Five Firefox 4 Extensions to Get You Up and Running

March 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

With over 8 million downloads and counting it’s a good bet that not only are a lot of current Firefox users downloading Firefox 4 but it may actually be winning over some new IE users and, dare I say, winning back some Chrome users.

One of the first things I noticed after downloading and beginning to test FF4 was just how dependent I had become on many of my Chrome extensions. I was pleased to see that many of the Chrome extensions I hadn’t seen on Firefox previously had made their way into Firefox 4.

Must Have Firefox 4 Extensions

  • Awesome Screenshot: Back before I made the switch to Chrome “Screengrab” was my extension of choice. Since that wasn’t available I finally found Awesome Screenshot and loved it. Not only can you take screenshots with a number of options you can edit, annotate and upload the screenshot to a hosted site. I even wrote a review about the Awesome Screenshot Chrome extension.
  • gpum: Similar to the Google Mail Checker Plus extension for Chrome, gpum is a Google mail popup manager that lets you preview your Gmail in a convenient popup window. It even has a better UI than GMCP in my opinion.
  • InstantFox: This is a huge one for Chrome users that have become accustomed to using Chrome’s “omnibox” for not only entering URLs but for quickly doing Google searches as well. InstantFox extension allows you to do that and more. In the address bar type “g” then your search term. You can also type “i” will which will do a Google Image Search and “m” which will do a Google Maps search. There are also shortcuts for Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon and even the Weather. This is a great plugin.
  • Tab Scope: This is a pretty cool extension that allows you to not only preview your tabs through popups but also allows you to navigate in the popups as well. The one caveat to this extension is that some users have complained of it being a bit of a resource hog. I haven’t experienced that yet but if you install it and begin experiencing some slowdown you may want to consider uninstalling it and see if that helps.
  • Speed Dial: Not quite as robust as the the Chrome start page with access to your apps as well as your most visited sites, but Speed Dial is a popular Firefox extension that now works on Firefox 4.

I haven’t used Firefox in a while but I believe some of these apps are new to Firefox 4, even if they’re not they’re definitely still worth installing.

What did I miss? What are some of your must-have FF4 extensions? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Firefox 4 Smashes IE9′s 2.3 Million Downloads in 24 Hours With 7 Million and Counting

March 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

Poor IE can’t catch a break. Last week they published a post touting the fact that IE9 had been downloaded 2.3 million times in the first 24 hours.

Just a few days later Mozilla responded with its official release of the long-awaited Firefox 4 along with a kick-ass interactive stats and download page with a live download counter as well as a world map showing where the downloads are coming from in real-time.

As of this posting the live-counter was only about 150,000 downloads away from the 8 million mark.

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Mozilla Labs working on “Smart” Inbox: Raindrop

October 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Mozilla Labs Thunderbird team is working on new, open source software aimed at making your email life easier by unifying many platforms in one place. Raindrop will use a smart filtering technology to separate the important, personal messages from the background noise of alerts, friend requests, direct message alerts etc. Possibly the most exciting part of this project is that, unlike Thunderbird, Raindrop is a web app.

Mozilla Raindrop

Email used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that’s no longer the case today. In today’s world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, Email, etc. to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of places we might get new messages. As a result, we never know that we’ve actually processed all the important messages, because our email has overwhelmed by noise which obscures the real messages from real people.

This boosts my argument last week that the email era is far from over. On the contrary, email is still in its infancy and as email grows up we will see more and more apps that will attempt to help you sort out the distractions until you’re ready to access them.

Click after the jump to watch a quick video highlighting some early features of the current Raindrop prototype.

[Read more...]

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Firefox Browser Takes 20% Market Share

November 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been using Firefox since 1.0 was released in 2004.  Once I got used to tabbed browsing I never looked back.  

For me, Firefox blew IE out of the water.  By the time IE finally caught up with the release of IE6 it was too late, I was already hooked.

In 2004 it seemed like IE was going to be the default web browser forever.  Netscape was, for all intents and purposes, already dead at that point and the thought of an open source browser was unheard of.

It’s hard to imagine that almost exactly four years after it’s initial release 1 in 5 people are now using Firefox.  

I have no doubt that number will continue to grow thanks to Firefox’s excellent open source community and the phenomenal number of plugins available to customize FF to fit your needs.  

If you haven’t already, you should really do yourself a favor and get Firefox.

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Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is Looking Pretty Sweet

October 14, 2008 By 1 Comment

I have to admit, I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with using Chrome as my everyday browser while at home.  There are however a few key features in Firefox that I’ve grown extremely accustomed to which I have indeed been missing.  So, of course, word of FF 3.1 Beta 1 coming out was enough for me to drop Chrome for a while and come back home so to speak.

One thing that took me a few minutes to figure out was the “new tab” button missing off the toolbar.  I usually add it on manually and have grown accustomed to using it fairly regularly, even though I know I should be using the ctrl+t keyboard shortcut.  Don’t bother, that option is gone from your toolbar icons.  replacing it is a permanent spot over on the right side of the tabs.  The “+” obviously opens new tabs and the little arrow next to it allows you to skip to any open tab as well.

From a GUI point of view, one of the cool new features in FF3.1B is the ctrl+tab 3D feature to cycle through open tabs, which is sort of similar the alt+tab feature in Windows which cycles through open programs, and maybe even more similar to the cascading desktop feature in Vista.

FF 3.1 beta uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine which is most of the reason it’s so much faster than the current version of FF3 and more on par with Chrome for its Javascript rendering speed.

For whatever reason though, this feature comes disabled by default.  It’s fairly simple to turn on in three easy steps.

  1. Type about:config in your browser’s address bar.
  2. Type or paste javascript.options.jit.content into the filter.
  3. Double-click the preference to set the boolean to true.

FF3.1B will also be introducing geolocation awareness which is something you could get with FF3 but not without an additional plugin.  3.1 will have it baked right into the main product.

You can download and test drive a copy here.  Beware though, it will brick all of your plugins.  I’m sure those will be fixed soon enough and for now it’s nice to see an even faster version of FF rolling out with brand new features to boot.

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Top Firefox 3 Plugins I Can’t Live Without

June 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Here are some of my favorite plugins that are currently compatible with FF3.

  1. Adblock Plus – I’ve had this installed so long that I literally forget that I even have it. Many times it works so well that when I do need to find an ad on a page for my job or something I think the page is broken until I realize I need to greenlight the ads for them to show up.
  2. Better Gmail2 – Whether you’re a Gmail power user like me or just a casual Gmailite you’ll probably want to check out Better Gmail2. It lets you customize Gmail just the way you like it. From forcing Compose mailto: links to open in Gmail to hiding your spam count to some pretty sweet skins plus a whole lot more. Better Gmail 2 is updated frequently, and is definitely you’re best bet for fine tuning Gmail to fit your needs.
  3. Better GReader – If you’re a GReader guru you this is an add-on that will make you’re life a little more convenient. I basically use this add-on for three things. Auto Add to Reader which lets you automatically bypass the option to add the feed to iGoogle, show favicons and the optimized skin. The skin does a great job of maximizing screen real estate and making GReader even easier to navigate.
  4. Colorful Tabs – This add-on is super simple and does just what it says. It colors your tabs. “Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface.”
  5. Forecastfox – The best thing about this plugin is the seamless way it integrates with the browser. Now when anyone asks, “what’s the weather like outside” or “is it going to rain tomorrow” all you have to do is glance to the bottom right hand corner and you’ll have your answer.
  6. IE Tab – IE Tab is probably only really useful if you’re a coder and need to check browser compatibility issues. IE Tab let’s you run a page based on IEs engine right in Firefox. It’s a quick and convenient way to make sure your page doesn’t fail once you launch it in IE.
  7. Picnik – I just added this add-on recently and haven’t used it much but from what I have used I’ve been pretty impressed. The coolest feature about the plugin is it adds a “Send page to Picnik” option in your right-click contextual menu. This will screencap whatever page you are on and send it straight into picnic and let you go to work on it. Extremely handy if you’re a developer and you want to capture some of your work, throw a nice matte frame around it and post it to your portfolio.
  8. Screen grab! – “Saves a webpage as an image”. That’s what it says under the add-on screen and that’s exactly what it does. This is sort of a trimmed down, streamline version of the Picnik plugin and one which I use way more frequently. This plugin also add options to your contextual menu. With Screen grab! you can either capture and save the visible portion of the page, the complete page or a selection. This is a very handy plugin that I find myself using often.

There you have it, many of you may have heard of some of these and some of you may have heard of all of these but you can’t fool the fooler once again.

On a quick sidenote in case anyone at Mozilla reads this, you really need to fix up your search function on your add-ons pages. For many of these plugins I typed up the exact name and they either didn’t come up at all or were way down on the list. A few I actually had to go through Google to find them on your add-on page.

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