For more help and support for the Stay-Open Menu extension, be sure to check out this thread:

You can pick up the add-on via Firefox’s Add-on site or learn more about it via the official web site.  It might not be an add-on for all, but if this is a pet peeve of yours, you now have a solution.

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Quickly Jump to Un-Linked Hyperlinks

Nov/24 in Add-ons Reviews

You can file this one in the folder of annoying things you find on the Web.  Not to slip into Andy Rooney here, but don’t you hate it when you find a super long link you’d like to visit but it is not hyperlinked?  You have to copy, paste, open a new tab and then navigate to it.  It should be a simpler task to tackle and thankfully the Copy and Go extension for Firefox makes it an easy thing to do.

Copy and Go!

Here is what the developer of the extension has to say about Copy and Go:

With this add-on you just need to mark the link, and choose Copy and Go from the right click menu. The add-on will simply copy the marked text URL, and will open it on a new tab. That’s it!

This makes for a great addition to any Firefox installation you might have.  You can pick up Copy and Go on the Firefox Add-ons site.

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Integrate Gmail with Everything!

Nov/03 in Add-ons Reviews

Integrated Gmail in Action I have seen my fair share of the add-ons for Firefox, or Greasemonkey scripts that promise to integrate Gmail with just about anything and everything.  They all have little flaws in them though, that keep me from wanting to use them all the time. 

One new add-on that might change my mind is Integrated GMail, an experimental extension that does a fine job at the previously mentioned task.  It allows you to make the inbox collapsible and loads your choice of Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Notebook and Google Groups under it (they are also in collapsible boxes).

It was also recently featured on my list of  9 Google Reader Add-ons for Firefox via Mitchelaneous.com.

If your are inbox minimalist, enable minimalist mode to clean up the inbox even more.  This extension is well worth checking out.  You can pick it up on the Firefox Add-ons web site.  Once you do, let me know how it stacks up against other favorite Gmail tools of yours for Firefox.

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8 Ways to Open Text as a Link

Oct/17 in Add-ons Reviews, Best of Firefox

Turn Text to Links in Firefox One of those pesky things that bug me is when somebody writes a link in that I want to click, but there is no HTML code included to make it into a click-able link.  Thankfully several add-ons for Firefox have figured out how to turn URLs and e-mail addresses not marked up as a link into things I can click on.

There are eight add-ons for Firefox that do this job very well.  The only problem is that there is not that much difference between them.

Know of a number nine I might have missed?  I wouldn’t be surprised.  This seems like a very popular idea to do for a Firefox extension for some reason.  Since today is my birthday, just consider these eight gems your present from me.

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Play and Download YouTube Videos Inside Google Search

Oct/10 in Add-ons Reviews, Entertainment

Say, you like the fact that Google has started to thumbnail YouTube results in search, but you just want a ‘bit more.  GoogleTube, an add-on for Firefox, will allow you to play the YouTube videos inside of the Google search results window.

GoogleTube Screenshot

Once installed, all you have to do is hit the YouTube icon next to the search result link.  Instantly the video starts playing, without the need to open up a new tab or window.  Also, you can also download the video and view more information regarding the video (date added, views, rating, comments) directly from the search results.

The player can be configured to suit your needs too.  You can select player colors, player size and these additional options:

  • Allow auto play
  • Show player border
  • Show tiny icon on the status bar
  • Show download button
  • Show more information button
  • Choose where to show the video (next to link, under link, ect)

It is a simple extension that does a simple task very well. You can pick up GoogleTube on the Firefox Add-ons web site. 

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Split Up Your Browser

Sep/24 in Add-ons Reviews, Usability

Split Browser, the add-on for Firefox, splits up the content area of the browser in as many windows as you like.  Each window you see, also has its own mini browser inside.

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This is a really helpful extension for those people out there that work on multiple pages at the same time and down want to have two Firefox windows open side by side or don’t want to switch between tabs.  There are several ways you can decide to split your window too.

Ways to become more productive by splitting up your browser…

  • Choose the "Split Browser to" menu in the context menu.
  • Choose the "Load in Split Browser" menu in the context menu on link.
  • Click popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area.
  • Drop links, bookmarks, etc. to popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area while dragging.

too-many-windows There is no limit to the number of windows you can open inside of your browser.  Of course, adding too many might get a little on the silly side.  Click the picture to your right to see an example of the madness that can happen with a few too many windows open.

Another great use for this, would be to view one page normally, and then load up a mobile or sidebar-friendly page and squeeze it down so everything fits in nicely.  You can pick up the Split Browser add-on for Firefox on the Firefox Add-ons web site or learn more about it on the official Split Browser web site.

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Interview with Michel Gutierrez of Video DownloadHelper

Sep/08 in Interviews

11 Video DownloadHelper is by far the most popular of the video downloading add-ons out the for Firefox.  Only proof you need is to check out the most popular downloads page yourself.  It gets 480,759 weekly downloads.  With that in mind, I wanted to talk with the man behind what might be one of the most popular add-ons for Firefox, ever.  Who is this man? Michel Gutierrez is the brain behind the Video DownloadHelper and I was lucky enough to get him cornered to answer a few questions I had about the extension.

Out of all the different, “download the video from that video sharing site” services out there – what does it feel like to be the most popular one, right now?

It’s good and that’s even better to be one of the most popular Firefox extensions overall :)

I started computing in the early 80s on a Sinclair ZX81 (2KB of RAM!) and since then, i wrote many lines of code within a lot of various projects but DownloadHelper is by far the application that got the best success. So when you write a piece of software that will be executed one million times everyday, you for sure feel useful but a bit anxious as you have the responsibility to make this code work flawlessly.

Continue Reading →

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Grab Color Palettes in Firefox

Sep/07 in Add-ons Reviews

icon_big Sitting in the left corner of your status bar, until you are ready for it to jump into action Palette Grabber for Firefox, will grab the color scheme for any site on the web you are viewing.

Here is a little more about the extension from the developer:

Palette Grabber is a Firefox extension for web designers. It adds an “Export color palette” command to your Tools menu; selecting this command will extract a color palette for the current page and export it to a Photoshop/Illustrator color palette file. It’s useful for creating mockups of new designs which share a color palette with an existing design.

The Palette Grabber extension supports Photoshop, Flash, PaintShop Pro, GIMP, Adobe Fireworks, and Mac OS X Color Picker palette formats.  You can pick it up from the official web site at http://www.gusprevas.info/palettegrabber/.

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