Besides blazing fast JavaScript benchmarks, privacy mode is the big new feature in modern browsers. The latest version of Firefox includes many privacy enhancements that can keep others from seeing what you've been up to while online. But what if a friend, family member, or boss wants to borrow and/or look at something on your computer? How do you play it cool and hide tabs you don't want them to see?
Developer Diego Ruiz has come up with a solution called HideTab that does just that. You can very quickly hide one or all open tabs with a keyboard shortcut or right-click contextual menu. This means the tabs can't be seen both along the top of your browser, and in the list of open sites. Instead, you can only see what you've hidden in a small, and subtle pop-up menu that sits in the bottom-right-hand corner of your browser. There's also a keyboard shortcut that restores all of the tabs you've hidden.
HideTab lets you hide certain tabs one at a time, or all at once in case someone comes by when you're looking at something you don't want them to see.
(Credit: CNET)One thing to keep in mind is that hidden tabs still continue to run in the background, which means if you're watching a video or listening to music it's going to keep playing. Hopefully a future version will provide the option to mute the audio from any tabs that are hidden.
Beyond privacy, this add-on can be a useful tool for leaning down the number of tabs you want to see. I regularly do tasks in my browser that involve hopping around to a few specific tabs, and sometimes it's nice to hone down to just those few without transferring them to a new window or doing a lot of reorganizing.
HideTab is an experimental extension, which means there may be a few bugs that have not been worked out prior to its review by the Mozilla community.
Related: How to hide your tracks at work
Since Twitter has become such an important part of the social-networking world, it only makes sense that developers would create a variety of browser extensions that give you access to the microblogging service's features.
If you don't like extensions, or you want to be more social with your browser, downloading the Flock browser could naturally be your answer. Built on Firefox, Flock provides a variety of cool social features while also supporting most Firefox extensions. But for those sticking with the Mozilla browser, the Twitter-based extensions in this roundup are impressive.
Twitter extensions
InstantTweets InstantTweets lets you quickly update your status, add images, or share links by entering tweets into your Firefox address bar. You can also click on pictures, and you have the option of automatically updating your status with that image. I had some trouble with that feature. Sometimes it worked, and other times it didn't, so beware. InstantTweets is a neat app, but it's not perfect.
InstantTweets sits in your address bar.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Power Twitter Power Twitter adds some neat features to your Twitter page. After installing it, you'll find a photo-uploading option, a tab to help you shorten a link, and more. I found it that worked really well and made it quite easy to perform basic Twitter functions. It's a great extension.
PowerTwitter adds tabs to your Twitter profile.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Twitbin Twitbin is installed in your Firefox sidebar. Once there, the extension enables you to send and receive messages. It works well, and I've found that it provides an easy way to monitor my conversations with others. It's worth having.
Twitbin lets you see tweets and update your status.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Firefox tabs make surfing the Web much easier. But managing them isn't so simple. That's why I've found 12 Firefox extensions to help you do just that.
12 tab managers
Duplicate tab lets create multiple tabs with the same history.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Duplicate Tab The Duplicate Tab extension lets you copy a tab's history and open that same tab in your browser. You can also merge windows, which combines tabs from multiple instances of Firefox into a single window.
Firefox Showcase Firefox Showcase enables you to view your tabs as thumbnails in a new window, in the sidebar, or in a new tab. If you view them in a separate window or tab, the extension lets you view what's on the site without displaying it in full size. If you have a bunch of tabs open, the tool even lets you filter them to find the desired tab sooner. It works quite well.
FoxTab FoxTab is the coolest Firefox extension in this roundup. Similar to Apple's CoverFlow, FoxTab displays tabs in 3D. You can flip through them, view them in a grid, or sift through them one by one. When you click on a tab, it's brought to the front.
LastTab Firefox allows you to scroll through tabs from left to right with the control and tab keys. But with the help of LastTab, that key combination will switch its operation to move to the most recently accessed tab. LastTab provides a simple change, but it's extremely handy when you want to reference content on just a few of your many open tabs.
... Read moreBeing safe while you surf the Web is extremely important, yet safe surfing sometimes seems like an oxymoron. For users of the Firefox browser, downloading security extensions can help increase your level of protection from worms, hackers, phishers, and the like.
I should note that even with these extensions installed, you won't be perfectly safe. Visit sites only of trusted sources, and don't download unknown files.
Safer browsing ahead
BetterPrivacy BetterPrivacy protects against long-term tracking cookies that can't be deleted. The extension makes you aware of those objects and deletes them for you. You can then sift through those cookies and selectively decide which you want to delete. It's a simple but effective tool.
BlockSite lets you block sites you don't like.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)BlockSite BlockSite gives you the option of blocking a Web site that you deem unsafe or unsuitable for the family. The extension even disables all links to the sites you might find in search results. When you access the extension's menu, you need only to add the site's URL to the blacklist. You won't be able to access the site, unless you remove it from that list.
Dr. Web Anti-virus Dr. Web Anti-virus enables you to verify that any file you're downloading, or any page you're browsing, isn't installing malware onto your computer. Once you right click on a link or file path, you'll find the Dr. Web Anti-virus option in the menu. Click it, and the path will be scanned to determine if there is any malware being added to your computer.
FormFox You think you're on a familiar site while filling out an online form, but you're nervous about whether the trusted source will actually receive it. That's where FormFox comes in. The add-on gives you the exact URL destination of information you're submitting to a site. So when you input your name, address, and other information, you can mouse over the Submit button and search boxes to find out exactly to where you're directing the information. You might be surprised to see where your data is going.
Ghostery Ghostery gives you alerts whenever a Web site is "watching" you. When you have the extension on, it constantly analyzes the site to determine if it's running hidden scripts that track your behavior. If it does, it will alert you to it. You can then decide to leave the site or stay.
... Read moreI use Firefox's on-page search tool all the time. One thing that's always bugged me about it, however, is that it can only remember one word or phrase at a time. If you're working on a research paper, or switching between the same few words every time you use it, I recommend downloading FindList. This new, experimental extension gives your search box its own drop down history list.
With it installed you can have up to 15 of your latest searches saved for later use and quick selection. Every time you do an on-page search it simply saves that word or phrase in its history even after you start searching for something else. Neat.
Firefox's stock search only remembers one search. With FindList installed it saves up to 15 of your most recent searches for using again and again.
(Credit: CNET)
It hasn't been updated since February 2005, but the free Firefox Preloader continues to help users who want faster boot times while maintaining a heavy load of tabs and extensions. Weighing in with an installer at 840kb and using around 30MB of RAM, the program gave me dramatically improved start-up times on a fully loaded Firefox 3.0.7.
Light on options, Firefox Preloader does one thing and does it well.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Somebody running a clean, unencumbered version of Firefox probably wouldn't find Firefox Preloader all that useful, so I tested it against Firefox with 22 extensions and about 40 open tabs. The extensions ranged from the bulky Cooliris to the svelte AutoCopy, while the tabs included everything from text-heavy, easy-to-render message boards to the main Facebook page and YouTube.
How dramatic were the improvements? Without using the Firefox Preloader, it took 32.1 seconds for Firefox to open, and 2 minutes, 34.2 seconds to finish loading all the tabs. With Firefox Preloader running, Firefox opened in 7.8 seconds, with another 1 minute, 36.7 seconds to complete all the tabs. I tested the times by hitting a stopwatch at the same time as I opened Firefox, so my times might be off by a couple tenths of a second, but even with factoring in the imprecision of the test, the results are still impressive.
Firefox Preloader is not otherwise laden with options. You can set it to run when you turn on your computer, and it installs a convenient system tray icon for accessing it on the fly. From there, you can unload the preloader, which clears out the program from the list of active tasks. And you can reload it, which dumps it from the active cache and then reloads it.
The Preloader doesn't play well with certain browser functions, notably when Firefox restarts after installing an extension or theme. It almost certainly adds at least a small amount of time to the computer's boot cycle, since it's one more thing that needs to load before Windows is ready to go. But for users who want to have their cake of extensions and tabs and eat it, too, Firefox Preloader remains a reasonable way to gain back more than a few precious seconds.
Firefox, for all its great functionality and superior performance, has long been a laggard when it comes to managing PDF content on the Web.
Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers both give users the option of reading Portable Document Format content within the browser, while Firefox forces users to navigate to PDFs through its Downloads window. Not very convenient.
Leave it to Firefox's online community, however, to remedy this failing. While there are a range of Firefox plug-ins to help manage PDFs documents, two stand out for me.
The first, Download Statusbar, doesn't actually enable in-browser rendering of PDF documents but gives the user a status bar at the bottom of the browser window that displays the progress of downloads and allows the user to double-click any download to open it in the application of one's choice.
In other words, no more searching for the Downloads window to check on the status of a file download, and no more scouring one's hard drive to remember where the download went. Download Statusbar keeps it all in Firefox. For my PDF documents, I just double-click the status bar to open them in Preview. Easy.
If you use a Mac and you prefer to have PDFs rendered in the browser, you can thank Google for its simple but excellent Quartz PDF viewer, which does one thing really well: opens PDFs as if they were HTML right in the browser. If you want it to do more than that, well, it's an open-source project, so feel free to contribute.
If you use the two together, Google's Quartz PDF viewer overrides Download Statusbar for PDF files. So, if you want to manage PDFs through Download Statusbar, you won't want Quartz PDF viewer. But through add-ons like this, Mozilla and its large and diverse community have you covered.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
As performance reasserts its prominence and features become less of the driving force behind browsers, I find myself looking at the list of inactive extensions in Firefox with jaundiced eyes. It's been months since I've added a new extension, but the ones I still have I use regularly, and several are actually new to me for this year.
Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, turns photos and videos into moving walls of imagery.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Part of the problem with add-ons is that they're such a personal, subjective thing. What do you need? Why do you need it? One of my favorites is a minor, tiny thing, but it saves me so much time that I have trouble when I use browsers without it. Dragdropupload gives you the ability to drag a file from your desktop into any text field in a Web page. Lightweight but extremely effective, if you e-mail a lot of attachments, this should quickly become a massive time saver.
I use it at work to drag images into form fields that then upload them to the CNET servers. Instead of having to navigate that obnoxious folder tree, I just drag the file and drop it into the appropriate field.
One of the problems with Dragdropupload is that sometimes Firefox updates break it, and it takes me a while to bring it back to life. There are two user-end solutions to solve that conundrum, but both are somewhat risky. Using either Nightly Tester Tools or MR Tech Toolkit, you can use the override compatibility feature to force Firefox to recognize outdated extensions. However, as I've noted before, this greatly increases the chance of having Firefox crash on you.
Nightly Tester Tools can revitalize dead extensions...for a price.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you can't find the same feature replicated elsewhere. I used to force compatibility with AutoCopy, another tiny little extension that introduces Linux-style compatibility to Firefox. Since I do a lot of cutting and pasting, AutoCopy and its multiple clipboards and automatic functionality make it a must-have for me. The mileage you can get out of it may vary with use, of course.
I have one frivolous extension installed: Cooliris. For compatible Web sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon, it introduces a bit of a futuristic vibe to browsing the Web. Your display turns into a full-screen wall of images, smoothly zooming in and out. It makes me wish that we all had Minority Report-style interfaces to work from instead of these comparatively-clunky mice.
Session Manager offers in-depth tools for saving and restoring sessions.
(Credit: Session Manager)The last new-to-me add-on that I still use is Session Manager. Besides resurrecting crashed browsing sessions, it also lets you save current ones and keep them for later. You can configure how the sessions are named, change the default saved-sessions' location, encrypt saved-session data, and configure how post data gets saved, even from encrypted Web sites. Since each session file created by Firefox includes text data, cookies, and history, as well as tabs, being able to recreate all that information effortlessly is incredibly helpful and shouldn't be underestimated.
If you've got an extension that you've discovered in the past year and can't imagine how you got by without it, tell me in the comments below.
Here's a fun extension from the experimental section of Mozilla's Firefox add-ons site. It's called Puzzle, and once installed lets you turn any image from a page you're on into a sectional puzzle with pieces that can be moved around. Upon completion you have the option to ramp up the difficulty, which goes all the way up to a 15x15 grid. It's also able to resize larger images into smaller, laptop-friendly versions.
To toggle it on you simply right click on an image and select which difficulty you want. It then opens up the image (in puzzle form) in a new tab.
I didn't have any luck getting it to work with Firefox 3.1 beta 2, however it worked fine in the current public build of Firefox 3. As with all experimental add-ons, you'll need to be registered with Mozilla to download it.
With Puzzle installed you can take any photo and turn it into a quick game.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)The journey is over for Pirates of the Amazon, a new Firefox extension that let users illegally download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s for free by cross referencing Amazon.com's product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.
On Thursday, a day after Webware reported on the plug-in, lawyers for Amazon.com took action. They served the Internet service provider of the two students who released the extension with a take-down notice--and the students complied and removed the tool, according to The New York Times.
However, on their Web site, the students now say the plug-in was meant as an artistic parody, part of their research for a media design course at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool in Rotterdam Holland. "It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access, and currently debated issues in media culture," the students say.
And while that might seem like a convenient story concocted by the students to stay out of trouble, the NYT reports that they have backup from their teacher, Florian Cramer, who defended them on an Internet mailing list called Nettime.
Cramer said a majority of commentators failed to see the artistic nature of the experiment, and expressed concern that his students were being censored.
"With the take-down notice from Amazon.com, our students have been scared away from pursuing their art, research and learning in our institute," Cramer wrote. "We do not want a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study because their work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues."
While the extension was working, it showed up as a "Download 4 Free" link on the top of the Amazon product page if the content could be found on the Pirate Bay's search index. This linked directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.
