Web Browser Wednesday
Firefox extensions are often lauded for the additional features and functionality that they bring to the browser. Some of them can save you crazy amounts of time, while others are more about beautifying Firefox. Here at CyberNet we typically try to focus on those extensions that can make you more productive, but today we’re going to flaunt what the developers have given us. That’s right, it’s time to tell your friends that your browser is better than theirs. 
The top 10 extensions that we’re going to show off today have been downloaded thousands, or even millions of times by Firefox users like yourself. One thing that they all have in common: they are all rather impressive to those that have never seen them before. Well, maybe only impressive to the nerdy tech-savvy crowd.
Lets get the show on the road… in no particular order here are the top 10 extensions that you should show off to your friends.
1. PicLens (Homepage)
Anyone that hasn’t seen PicLens before is sure to be left in awe. It’s a nifty image browser for sites like Flickr, Google Images, Photobucket, and more. It brings an astonishing 3D realm for navigating photos to the browser. Transitions are smooth, effects are amazing, and there aren’t really enough words that can describe how awesome the experience is. We’ve gotta throw a YouTube video out there because a screenshot wouldn’t even do it justice:
Seeing that you and all of your friends are probably YouTube junkies it’s best that we forewarn you about PicLens supporting YouTube videos. Yes, you can search and browse through YouTube videos just like you can with images. That’s a good enough reason not to install the extension, because the last thing we need is a reason to spend a few more hours each day on YouTube.
2. Scrapbook (Homepage)
WIth Scrapbook you can actually capture and save any website to your computer. That way you can access a cached version of the page anytime you would like, and what’s even better is that you can mark it up all you want. Highlight a word here, throw a note there… you’re friends will never realize that you can grab a site and morph it into whatever you want.
3. Gspace (Homepage)
Do you feel bad about having an outrageous amount of storage in Gmail and letting it all go to waste? With this simple extension you can put your Gmail account to work as a file storage solution. It comes equipped with a spiffy FTP-like interface that couldn’t make transferring files any easier with your Gmail account. Heck, it can even interact with multiple Gmail accounts so that you can create one for documents, another for images, and so on!
4. Tab Effect (Homepage)
I can’t say that this extension serves a valuable purpose, but it will sure catch the attention of your friends just as it did with our readers. You’ll see the extension in all it’s glory when you go to switch from one tab to another. That’s when the cube-like rotation effect will kick in, and you can watch as your friends’ jaws drop to the floor.
5. Repagination (Homepage)
This is an extension that your friends may not be impressed with right away, but they will definitely be looking for the download if you use it with one of their favorite sites.
Repagination is a powerful tool that can continuously grab whatever page the “Next” button links to, and it will be concatenated onto the current page. One example of this is being able to grab hundreds of search results pages, and scroll through them all as if they were a single site. It works pretty much anywhere there are page numbers or a next button. It’s especially handy when you’re navigating through pages of photos, such as those on Flickr.
What’s going on in the screenshot below is I scrolled down to the bottom of the Google search results page and right-clicked on the number “2?, which represents the next page in the order. Then I went to Re-Pagination->All and it concatenated 26 more Google search results pages onto the one that I was already viewing. I darkened the concatenated portion in the screenshot below so that you can distinguish where the original results page ends and where the other one begins, but when using the extension it looks like one fluid page. You can also limit how many pages are concatenated which might be a good idea so that it doesn’t add so many.
6. Tab Scope (Homepage)
I know I know, seeing a thumbnail when you hover over a tab is nothing knew. Opera does it out-of-the-box, and to the untrained eye this is really nothing different. Don’t be deceived… this is not just a preview.
With Tab Scope you can fully navigate the small thumbnail that is shown when you hover over a tab. Go forward or back, refresh the page, scroll, or even click on links. It’s way more than just a preview, and it deserves all the attention it gets.
7. Update Scanner (Homepage)
I’m sure your friends would love to be notified when the content of websites change. Just think, they could take MySpace stalking to a whole new level. With Update Scanner it is a no-brainer.
Just point it to the URL you want to check for updates, specify the interval at which it should check the page, and tell it roughly how much of the content needs to change before it notifies you. Update Scanner will do all the work in the background, and will popup with a notification whenever a change has been detected.
8. Interclue (Homepage)
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a better idea of what a hyperlink points to? That’s where Interclue comes into play. When you hover over a link it is capable of showing a crazy amount of data about that specific page. Maybe the number of words the it contains, how many links there are, Digg count, and much more. If the link points to a YouTube video you can even watch it right from the Interclue popup window.
9. Firefox Universal Uploader (Homepage)
Take the pain out of uploading files to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Box.net, Facebook, and more by using this uploader tool. It is complete with an FTP-like interface, but you’ll use it to upload/download images and other files to your favorite sharing sites. This is also a great way to retrieve images in bulk that you’ve uploaded to a supported online service, but accidentally deleted from your own computer.
10. ThumbStrips (Homepage)
The last thing you’ll need to show your friends is how you can navigate your browser’s history in style. Remembering names of the websites you visit is so 2005. With ThumbStrips you can just flip through thumbnails of the sites you recently visited:
If you show your friends all of these things it will surely leave them in awe. Most browsers aren’t capable of doing most (if any) of the things listed here, and if they’re not using Firefox the odds are probably pretty good that they had no idea it was capable of doing such amazing things thanks to the extensions.
Let us know in the comments below if there are any extensions you think could really impress people.
I have my own FTP space for storage (so I use FireFTP), but I like the GSpace interface and so on. Plus, the FTP connection to my provider’s often a bit poop so this could be a nice add-on.
Update Checker is fantastic. I have some friends who’s blogs don’t have RSS for whatever reason and this is superb. Means having to use one of my own PCs all the time (i.e. no cybercafes), so it’s not *perfect* but much better than checking pages every day manually.
This article about Firefox extensions is cool. Among the list above, I have only used Piclens and Tab effect. But the real problem with Firefox is that some of these add-on’s do not get updated as and when Firefox gets updated and when you move over to a new version of FF. I have started using Firefox 3 version beta 5 and it says some of the extensions which you detailed above are not supported. The FF extensions I use the most are Piclens, Cooliris, Zotero, Blogrover, Scribefire, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and I have somemore which I have up and running, but I do not remember now. Firefox is a great browser and with all these add-ons available, I just love it. The only time I use IE is for online banking or kind of such things, as I still do not completely trust FF for this. Maybe I will start using FF in the future for these highly confidential and sensitive things. I hope FF will beat IE in the times ahead. Thanks once more for your interesting article and keep it up.
Techbuzzard, how funny you wouldn’t use FF for your “confidential and sensitive” stuff. Seems you’re missing the whole point about FF being a much safer browser than IE.
If you like Piclens, and if you’re also a movie buff, here’s a freeware that uses Piclens 3D wall to display your DVD collection, your favorite movies & series, your favorite actors, etc…
It also uses the latest PicLens feature to find videos on YouTube (trailers, interviews, making of, alternate scenes, spoofs, etc…)
[coollector.com]
PICLENS — Although a great extension I cannot use it as it disables the setting for logitech MX700 mouse double click using the center scroll wheel (pushing it down, not scrolling). Emailed for their tech assist a week ago, no answer yet.
Also I am using Repagination which is great, but sorry to say I frequently forget to use it! Can’t wait to try out the others you have mentioned, even though I already have 42 active extensions plus several disabled for use only when needed. (With 42 extensions, FF takes longer to start up, but since I leave it running all day, that’s no hassle.
Also don’t use Tab Scope because when the mouse pointer is moved to a tab the focus immediately changes to that tab. Believe due to TabMixPlus setting to select tab after 350 ms.
I actually use it for running some scripts on my webserver as well, using a specialized URL that I’ve created.
That’s kinda what I was thinking as well. Normally it’s the other way around.
Huh, that’s actually pretty cool. A very clever use for that kind of display.
That’s the problem with a lot of extensions for me. I install them but never remember to use them when they’d be the most useful.
Tab effects – the novelty wore off fast and the functionality became rather annoying very fast.
Unless Scrapbook has changed significantly in the last 12 months, it appears to slow Firefox, especially as the the amount of web clippings grow.
It seems to use a proprietary database to store the clippings, which can’t be accessed by any major desktop search app. It’s own search and organize capabilities are weak to dysfunctional. Lastly, if you want to mass export multiple clippings, their is no built-in way to do so.
(Hopefully, the new version(s) of this extension has fixed these shortcomings.)
Some of the extensions look awesome, especially PicLens.
I knew it! Piclens will always be the coolest one!
Yeah that would be TabMixPlus. You can turn it off or change the amount of ms.
I agree. I’ve had Scrapbook installed for a long time, but decided to replace it with Evernote. The only thing I miss in Evernote is that it doesn’t display the website as it looked when I captured it, although that could be seen as an advantage as well (more consistent).
Ben,
I do agree to some extend when you say that FF is more safer than IE. But the point I am trying to make is that, I will have to create another profile in FF with all the extra add-ons which will make FF a more safe while trying to access sensitive and confidential sites. And since I use FF for all my day to day surfing, I do not want to install all the add-ons into this basic profile, because it will slow up FF. I use IE just basically for all those sensitive stuff, and I use it once in a week or so, so its ok for me. So as long as FF integrates into itself all the security features without the help of all all those add-ons, then I will be using IE for my banking needs. And one more thing, many of the add-ons available are not still certified by FF because when you try to install a add-on, you can see that FF says “publisher unknown”. So it’s always better to be on the safer side than just blindly following something which may or may not be true.
I installed PicLens and now the address isn’t showing up in Firefox’s address bar. Random. Awesome extension though!
Edit: I went to their website and downloaded the newest version, URL bar all fixed now. Woop!
Have you heard of Portable Firefox
it allows you to keep all your passwords and extensions with you even at an internet cafe it just runs off your thumb drive.
[Portableapps.com]
Hi Ryan,
Thank you for posting about PicLens! We truly appreciate it. We’re delighted to hear that you are enjoying and we hope your readers will too.
A quick update about PicLens: we have officially renamed the product Cooliris. Also, we just released Cooliris 1.8 with Sharing and Cooliris for Developers. Not only can you now share content easily with your friends, you can also enable your own site with Cooliris in as little as 10 minutes. All new reasons for spending more time enjoying Cooliris!
For interested readers, please check out [cooliris.com] and [developer.cooliris.com] to learn more.
Thanks again,
Luna and The Cooliris Team
about gspace there is also a nice little utility that does it in a very simplified form, although its not a firefox plugin its very useful and you can right click a file/folder and backup it immediately to your gmail account without the hassle of mounting a file system. the application is called “Backup To EMail” and can be downloaded from [emailer.zapto.org]