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.

Over the weekend I started checking out the newest project out of the Mozilla Labs, Raindrop.  To some it might sound a little like Google Wave – however it offers much more, and is also much easier to wrap your mind around. 

Here is more about the program, in a nutshell, from the developers:

When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.

I am all about the “making things easier to manage” so I eagerly anticipate learning more about what Mozilla has planned for this service.  If you want to learn more about the fundamentals of Raindrop, watch this video:

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

What do you think?  Are you excited, or does it look like another web trend that is doomed to trip over itself?  Leave a comment and let me know how excited you are about Raindrop.

1. Embracing Glass: Toolbar and Tabs using Glass. Buttons translucent and slightly glossy to meld with the toolbar. Raised 3D lookachieve tactile "feel".
2. Page Button: Connect the Page button to the left side of the tab area. Directly connected to the Page.
3. Tools/Bookmark Bar: Connecting the Tools button to the side of the Window to emphasize the fact that it is used for customizing and changing the UI. Adding a button next to that to toggle the Bookmarks Bar which is turned off by default.

What do you think thus far?  I kind of like the idea of removing the menu bar, as long as all the important aspects are still easily reached (maybe via “tools”).  However, not sure if I want everything to be as see-through as it is in the example.  Here are two more screenshots:

How do you feel about the proposed Firefox 3.7 changes?  Are you excited or annoyed?  Give me your opinion!

Here is a little more about Slickerfox from it’s creator:

There is a philosophy behind the shapes, colors and designs of all of the Slickerfox icons, which aspires to be user friendly as well as recall older Firefox designs. Simplicity and intuitive control is the overall goal of the theme. Slickerfox uses native OS Scheme settings just like the default Firefox theme, so it will follow the look of the rest of your OS.

Like what you see?  You can pick up the experimental theme, Slickerfox for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

This comes in handy because it allows you to check out scenes from a video before you watch it.  It works with: YouTube Search, the YouTube Home Page, the YouTube Video Pages, and FriendFeed.

It also works for your search results too:

A few other features included are:

• Use the visual summary to jump in time while watching a video on YouTube’s video page
• Discover more videos featuring the characters in the videos you click on, and learn more about them
• Make all HD-compatible YouTube videos play in high quality (or HD) by default

If you want to give it a shot, go check out the VideoSurf Videos at a Glance page over on the Firefox Add-ons site or go lean more about VideoSurf on VideoSurf.com.

Ubiquity takes language based instructions and turns them into action, right where you  need them to be.  This video goes a great job at explaining the add-on and showing it in action:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Here are a few more tutorials to get you started:

• User Tutorial for Ubiquity
• Developer Tutorial for Ubiquity

The initial prototype is a little rough, and not ready for prime time yet.  It does show a lot of promise though, and with a little creativity this type of tool could go a long way.  Ubiquity looks to be another amazing tool to add to the many that have come out of Mozilla Labs.

Here are some of the other Tab Sidebar features:

• Provides navigation options for each tab including history, stop and reload
• Allows you to move tabs around with drag and drop
• You can drop links, local files and bookmarks anywhere you like
• Displays the security status of tabs
• Automatically refreshes the tab preview whenever the page changes

To activate the extension, just go to View and then Tab Sidebar to see it.  On the down side, some have complained that CPU usage goes way up when using this addition.  On the good side though, hey – you get pretty thumbnails for all of your tabs!  In the “what would I like to see” I would like to see if work flawlessly with the scroll wheel on your mouse. 

There is a lot of promise and a lot to already love, so give Tab Sidebar a download either via the Firefox Add-ons site or the official web page for the extension.

Personally, I think I might like the Tango one the best.  The other day played with Strata some but still not a big fan of it.  I am sure it will also be only a matter of time before people release “classic” versions to make the theme look more like Firefox 2.

Tired of these themes?  Try a few of the best new ones out there!

At first glance, it didn’t really give me any shock and awe feeling or emotion but after navigating around it for a while it is an improvement over the older styled web site.

So What is New to Love?

They have made the "review and rate" box easier to reach when checking out add-ons one by one, which will encourage more feedback to be given.  Also there are a few more related links on each add-on’s web page to give you that, "Well, if you like this then go check out that!" sort of feeling.

The larger search box at the top of all the pages is a welcome addition too.  Not only does it give it that Web 2.0 feeling but it is handy to have it bold and in my face when looking where to search for more extensions.  

Also when you are doing a search, you now have the option to "Add to Firefox" right from the search results.  You no longer have to search, pull up the addon’s profile, and then add it to your browser.  There are a lot of little things that just make this a really welcomed update I think for many Firefox users out there.

To get some more inside information about the back end of things be sure to check out Basil’s Bodacious Blog. 

My first thoughts were “oh, it’s shinny and blue” but it does the job it sets out to do. It does fit into the Windows Vista look and feel pretty well, don’t you think?