Firefox add-ons

Selected Search speeds up on-page searching

Selected Search is a new add-on for Firefox that makes it easier to start a search from any page you're on. It works by taking text you've highlighted with your mouse, and then bringing up a small pop-up list of all the search engines you have installed. From there you just pick the one you want and it opens up behind the scenes in a new tab.

Firefox has its own built-in contextual shortcut that does this with whatever search engine you've got set up as the primary. The big difference with this extension is that you … Read more

Log all your Facebook chats in Firefox

Facebook's built-in chat service is convenient, but where it lacks when compared to software-based chat tools is in letting users log past conversations. Facebook intentionally does not save full conversations, however it does keep a few lines from the last time you chatted with someone so you can pick up where you left off.

If you're looking for more though, there's a new Firefox add-on called Facebook Chat History Manager that saves all of your conversations locally. As long as you're using the browser with it installed, it saves everything and puts it into a log … Read more

Amazonlinks shortens Amazon's massive URLs

I am a regular user of Amazon.com, and one thing that's always irked me is the company's use of excessively-long URLs. In fact, they are so long that back in 2002 Google increased the number of URL characters it was indexing just to accommodate them.

Now there's a rhyme and reason to this system, but try to explain that to the person who you just dumped a 150-character URL on in your IM conversation.

Instead of using a third-party link shortening service that might not work if it goes down, you should check out AmazonLinks. This … Read more

20 useless Firefox add-ons (slideshow)

There are more than 7,000 Firefox extensions in Mozilla's official catalog, and a good portion of them can drastically improve how you browse the Web. Then there are the stinkers. These add-ons that actually make the browser slower, or harder to use. We've compiled a list of 20 that you should steer clear from, if only for their lack of basic utility.

It's worth noting I went through more than 7,000 extensions to come up with this list and it was incredibly tough to even come up with 20. It can also be argued that some of the ones on this list are, in fact, useful to a select few.

Nearly all of the ones on this list are up to date, but there are a few that won't work with the latest version of Firefox. We've noted that in the description. Also, for the respect of your mouse clicks I've pasted in the full list, with links to each one on Mozilla's add-ons site after the page break.… Read more

Never enough Firefox add-ons

Is there such a thing as too many Firefox extensions? Not as long as developers keep creating handy, gorgeous, or ingenious time-savers like the nine add-ons featured in our gallery. We leaned away from the usual, though always excellent, fare of McAfee Site Advisor, Google Preview, and these top five Firefox add-ons to bring you a new crop of favorites. Feel free to chime in with your own gems, too.

Flip tabs with style

FoxTab is a cross between Mac OS X's Expose, Windows Vista's Flip 3D, and the thumbnail view in Google Chrome. When you've got a lot of tabs open in Firefox, FoxTab offers a quick way to jump to the page you want without having to eyeball the name of each one. To toggle it on, just hit a small keyboard shortcut and it zooms out all the tabs into a giant wall. You can also summon it with a small button that sits next to the address bar or by choosing it from the right click menu. … Read more

Simple search in Firefox

One cool thing in Firefox is the capability to highlight a word, right-click, and search your default search engine. But that just gives me a general search. I swear I've seen the woman who plays Charlotte on "Lost" in some movie. I'd rather be able to right-click and immediately search IMDB. Here's a Quick Tip for adding multiple search engines to the context menu in Firefox. Watch the video to see how it works.

Go to addons.mozilla.org and search for SimpleSearch. While it's still in the experimental stage, you'll have to … Read more

Headup puts semantic search in your browser

Headup is the latest company to attempt in-browser semantic search. The Firefox-only add-on that, surprisingly enough, uses Microsoft's Silverlight to do its heavy lifting, will scan whatever page you're on and search a cross section of the Web for related news stories, music, videos, and more.

To personalize the results it finds, you can plug in your contacts and accounts from various social services including Twitter and FriendFeed. This will pepper the results with related tidbits from them when applicable. For example, a quick Headup search for "cheeseburger" showed me that one of my FriendFeed buddies … Read more

Open up most files with Google Docs automatically

If you're a big fan of opening up PDFs and Microsoft Word .doc files in Google Docs from Gmail, you're probably wishing you could do the same thing from every other Web app or site you're on. Firefox users now can with a small extension called "Open in Google Docs." Once installed it will open up any file type that Google accepts in--you guessed it--Google Docs. This includes both PDFs and PowerPoint files, the latter of which will open up straightaway in the presentations app.

This is a marriage of convenience for people on Netbooks, … Read more