Webs’ Random Ideas

I am sure many of you have heard of Mozilla Firefox before and understand how cool tabbed browsing is. So I will instead show you some tricks for maximizing your efficiency of browsing by telling you about the plugins side of Firefox…

Plugins allow you to extend the capabilities of various software. Many software companies allow plugins to be written because it would cost them time and money to figure out how to extend their software, plus everyone is different. Some people may want a plugin to do X while others may not. Allowing people to write plugins means software companies can get functionality improved for their products for free. One of the many benefits of OpenSource Software.

Plugins are very easy to use all you have to do is go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/, or within Firefox go to “Tools”, “Add-ons”, then click on “get extensions” in the lower right corner. Then search away and find something you like. If you have trouble finding a plugin you can easily search using Google. I recommend using a string such as “firefox [name of plugin]” or “firefox add-on [plugin idea or name]“. The last one will help you find a plugin that can do something, but you don’t know the name of it (remember to keep out the quotes and brackets).

My plugins that I use on almost all boxes I touch are the following (in particular order):

1-clickweather:

Looks nice, displays info from Weather Channel, can give you 4 day outlook

Download Statusbar:

Sends all downloads to a bar that auto-hides above the status bar, no more annoying download popup window

Fasterfox:

Cache pages that you commonly visit to speed them up, plus can be tweaked for performance

Google Notebook:

gives you an icon in the lower right corner of screen to connect directly to, or write to Google Notebook

IE Tab:

Allows you to view pages made for IE (Internet Explorer) in a tab that runs IE, and you can set options so that certain websites will always open in an IE tab. Great for use with Microsoft Exchange!

I use other tabs, but I feel these are the most important ones.

Another trick I learned from DOF is that you can Middle Click on links to have them open up in new tabs (most mice now-adays have a scroll wheel, push directly down on it to make it click). Go ahead and test it out here…

If there are plugins you use that you feel I have left out, please feel free to comment. Or if you have any tips of your own.