This simple add-on for Firefox will give you the old menu bar layout under a single button – so you can kind of mix the best of the old and the new when it comes to using Firefox 4. It adds a compact menu button to the navigation toolbar and then hides the big Firefox button. 

You can fully customize the compact menu by right-clicking on the new toolbar button and selecting "Customize". From here you can drag the menu button to a new location inside of the Firefox navigation layout.

While there are other add-ons that will do the same job – I think Compact Menu 2 might do it the best.  You can pick it up from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Here is a little more about the add-on from the developer:

Now you can edit the Firefox Menu and change it to your personal and powerful one! Personal Menu provides you a couple of new helpful items that available to be put into Firefox Menu: Bookmark Items, History Items, Configuration(about:config), Restart. In addition, you may create toolbar-box (let you put toolbar-buttons inside), sub-menus and split-menus to organize your Firefox Menu!

To sum things up, if you are one of those people who thought, "Well, this menu item would be a lot better over here" or "Why is there no easy way to get to that feature" then this add-on was designed for you.  This add-on gives you the most control (in comparison to other add-ons like it) when it comes to really customizing everything that is shown under the Firefox button.

You can pick up the Personal Menu add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

So, what is the magic going on behind this add-on? Start Faster bypasses the Windows prefetch feature to get Firefox up and running faster.  When running Firefox on Windows, the default way of doing things is to call several things up at the operating system level (such as DLL libraries). Since these are not 100% needed, all the Start Faster add-on has to do is ignore this step of the start up process.

A “Faster Firefox” shortcut is added to your desktop to start launching Firefox with this idea in mind, after you install the add-on.  So, if you want to go back to starting the old fashion way – you can do so via your regular shortcut icon. Overall you should see your Firefox start up time be about two times faster than without.

You can pick up the Start Faster add-on for Firefox 4 from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Well, I have finally made the switch to Firefox 4 as my primary browser. (Firefox 4 – Beta 9 to be exact) I figured with the big Firefox 4 release date being next month, it was about time I got used to the new way of browsing with the latest incarnation of the Mozilla browser.  So what are some of my initial thoughts?

• Fonts seem clearer to me.  Not exactly sure why, but they do.
• When you right-click on a link, it looks like they have switched the positions of "Open in a New Window" and "Open in a New Tab".  This is going to get some taking used to.  All day yesterday, I kept opening new links in new windows instead of new tabs.
• I like how the add-ons menu now opens in a new tab, rather than a new popup window.  However, I would like to see them do the same for downloads, the bookmark manager, options and everything else that pops up at me.
• The "Private Browsing" mode is a little easier to access.  All you have to do is hit the Firefox button, and then click "Start Private Browsing".  Might actually use it now that it is not hidden.
• In the Add-ons menu, there is a way to get add-ons without having to visit the Firefox Add-ons website.  You have a mini extensions and themes resource built right into the browser.  Hopefully this doesn’t hurt independent add-on review websites like Firefox Facts.
• I have mixed feeling about having no status bar.  I like that when you hover over links, they still show you a preview in the address bar – but it is going to take some time to get used to.

After using Firefox 4 for a day, these are the only real issues or complaints I can come up with.  I am looking forward to the public release coming in February (cross your fingers) and seeing how the Firefox community at large reacts to this brand new browser.  Firefox 4 is going to be the biggest overhaul to Firefox we have seen in a long time – are you ready?

Quickly create PDFs anywhere from any source on the Web.  The add-on PDF Download will let you save just about any type of content from any webpage as a PDF file.  The extension also promises to remove the pain you can experience when you encounter PDF files online too.

Almost every single time I run into a PDF online, I run into problems.  This add-on has solved that issue completely.

Some of the features include:

• View PDF online. Convert PDF to an image and display it in the browser for quick viewing.
• Convert Web pages to PDF. Convert any (unsecured) Web pages to great looking PDF files, and then save, share, print or archive them.
• View PDF as HTML. View the contents of PDF files faster and eliminate browser problems by instantly converting any Web-based PDF to a browser-friendly HTML Web page.
• Control PDF files in Firefox. Stop crashes and get the upper hand on Web-based PDF files by automating and controlling how your Firefox or Flock browsers deal with them.
• Works in your language. Through the help of our users, PDF Download is now available in 19 languages and counting.

This might be one of the better PDF-related Firefox add-ons out there today.  You can pick it up and try it out at the Firefox Add-ons web site.

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 know specific details about an image you are looking at?  You can quickly find an image’s width and height with the Image Spider add-on for Firefox.

Now I can not see where this would be useful for your normal day to day Firefox users.  I can see where it could serve as an important tool for web site designers.  For any image on a website you can pull up details such as the width, height, natural width, natural height, and HTML elements such as the alt, title tag and border tags.

To use it, all you need to do is click on the new icon it places in the navigation toolbar.

In the options, you can define how the text box looks that delivers you all the image details, as well as the fonts for that text box and the border color that goes around a image after you have clicked the Image Spider icon.

Overall it is a simple extension for Firefox that does a great job at serving a simple purpose.  You can download Image Spider yourself from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Do you remember Jetpack?

It is the Mozilla Labs project that makes the add-on building process easier, mixing elements of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.  Mozilla has released an awesome Jetpack Gallery, which serves as a community for Jetpack developers and add-on users.

Much like the Firefox Add-ons site, you have featured add-ons for Jetpack, ratings, and user reviews.  It does a good job at giving you a summary of what each add-on is all about and looks like.

Here are some of my favorite Jetpack add-ons I have found:

• Thumbtabs – This jetpack displays your tabs and theirs thumbnails in Jetpack’s Slidebar.
• Jetstatus – Jetstatus is a Twitter client for Jetpack. It polls the service for new updates and displays popup notifications for every entry in the friends timeline.
• GTranslatifier – To translate a web page into your language, just click on the Google Translate icon in your status bar.
• Image Editor – Let’s you use the Pixlr image editor to edit any image you find on the web. Simply right-click an image, select “Edit Image”, and you’re editing away.

Here are a couple of other places to get Jetpacks:

• Jetpacks in the Wild – Mozilla Wiki
• Recent Jetpacks – UserScripts.org

I am happy to see that Jetpack development is alive and well.  It really brings new and interesting ways to change your own Firefox installation or interact with your favorite web sites. The Jetpack Gallery is well worth diving into.

You get instant access to recently closed tabs, personalized suggested sites and even shortcuts to your desktop applications. 

The most recent release also comes with 7 built in themes, so you have a few more ways to customize it to suit your needs.

There is no reason why, these days, your new tab should be empty and bland.  With the New Tab King add-on for Firefox, you can make the new tab page and the Firefox browser even more functional than it was before.

Sage was once one of the more popular RSS feed reading add-ons for Firefox.  However, time went by, years went on and these days it is not making much news.  However, if you still need a lightweight feed reader, there is now Sage-Too.  This is a continuation of the original project to keep it up to date with today’s Firefox browser versions. 

Some of the features include:

• Reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds
• Feed Discovery
• Integrates with Firefox’s bookmark storage and Live Bookmarks
• Imports and exports OPML feed lists
• Newspaper feed rendering customizable via style sheets
• Technorati and RSS search engine integration

It also has support for the following locales: Argentine Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.

As they say in their own words, “It’s got more of what you need and not much of what you don’t.”  You can give it another shot, or take your first trip down lightweight RSS reading road by downloading it on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Also, don’t forget to start your RSS feed collection with the best Firefox feed out there today, http://feeds.feedburner.com/firefoxfacts.  Never leave your RSS feed reader without it!