With Firefox 4 being right around the corner, are all of your favorite add-ons and themes going to make the cut?  In my own opinion, I think that the drastic changes in both the backend of Firefox and the visual frontend will lead to a lot broken add-ons and favorite themes.  Hopefully though, this will not be the case once Firefox 4 is ready for the general public at large.

Add-ons Compatible with Firefox 4 – First, lets take a look at the Firefox extensions.  Doing a quick search on Firefox’s Add-ons website I found 1,000 add-ons that claim to be compatible with Firefox 4.0.  That might sound like a lot – and it might cover all the basic bases, but Firefox currently has at least 10 times that amount in all.  So this means that possibly only 1 in ever 10 add-ons might be compatible.

Themes Compatible with Firefox 4 – So, what about Firefox themes?  Currently there are 412 themes for Firefox (or 694 if you count the ones that are un-reviewed). So how many Firefox themes are compatible with Firefox 4 right now? There are 29 themes that are ready for Firefox 4.

How Can I Get Involved?

So, how can you make sure your favorite theme or add-on is compatible with Firefox 4?  The best way would be to visit that theme’s profile on the Firefox Add-ons website – and then either find the official site for the add-on or search for the “E-mail your question” link on the profile page:

Contact the add-on or theme author and let them know you would like to continue to use their wonderful work once Firefox 4 rolls out.

There have been several highlighter extensions I have seen over the years for Firefox, however this one might be my favorite.  The ultra light-weight Highlights add-on for Firefox simply highlights selected text on web pages with a right-click of the mouse.

To highlight text on a web page, select the text, right-click (‘Ctrl+Click’, on Mac OS X) and select ‘Highlight’ menu from the popup.  The default yellow highlight color can easily be changed, by clicking the “Highlights” icon on the status bar, and choosing the color picker.  To remove the highlights, simply refresh the page.

No matter if you are doing research or you just like to highlight interesting points while you read, the Highlights extension is an excellent way to mark your spot on the Web.

Headup underlines words on pages when you browser.  When you hover over those words, you get relevant content from popular web services. 

Technically speaking, they  “presents you with textual and rich media content related to the objects and terms it identifies on the pages you browse.”  Here are a few more examples from their web site:

Use Headup’s ability to recognize objects and relationships to discover all kinds of information quickly and effortlessly. Here are some examples:

• Discover which of your friends like a particular band and gain access to the band’s videos and lyrics.
• Find blog posts and stock news about a company and discover which of your contacts work there.
• Get alerted about your friends’ birthdays and see which books they’re likely to enjoy as a gift.

Overall, I have to say it is an interesting idea – and a cool tool.  Sometimes these semantic plugins kind of confuse the general public, so I would really recommend playing with Headup to see if it is right for you.  You can pickup the Headup add-on on Headup.com or the Mozilla Add-ons web site.

Why just send a simple text-based note, when you can send that and the web site you are talking about all in one swift, easy to access movement?  Here is the extension in action:

It also supports sharing via Facebook, Twitter, RSS, HTML, and direct email so you can quickly share your comments.

Reframe It allows you to simple say what you want to where you want to.  This extension would be perfect (as an example) if you were working on a web site re-design, and wanted to show your boss the areas you wanted to work on.  Another example, would be citing research, when working on an article.

You can learn more about Reframe It via the Reframeit.com web site and pick up the Firefox add-on for the service on the Firefox Add-ons site.

What sources does it support?  We have:  YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter, Amazon, Economist, CNN, LinkedIn, TechCrunch, Hacker News, Digg, Reddit, Google Books, Fluther, Delicious, Yahoo! Shopping, Scribd, Backtype, and Youlicit.

The easiest way to explain WebMynd is that it makes Google better by personalizing it with information and resources that you value.

Here is a little more about how it works from the developers:

After installing the WebMynd plug-in just search and browse the web as you would regularly.

When you search on Google, WebMynd will add results from your own browsing history and the top sites that you visit. And you can configure it to search many of your favourite sources such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Flickr amongst many others. If you use Twitter, you can ask your Twitter network for help while searching, right from Google.

When you are using WebMynd to record your history, a copy of the sites you visit is kept on your computer’s hard drive and the text is sent to our servers so we can index the information to make it easier for you to retrieve later. You can turn WebMynd on and off with a single click and you can set it to never record particular sites, you have 100% control.

Here it is in action:

WebMynd currently supports Firefox 3 on Windows, Mac and Linux.  You can pick up the Firefox extension via the Firefox Add-ons site or WebMynd.com.

Here are some of the features ScrapBook provides…

• Save Web page
• Save snippet of Web page
• Save Web site
• Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks
• Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection
• Editing of the collected Web page
• Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes

If you find yourself in the need of a better note taker, then you might want to pick up the ScrapBook add-on for Firefox.

As you can see Internet Explorer is still pulling head as you would assume it would do, but Firefox still is holding a healthy share of the market.  Internet Explorer 7 itself still can’t beat the ugly stepsister that is Internet Explorer 6 though. 

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.

Alright, that is good to know. For many of us, doing research can be a pain in the rear so i am all for any tool that promises to make the experience easier.

+ Download and Install the Zotero Extension for Firefox!