Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Pursuant to Mr. Simmons' Suggestion

The best Firefox addons, or at the least the ones I like the best, are as follows:

Gmail notifier: This handy little addon goes into the bottom status bar. It's very simple: a small notification pane shows up whenever you get a Gmail message. (If you haven't already switched to Gmail from whatever crappy email service you use, do so immediately.) Now some people aren't going to like this because they'll find it invasive, intrusive, or whatever. I personally think it's genius. Email, cell phone, and AIM are the three ways I do most of my nonpersonal communication. Two of those are immediate, as in I get notified every time I get a cell phone call or a AIM message. Now I also get notified with each Gmail.

Adblock: You know how Norton Internet Security comes with a fancyoption that basically lets you drag and drop web ads into it so they'll never show up again? Adblock basically does the same thing. You can click the Adblock button in the bottom status bar (conveniently next to the Gmail notifier) and permanently block a certain image or frame from appearing. Or, you can block an entire domain worth of crap from showing up. Very nice not to be accosted with ads every time I try to go to a website.

ForecastFox: So there are a lot of weather tools out there. Most of them are adware or suchlike crap. ForecastFox is not. It's pretty much self-explanatory: you input a zip code, you get the current weather as well as the next two or three days forecast at the bottom of Firefox. So in the morning, if I want to know how much I'm going to freeze on the way to Biology, I'll be able to.

IE View: As previously stated, Firefox is a superior browser to IE. But some people seem not to have caught on to that yet. Even some web developers haven't caught on to that yet. So a few websites don't work in Firefox as well as they're intended to. IE View adds an option to the right click menu that lest you see a current page in IE, should you ever have to subject youself to that horrific fate.

Additionally, even though it's not an addon per se, the search bar deserves a special mention. It's got Google, of course. But you can expand it to include IMDB, Webster's dictionary, Urban dictionary, Wikipedia, Amazon, and all sorts of wonderful places. In IE, one would have to open a new window, go to IMDB (for example), then use the search box there; in Firefox, you can merely type a search string into the bar, press enter, and have the results show up in a new tab.

So there you have it. 5 reasons that Firefox is the browser you have no excuse not to use.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. I didn't have ForecastFox (dunno why I hadn't gotten around to that one yet) and I didn't have any idea about IE View. The few websites I have seen that allow no interaction through Firefox or Safari (which is my default second browser, what with using a Mac) aren't really things I need to see... but there are some sites "optimized" for IE for which this could be useful. So... cool.

Anonymous said...

The above was from me Nick Simmons who might as well create a Blogger account if he's going to keep commenting on here and eschewing punctuation which is hopefully a single-comment phase