It didn’t take long before we have the first handy Firefox extension for Buzz, Google’s new microblogging service.
Buzz it!, developed by Arthur Sabintsev, adds a button to the Firefox toolbar you just need to press to share the title and a link to the current page via a Gmail post.
A simple extension to help early adopters.
Get Buzz it! at Mozilla Add-ons.
If the white space you get when opening a new tab in Firefox is not your thing, NewTabURL, a Firefox extension developed by Sogame, should help.
Once installed you can set your home page, the current page, or a web address (URL) you enter as the content to show when adding a new tab.
Pretty simple, pretty useful. Try it at Mozilla Add-ons.
Here’s a great Firefox extension that helps find the tab you’re looking for among dozens. Tab Filter/Tab Search, developed by Tito, adds an option to Firefox tabs’ context menu so you can filter in the ones that match by title, address or both the terms you entered. As you start typing, tabs that don’t match the criteria are removed until you get the wanted ones.
To get all your tabs back, just press Esc or close the filter bar.
It works really great. My only complaint is that Tab Filter/Tab Search desperately needs a keyboard shortcut to activate the filter bar. (And a shorter name!)
Thanks to twitter and its 140 character limit, we now suddenly have to care about web addresses (URLs) length. Yeah, whatever. Except that you never really know where that shortened URL will take you and it could easily be just bait to increase someone’s page hits count.
Fear no more thanks to Long URL Mobile Expander, a Firefox extension created by Sean Murphy, that reveals the true destination of obfuscated URLs using the LongURL web service that covers more than 200 URL shortening services.
If you already know that Firefox 3.7 and beyond will feature page loading progress bars in the tabs themselves (making you a true Firefox fan), you may also want to know there is an extension that lets you try this feature about a year before it becomes generally available.
Tab Progress Bar, developed by Frank Yan, adds just this feature which I found so far to be more informational than the old common progress bar in the status area.
Get Tab Progress Bar from Mozilla Add-ons.
Popular file hosting service, MediaFire, has asked Mozilla to take down the SkipScreen Firefox extension.
Like other file sharing systems, MediaFire download links take you to a web page where the download link is displayed along several ads which generate its revenue. For an ad free experience, users can upgrade to a Pro account for $6.97/month or less depending on the length of the subscription.
SkipScreen circumvents the download page, navigating to the download link immediately. So users don’t get to see the served ads, so they won’t click on them, or feel inclined to get a Pro account, effectively hurting MediaFire’s revenue and business model.
I learned today about a cool new Google Docs feature that lets you create good looking mathematical expressions via its new equation editor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support MathML export at this time, which I thought would be great to help scientific authors produce better web documents.
(Not that) Surprisingly, there is a Firefox extension that will help anyone create a MathML expression of really complex mathematical equations. FireMath, created by MrBont gets the job done, and allows you to save the formula as a full XHTML file, a stand alone or inline equation, or an image file.
If you tend to leave your computer running overnight to let some Firefox download complete, now you can do so without the guilt of all the wasted energy once downloads complete and you’re well into R.E.M.
Auto Shutdown is a Firefox extension developed by InBasic that monitors your active downloads and will shutdown your computer when they are done.
To configure an extension, open the Tools menu, click on the Add-ons Manager, switch to the Extensions page, look for the extension, click on it, press the Options button (if it has one), and start tweaking. Or, click on the Options Menu button, select the extension, and start tweaking.
That’s four steps less thanks to the handy Options Menu, a Firefox extension developed by James R Skinner, that gathers all your extensions’ options dialog into a single menu you can add to a toolbar or the Tools menu, for real quick access.
Snapper is a Firefox extension developed by Joe Miller that adds the most common screen capture options you may need.
It adds a snapper icon to the status bar to start screen capturing. You then draw a rectangle over the web page to select the regions you want to capture. You can also resize and move the selection (must activate it through Options). Selections can then be copied to the clipboard, saved as JPEG or PNG files, or automatically saved as you capture them (great for batch capturing).
