• Google
• Yahoo
• Microsoft
• Network Advertising Initiative Members

Here is a peek at the interface of Beef Taco:

Personally I have never understood the reason for wanting to block advertising cookies in the browser, but for those of you who like to keep things nice and private – Beef Taco will help you get the job done. If anything, you could pick and choose who’s ads you want to accept and who’s you want to block too.

You can pick up Beef Taco from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Here are some quick links to the customizations you can make:

Change the Firefox Button Icon
http://userstyles.org/styles/51118/fxchrome-firox-button-icons?r=1311430549

Change the App Button Back to Normal
http://userstyles.org/styles/54955/change-the-app-button-back-to-normal?r=1318606186

New Tab Button with a Plus
http://userstyles.org/styles/55686/new-tab-button-with?r=1320316319

Change FXChrome Minimize/Maximize/Close(Windows XP)
http://userstyles.org/styles/55689/change-fxchrome-minimize-mazimize-close-winxp?r=1320317556

When you are done, your theme could look something like these –

Like it? Go grab FXChrome from the Firefox Add-ons website.  It is a really nice theme that allows you to keep it simple or snaz-it-up the way you see fit to do so.

There is no doubt that both Microsoft and Firefox must be worried about Google’s Chrome browser.  This odd team up only confirms there is a major worry that Google might get a little too powerful.  It will be interesting to watch and see though how this effects Firefox’s default search in the future.  You can only get the Bing powered Firefox on a specific website, and Google is still the default search engine on the version you get from the Mozilla website.

The current Google/Firefox contract runs out in November – so the guys behind Firefox could be using this special version of Firefox to test the waters and see how the public reaction is.  If anything, you can always change your default search engine in Firefox so for knowledgeable users this might be a lot of fuss about nothing.

Why would you want to do this?  Well, some people may feel that having the Google+ information up there 24/7 is a distraction from what they are doing.  If I am trying to clear away the dozens of emails I got last night, do I really need to know that Uncle Bob has just put me in his inner circle?  Probably not.

You will need Greasemonkey installed to make the script work.  Go check out imwill.com for more information on and about this specific script and you can download it directly from the UserScripts.org website.

FXChrome is a nice mix of both Firefox 4′s theme and Google Chrome’s theme mashed together.  While many people would argue that the themes are pretty similar already – and I might have to agree there – I do like the flat buttons from Chrome that FXChrome brings to the table.

Want to download it and give it a shot? You can grab it on the Firefox Add-ons website.

Not only will the Google Shortener let you shorten links, it also adds a button to your address bar so you can shorten or expand the URLs in the address bar too.   Google’s URL shortener service is pretty simple itself, so not sure this Firefox add-on could do much more as far as features go, even if it wanted to.

A nice feature they might be able to bring to it would be to show you the detail page of when the link was clicked and some of the basic statistics too.  I have been using the Google URL shortening service via FeedBurner for my Twitter posts for some time, and I do like having those basic features handy.

You can pick up the Google Shortener add-on for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons website.

The biggest pain, other than cosmetics, is having to re-teach yourself the way you browse.  You have to get used to having that ability at your fingertips to do searches inside a website and get used to the usefulness that an add-on like this brings.

What are some of the newest features?

• Customizable keyboard shortcut to call up Apture Search
• Performance improvements, contextual search results now even faster
• Secure: Automatically disabled on HTTPS (secure) websites to not interfere with your private information
• What’s that word? Dictionary definitions now included in search results

and that is only scratching the surface of what the amazing Apture Highlights add-on can do.

You can pick up the Apture Highlights add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Is it fair that other companies can install unrequested plugins to Firefox?  It is happening right now, and there is not a lot we can do about it.  Asa Dotzler brought this topic up in one of his most recent blog posts and I do think it is an interesting debate.  The three big tech giants out there find it ok to add things to Firefox without asking me first.  Google does it.  Microsoft does it.  Even Apple does it. 

Here is meat and potatoes of the complaint from Asa’s post:

Why do Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others think that it is an OK practice to add plug-ins to Firefox when I’m installing their software packages. When I installed iTunes, in order to manage my music collection and sync to my iPod, why did Apple think it was OK to add the iTunes Application Detector plug-in to my Firefox web browser without asking me? Why did Microsoft think it was OK to sneak their Windows Live Photo Gallery or Office Live Plug-in for Firefox into my browser (presumably) when I installed Microsoft Office? What makes Google think it’s reasonable behavior for them to slip a Google Update plug-in into Firefox when I installed Google Earth or Google Chrome (not sure which one caused this) without asking me first?

I have to agree with him, I do not think this is an ok behavior at all.  When installing any type of software to Firefox or to my computer in general – companies should be open and honest when doing so.  Make sure people know what they are getting and well, they shouldn’t be evil.  When you stop and think about it, Apple, Microsoft and Google all have their own browsers now too. 

What is to stop them from doing something bad with their Firefox plugins to make themselves look better?

Need to tweak the Google search interface, and make it look the way you want it to look?  Maybe you want a few more columns of results? Maybe you don’t like the related searches? One great tool to use to tweak your Google search interface is GoogleMonkeyR.  This user script written for the Greasemonkey add-on will have you tweaking Google in just a few clicks.

One installed, the GoogleMonkeyR user script can be configured by clicking the link for it next your your email address at the top of any Google search result page. 

Here is a screenshot of the changes you can make with this fantastic Greasemonkey user script:

As you can see, there is a lot to love about this fantastic little script.  You can pick up GoogleMonkeyR from the userscripts.org website. To learn more about Greasemonkey and how to use it with Firefox, I highly recommend my guide on Greasemonkey usage in the Firefox Facts archive.

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.