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.

Where are the features?  Here are some of the thinks I liked about this awesome add-on to your browser:

• Search by selecting/highlighting text and then clicking on the popup bubble
• Google results automatically show up in the Awesomebar/URL bar as you type (faster than going to google.com)
• Easily switch between search engines during a search with a single click
• Convert text URLs into clickable links
• Automatically copy on select / paste on middle click / paste on right click (NOT enabled by default)
• Visit bookmarks quickly with keyboard shortcuts using qLauncher
• Adds "related articles" side-pane to Wikipedia

There is definitely a lot of browser tweaking to be loved here.  It is that type of extension that does many things well, instead of focusing on doing one thing really well.  So if you would like to kill several birds with on stone – this is the pick me up your browser has been looking for. 

Want to give it a shot?  Pickup SmarterFox on the Mozilla add-ons site and let me know what you think.  Has it helped you browse the Web any faster or smarter?

I want to tackle some of the more basic questions people have about Firefox. What could be more basic a question than “What is Firefox?”. It like Opera and Internet Explorer is a Web browser. It allows you to view Web sites on the thing we call the Internet or World Wide Web. Here is the definition of Firefox from Wikipedia:

Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a large community of external contributors. Firefox, officially abbreviated as Fx or fx and popularly abbreviated FF, started as a fork of the Navigator browser component of the Mozilla Application Suite. Firefox has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the flagship product of the Mozilla project, under the direction of the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla Firefox is a cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems, including FreeBSD, OS/2, Solaris, SkyOS, BeOS and more recently, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Firefox’s source code is freely available under the terms of the Mozilla tri-license as free and open source software.

You can also check out more about Firefox’s history and future on Wikipedia as well. Have any more basic Firefox questions to ask?

If you use Firefox you can install the Wikiseek Search Extension to add Wikiseek to the search form inside all Wikipedia pages. Just click the install link below and follow the instructions. Once you restart Firefox you will see a Wikiseek button in the Wikipedia search form.

Pick it up and let me know what you think.

+ Download and Install the Wikiseek Firefox Extension!

This Firefox extension shows you a relevant Wikipedia article along with your search results. Clicking links in the article will trigger new Google searches, making it a very useful research tool. Just one more way to make your searching a little better inside of Firefox.

[Learn More About Googlepedia!]