The first thing you will want to do is point your browser towards the OpenSearch plugin generator.  This awesome utility allows you to create a search plugin in he open search format that Firefox (and many other browsers) use.  This way you could search Firefox Facts without even visiting the website first and typing your search into my search form.  The only hard part about this is locating the HTML source code that represents the search box on the website.  In Firefox, you can do this fairly easily by right-clicking on a website, choose "View Source" and then find where the form starts for the search box.

Here is one more quick tip, if you hit "Ctrl + F" you can bring up the search options in the webpage’s view source pane.  From there, search for "form" until you find the right form you need.  For webmasters, this should be pretty easy. Now, for the easy part.

On the OpenSearch plugin generator webpage, simply fill in the website name, the website URL and then copy and paste in the form data you found on the website you want to create the search plugin for.  I would recommend not changing the data for input encoding, plugin file name, or favicon file name. Next, hit the big button labeled "Generate Plugin".

The website will now give you the code you need to save on your own website hosting server to make the search plugin work.  Scroll down the webpage, and make sure you follow each step as they have it.  Once you are done, you too can have your own search plugin like this:

Install Firefox Facts Search Plugin

Hope this helps you create a search plugin for your own website.  If you do create one using this method, be sure to share it in the comments!

Mozilla is getting into the world of social link sharing.  With F1, you can add the functionality of sharing a link on Twitter, Gmail or Facebook into the Firefox browser.  This neat add-on has a lot of potential, and is simple enough for anybody to pick up and use.

To share a link with F1, all you need to do is hit the share icon in the toolbar, choose the service you wish to share the link on and type out your short little message to your followers.  Once you then hit share, it will be sent out.  By default F1 works only with Twitter, Facebook and Gmail but I could see other services being included down the road.

Check out this short video to get more details on how F1 works:

Overall, I have to say I am pretty excited to see where F1 will go next.  Will Firefox having an add-on like this put services like AddThis.com out of business?

In a day where we have fantastic website designs, terrific layouts and tons of stuff to check out on the web – we sometimes forget that some people have more readability problems than most.  The Readability add-on for Firefox looks to change that.  It strips all the fluff from the webpage you are looking at – and delivers pure content.

This extension to the Firefox browsing experience makes reading webpages much more simple.  Once installed, all you need to do to activate it is click the "R" icon in the Firefox status toolbar.  The add-on will also auto-scroll for you too – to make reading any article a hands free experience.  All you need to do is press Ctrl + Shift + A to start the auto-scrolling experience.

Here are a few more tips to help you get more out of the auto-scrolling feature:

0-9 : Set scroll speed, 0 being stand-still and 9 being skim-speed
– : Decrease speed
= : Increase speed
shift + – : Decrease speed quickly
shift + = : Increase speed quickly
ESC or q : Quit

For people out there who want this nifty tool, but do not want to install another add-on into Firefox, you are in luck.  They do have a bookmarklet option available too at Arc90.com.  All you need to do is drag their bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar – and you can make any webpage article more readable.

For those who want the Firefox add-on experience, you can pick up Readability from the Firefox Add-ons website.

What if translating text to a different language was as easy as highlighting text in your browser?  It can be, if you pick up the gTranslate add-on for Firefox. With gTranslate installed, you can quickly translate any text on any webpage just by selecting the text you want to translate and right-clicking on it with your mouse.

Having worked in the support field for most of my life, I run into foreign languages a lot. While gTranslate is not the perfect solution, it does do the job.  It uses Google’s translation service to do the language conversions. Short of learning a new language, this is the best tool we have to use out there online today.

Some of the features of gTranslate include:

• Option to automatically identify the language of the original text.
• Option to detect the “lang” attribute of the of the selected text (or the whole page).
• Option to set the destination language to the browser locale.
• Replace texts from input and textareas form fields.
• Image title or alt attributes can be translated too.

You can also translate to and from the following languages:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Batalan, Chinese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Want to give it a shot? You can pick up gTranslate from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Sometimes we all go a little tab-happy when it comes to our Internet browsing ways.  You might be browsing around, one lazy Friday afternoon, and before you know it – you have twenty open tabs and then decide, "hey, maybe I should get back to work!".  Well, have no fear, because I can get all your tabs closed in one click or two.

The Close All Tabs (Reloaded) extension for Firefox will add a button to your toolbar to close all the open tabs.  You also have two configurations that come into play with this simple add-on.  You can choose whether the browser’s home page should be loaded, or if you want to see the warning about closing multiple tabs.

After installing Close All Tabs (Reloaded), the button is not instantly added to the toolbar.  You will need to customize the toolbar, and select where you need the button to be.   You can pick up this great browser add-on over at the Firefox Add-ons web site.

If you do not want to add another extension, you can also close all your tabs by following these simple steps.

1. Right-click on the tab bar in Firefox
2. Select "Close Other Tabs"

This will, in turn, close all the other tabs that were open, other than the tab that you clicked on when right-clicking the tab bar in Firefox.  It is a simple, yet sometimes overlooked, Firefox fact. 

Every so often, you might need to find your Firefox profile folder to do some tweaking or maintenance of your own.  In the past, this has lead to diving through your operating system’s folders and after twenty clicks, finding the information you need.  Since Firefox 3.6 there is a much easier way to open your profile folder, with no additional extensions installed.

To open your Firefox profile folder, go to Help in the menu bar:

Next, click on Troubleshooting Information.  This will take you to the about:support information page.  If you can remember, you can also visit this page by typing about:support into the Firefox address bar too.

Under Application Basics, click on the button that reads, "Open Containing Folder" next to Profile Directory, and there you go. Your Firefox profile directory should be opened up.  Going to the profile location by following the folder path to it via your computer still works, but this is a much easier way to get the job done.

Hope this comes in handy next time you want to backup, tweak or change something in your Firefox profile folder.

Want to remove all the clutter from your favorite site to read, and get right to the text?  TidyRead, an extension for Firefox, removes all the extra stuff from a web page or article that can make reading on the Web difficult at times.

This browser add-on does a simple, yet effective, job of stripping away the extra content from news or blog article pages, leaving you with nicely formatted text to enjoy.  Since the new version is overlaid on top of the old version, switch between the two is very easy.  You also have the options to customize it to suit your own reading style too (white on black, black on white, white on green, ect).

Well worth trying out, if you find some of the content on the Web a little hard on your eyes.  You can pick up TidyRead on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Nobody likes having to click on checkboxes, in our e-mail or on the online forms we might need to fill out.  It is a pain in the rear process, that I wish sometimes I did not have to do.  With that said, I have found one experimental add-on that promises to make the pain go away.

CheckBoxMate, an add-on for Firefox, allows you to check multiple checkboxes with ease by drawing a box around them to automatically select them all.  Here is what the developer of the extension had to say about it:

This tool is great for sites that use lots of checkboxes like a registration form or your Hotmail or Yahoo! inbox. Imagine this: Your Hotmail inbox has 10 spam messages and you don’t want to click on 10 separate checkboxes just to select them all. Now you can select them all just by drawing a box around them! To begin drawing a box, your mouse MUST first be positioned over one checkbox. Then drag to activate this tool.

Learn more about the CheckBoxMate add-on on it’s official site, or download it via the Firefox Add-ons web site.

This comes in handy when you bookmark a page, and your not sure exactly with what words it should be tagged with (or you don’t want to take the time to think it out).  There is no need for straining your brain to think of descriptive tags any longer with this extension.

You can pick HandyTag up on the Firefox Add-ons web site and learn more about HandyTag on the official web site.  It is still sandboxed on Firefox’s web site, so if you need a login to try it out, be sure to checkout these bugmenot username and password combinations.

With Tagmarks, you have a lot of different icons that popup whenever you hover over the traditional bookmarking star you see in the Firefox 3 address bar.  When you click in each icon, it will add the page to the bookmarks and associate that icon with that page, through the use of tags.

Selecting one icon has the same effect as clicking on the bookmarking star. It will add the page to the bookmark.   The perk here is that it will also apply a tag to the page and always remember and show that icon when you are at that page.  Think of it as a visual tool for you too, to say for example, “oh that is a search magnifying glass, this must be a search site”.

Watch the Screencast of Tagmarks in Action!

You can pickup Tagmarks on the Firefox Add-ons site.  It is still sandboxed, so if you need a login to download it, check out this list of user names and passwords you can use.  Also check out the author of the add-on’s web site for more information on how to get the most out of Tagmarks.