I recently upgraded from using the standard bookmarklet to save pages to the Firefox add-on and I have been really impressed with how it integrates into the browsing experience.  Want to save something for later? Just click the icon for it in the address bar.  You can then pull up your saved links by clicking another toolbar button that is added right into the Firefox interface.  You can also sync your saved pages to multiple browsers and devices.  So, I could save a link 5 minutes before I have to go to work – then read it after work on my iPad.

Here are some more of the fantastic features:

• Save pages to a reading list to read when you have time.
• Offline reading mode lets you read the items you’ve saved for later on the plane, train, or anywhere without an internet connection.
• Sync your list to all of your computers, at work or home.
• Sync your list to Read It Later apps for iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android and more.
• After reading, bookmark pages on your preferred bookmarking service or share them with friends.
• Click to Save Mode lets you quickly batch a reading list just by clicking on interesting links.
• Text view strips away images, ads, and layout from articles and presents them in an easy to consume way.

You have to try out this fantastic bookmarking alternative to really see what all the buzz is about.  You can pick up Read it Later from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Tired of right-clicking to get a link to open in a new Firefox tab? Well, with the DblClicker installed – that will be a thing of the past.  This simple add-on for Firefox adds double clicking to the list of things you can do in your browser to bring up new links.

This lightweight tab extension for Firefox is pretty cool.  Once installed, it pretty much enables double-click action to a lot of things we do daily.  Here are the amazing features it brings to the table.

• Double-click Link to open in new tab.
• Double-click Bookmark/History to open in new tab.
• Autohide Bookmark/History after selection – according to DblClicker Options.
• Double-click tab action – according to DblClicker Options
• Duplicate Tab – default || Close Tab || None – avoid conflicts when using other tab clicking extensions.
• New tab will open in front/background for Links, Bookmarks/History according to FF preferences/DblClicker Options.

I open links in new tabs all the time, so having this add-on installed is a definate must for me.  Once you get used to double-clicking links, the functionality this add-on brings really feels like second nature.

You can download the DblClicker add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Do you remember when picture in picture TV watching was going to be the next best thing?  You could watch one show, while another one was going on in the corner of your screen.  Well, picture in picture browsing is here and is on Firefox thanks to CoolPreviews.  This add-on from the developers of CoolIris is a great browser add-on that will let you preview links and media without leaving the page you are on.

Some of the features included are:

• Preview web links, images, and videos without leaving your current page or tab.
• Automatically subsearch Google, Wikipedia, and others
• Temporarily bookmark items to the right column with our unique “stacks” feature
• Instantly send links to friends and family with just a click.

If you spend a lot of time surfing around to random sources, the CoolPreviews add-on for Firefox could save you a lot of time.  You don’t even need to click the link to preview the content inside – just use CoolPreviews.

By far this has to be one of the most useful add-ons to come to Firefox in a long time, and it is amazing it wasn’t developed by Mozilla themselves.  To try it out for yourself, go download it over at coolpreviews.com.

Want to export your bookmarks to a .html file?  You can in Firefox with just a few clicks of the mouse.  This can come in handy when it comes to syncing your bookmarks with another browser, backing up or moving from PC to PC.  Mozilla has made the import and backup options in Firefox brain dead simple.

First, you will want to go to Bookmarks and then Organize Bookmarks from within the Firefox Menu toolbar.  That will open up the Bookmark Library.  From within there, click on Import and Backup and then Export HTML…

When you do, you will get a kind of “save this file as…” screen pop-up where the default name of the exported file will be bookmarks.html.  Select the location you wish to save the file to, and then hit the Save button.

There you have it.  You now have a picture perfect backup of your Firefox bookmarks.  Hope this basic tutorial comes in handy – and if you have any other bookmark exporting tips you would like to share – be sure to do so in the comments.

Once you have installed the add-on, it is simple enough to use.  Just click the Bookmark icon in the status bar:

Once you do, you get a pop-up message saying that the page has been bookmarked.  As you can see thus far, this is not rocket science.  Next, to find your bookmark, open up your bookmarks sidebar or use the drop down list feature from the menu bar.  When you do, you should see a folder named 2010.  Inside that folder is another folder named 7.  Inside that folder is another folder named 21.  Now, inside of the 21 folder you will find your bookmark.  This is representing the fact that it was bookmarked 7/21/2010.

Now either the best feature, or the biggest drawback (depending on how you look at it) is that it does not take over your current bookmarking system.  If you bookmark a page normally, it will be stored in the default way Firefox handles bookmarks.  It is only stored in this nested by date way when you click the bookmark icon in the status bar.

You can try DSBMarks out for yourself and let me know what you think.  Pick it up at the Firefox Add-ons website.

Need to save a list of links, but don’t want to copy each one, one by one, individually?  Then you might check out Multi Links.  This Firefox add-on will let you open, copy, or bookmark multiple links, rather than having to handle each one individually. 

To get started, all you have to do is right-click and hold to drag a box around the links you want to effect or “take action” on.  When you release the mouse button, you will have opened, copied and/or bookmarked those links. 

Now how do you decide which of those actions you take?  You can customize that in the options.  Overall, Multi Links is a great add-on that simply adds a lot of functionality to your links and how Firefox relates to them.  If you spend a lot of time copying and pasting resources, this is an add-on you can not do without.

The first step to take would be to bookmark this link (or drag and drop it onto your bookmarks toolbar).

+ spell check

When the bookmarklet is clicked, Firefox will turn on the built in spellchecker and highlight any misspelled words that are on the page you are currently browsing.  You can check for suggested changes too, of course they will not be saved to the page though.  This quick bookmarklet does come in might handy though for anybody who spends their time proof reading any online content.

(Kudos to Download Squad and UrbanoAlvarez.es!)

It isn’t often that I find one of these social “all in one” tools that I really like. They are usually lacking in a few areas or tossing so much stuff in my face, I don’t know how to even get started. One place that seems to have learned from the bad and the good to roll out an awesome service is ShareThis.com.

This service makes it super easy to get to sharing just about anything at just about all the biggest bookmarking and social link sharing web sites out there. With the Firefox extension you gain a button for your toolbar that when hit, will pop up a box letting you e-mail the link to others or post it to your diggs, stumble upons and deliciouses of the world.

Another neat feature I have yet to see anywhere else is the ability to scan your contacts at MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, GMail, AIM and others so that when you send a link to a friend, you can pick exactly how it is sent to them an via which platform you’d like to send it.

If you don’t want to have to install the extension, you can also gain a lot of the same features by adding the bookmarklet to your links as well. All in all, I would say that ShareThis is a winner and one of the more impressive Firefox additions I have seen in a while.

Since nobody has made a StumbleUpon “light” edition toolbar I was out to seek a way to do much of the functionality I like but maybe via javascript or a bookmarklet. That is when I happened to run across a page that promised to be the toolbarless StumbleUpon.

Here is the bookmarklet you’ll need to give a thumbs up to something and review. Just drag and drop this link onto your Firefox bookmarks bar.

Stumble This!

Apparently I’m not alone. Found this on a few other web sites as well – and makes me wish that StumbleUpon would maybe create a lighter version of the toolbar. Maybe even roll out a secondary extension that just gives me a stumble button to push. Till then though this bookmarklet should do the trick.