Imagine if you will that you've got an idea for a program/website that you're working on, but you're trying to play around with a bunch of different layouts to see which ones would look the best. What tool do you use to create your mockup? Photoshop? Some expensive program that costs hundreds of dollars? How about a free Firefox extension?

Okay, so I wasn't thinking that I'd have a new version of CyberSearch so soon, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will stop the flood of emails requesting that I revive the customizable background color feature. Yesterday we released CyberSearch 1.0, and with it came a bunch of new features. Along with that I also scrapped the option to customize the background color of the results.

It's been exactly one month since I uploaded the first version of CyberSearch to Mozilla's site, and since then we've had 4,000 downloads of the extension. What's really kept us going are all of you who have expressed how valuable the extension has become, and we're now averaging 4.60/5.00 stars from the 34 reviews we've received thus far.

It seems like just yesterday Firefox 3.0 was released, and here we sit with the first Alpha release of Firefox 3.1 in our lap. This new release is supposed to reach final form towards the end of the year, but until that time comes there will be plenty of pre-release versions (like this one) that you can tinker with.

Mozilla is working hard on Firefox 3.1 which is slated for release later this year, and with it will come several improvements. For starters it will include a Control+Tab replacement that makes switching between tabs a bit more fancy. It will also come packed with numerous improvements to the address bar to help please those of you who don't like how it currently handles itself.

The new Firefox 3 address bar is one of those things that you either love or hate, and it's quite amazing how much buzz such a simple aspect of the browser can cause.

There are a lot of great applications that are coming through Apple's App Store for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, but one of my new favorites would have to be the 100% free WordPress for iPhone.

Foxmarks has rightfully become an outrageously popular Firefox extension. I love it because I'm able to sync/backup my bookmarks with multiple computers. What makes it really nice, however, is that it integrates right into Firefox's bookmark system. That essentially means you won't even have to think about the extension once you've got it setup.

You're probably aware of how the Firefox add-on system works by now, but we'll give a quick recap. Over a year ago Mozilla decided that they needed to add a middle-man to the extension publishing process so that they could ensure that only the quality extensions made it onto the add-ons site.

Now that Mozilla has shipped Firefox 3.0 they have begun working on the next milestone that's due out at the end of 2008. Firefox 3.1 Alpha (code named Shiretoko) is should be released on July 25th according to ZDNet, and the first Beta is expected as early as August.

There are all kinds of ways out there that you can post messages to your Twitter account, but I think the TwitterBar Firefox extension takes the cake when it comes down to ease-of-use. To send a message a little gray dot will appear next to the Go button, and when you hover over it with your mouse it will turn into the plus sign you see above. It will also tell you how many characters are left.

We know that you've had less than two weeks to kick around our CyberSearch extension, and we hope by this point you're finding it to be an indispensable tool. The true power lies in the keyword system that it comes with, but it might take a little time to really understand how it works. Our video demonstration should be enough to get your creative juices flowing though.

Back in 2005 Google launched a bookmark management service that was designed to privately store links to your favorite sites. A few months after the launch a Firefox extension called gBrain popped up that used Google Bookmarks in a rather unique way. Once installed it would basically bookmark each and every site that you visited creating a searchable history.

Here you thought that the only big announcements today were going to be from Apple. Looks like you were wrong! We've got another new version of our CyberSearch Firefox extension, and this time it packs more than just bug fixes.

Virtual desktops are one of those things that have been around for ages, and they have been an integral part of the Linux operating system for a long time. It wasn't until Apple released Mac OS X Leopard last year that a virtual desktop system, which Apple calls Spaces, shipped with an operating system other than a Linux distribution.

Mac only Making one browser look like another has been a trend for ages. More often than not users like the functionality of a browser, but don't exactly like how it looks on the particular operating system.

I can't even count the number of times I've been asked whether there is some way that users can synchronize select bookmarks with their work computer. It's often because they like having access to some of their bookmarks from both home and work, while some they want left exclusively for one of the locations.

In Firefox 3 Mozilla wanted to make dragging and dropping items in the browser a little more intuitive, and so they decided to show a preview of the item your dragging underneath the mouse cursor.

Last week we released the CyberSearch Firefox extension, and I can't believe all of the great feedback we've received. Dozens of different sites have written about the extension already, and we've received over 2,100 downloads. If you like to follow stats as much as I do then you can head on over to CyberSearch's statistics page that I've made publicly viewable.

Ever since we launched the CyberSearch extension I've been getting a ton of emails with recommendations on what I can do to make it better, and alongside those emails are also a few dozen from people who are having troubles trying to install it. What happens to them, and I've had this happen to me before, is they are prompted with this warning when trying to install the extension: