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These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things...

Firefox add-ons, to be exact. Zen posted about the Interclue Firefox add-on earlier which I downloaded and am trying, so I thought I'd post a few of my favourite Firefox add-ons.
I really don't know what I'd do without them now - I couldn't go back to using Internet Explorer.

There are add-ons for just about anything you can imagine but here are some good ones.

1. Nightly Tester Tools: Sometimes you'll upgrade Firefox, only to find (horror!) that your add-ons don't work with the newer version. Nightly Tester Tools has a handy option that ignores the Firefox version and forces the add-on to try to work with your newer version. I don't really know what else it does (it's really for those testing add-ons and Firefox versions). Invaluable.

2. Scrapbook: I don't know what I'd do without this either. It's the best way of saving webpages that you want to go look at later. You just click a button and a pane opens to the left and you drag the page into it. You can fully organise the pages and even highlight text with different colors, rewrite text and make notes - all without leaving Firefox. The good thing about the way it saves is that it saves the page in it's current condition - a condition you might never otherwise be able to return to - eg, you've booked tickets on Air New Zealand, and have been given a reference number. With this add-on you can Scrapbook the page for later reference.


3. dotCOMplete: You may already know (or not) that if you type a word in the address bar (eg, 'hotmail') and press CTRL and hit Enter that it completes the URL for you (in this case 'http://www.hotmail.com'). This works in Firefox and Internet Explorer. This little add-on takes it further. I have mine set up so that typing the word (eg, 'hotmail') and then hitting CTRL and Enter in quick succession cycles through .com, .net, and .org until I get to the one I want. I have also set it so that pressing SHIFT/Enter cycles through .co.nz, .net.nz, and .org.nz - you get the idea?

4. ViewMyCurrency: If you buy a lot of things off the internet from overseas, you'll appreciate this little add-on. Just turn it on from the browser taskbar and it will show any monetary amounts on the webpage you're on (Amazon, etc) in the currency you choose (eg, NZ Dollars) followed by the original price in brackets. The exchange rates are updated live, so it's always correct.

5. OpenSearchFox: If you're a Firefox user, you'll know that you can add search engines to that dropdown searchbox at top right. You didn't know? There are several ways to do it: if you're using Firefox 2 or greater and you visit a site, eg, Trademe, you'll see that a little colored arrow flashes up in that searchbox (only if the site has added the option to do that) . You have but to click in the dropdown to add the engine to the list. The second way is to search for the engine you want to add HERE at Mycroft. The third way is to use the OpenSearchFox add-on. It allows you to go to a webpages, eg, Telecom Whitepages, click in an input field and add that to your search engine dropdown list (only if 'GET' method is used).

6. Customize Google: This adds a heap more options to your Google results page when you do a Google search, not the least of which is that each webpage result has a little thumbnail of the webpage next to it. Can be useful..It also creates links to do the same search on Yahoo and many other engines.

7. TabPreview: What this does, is if you have multiple tabs open in Firefox, you just mouse-over one of them and it will show you a thumbnail preview of the window in the tab.

I use a heap more but that's all for now...

Comments

  1. firebug - every programmer's best friend. Absolutely brilliant little plug-in, I use it all the time to look at how websites have been built.

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  2. Evernote.
    Freeware notetaking equivalent of OneNote.

    Shipbuktu.
    Receive goods normally only shipped within the USA. A physical mailing address for NZ residents that diverts mail from the US address to here.

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  3. Thanks Greg, Ashley, interesting stuff!

    Ashley, have you also seen ColorZilla? It's quite useful for web designers too, I think. You click on the eyedropper on the browser bar, and then over any object on the web page and it gives you the R/G/B or hex color of the object which you can copy to the clipboard. Also, it highlights parts of the webpage as you mouse over and displays DOM information.

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  4. Using Interclue and scrapbook since I read about them here. Brilliant!

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  5. IMFletcher - yes, I have used it, but I have found it superfluous to my needs - Firebug can give you the information you want via the CSS info (when you mouse over a colour, it shows it, and if you inspect an element it will show you the appropriate colours, which you can mouse over or copy as you wish).

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  6. Ashley, then I will certainly give it a go :)

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