addons

Customize Outlook's archive settings

You never know when you're going to need an Outlook message that was archived long ago. In a comment on a previous post about moving Outlook mail to local folders, Cliff Brandt asked how to move a file from the archive to one of his main Outlook folders.

Doing so is a breeze, but keep in mind, an archive relocates only Outlook data of a specific age and is intended primarily to keep your Outlook.pst file a manageable size. A backup copies all your Outlook data and allows you to restore all your messages, contacts, tasks, and calendar … Read more

How to build a futuristic Firefox (video)

Take two new add-ons, judiciously use some pre-existing extensions, and creatively apply built-in tweaks, and you can make Firefox 3.6 look like Firefox 3.7 or even Firefox 4.0. In this How-To video from CNET TV, I'll take you through the steps explained in this blog post from last week. The process isn't hard, and can be good for getting more familiar with the deep level of customization available in Firefox.

Dupe zapper

Microsoft's Outlook does a good job of retaining all kinds of useful information, but its power and complexity make it entirely too easy to end up with multiple entries for e-mail or addresses. Wisco's NoMoreDupes for Outlook add-on searches out and deletes duplicate entries throughout Outlook. It can help you keep your e-mail addresses and saved messages neat and orderly, but it does much more. It finds duplicate entries in your Contacts as well as duplicate e-mails, but it also searches through your Outlook Appointments, Notes, Tasks, and Journal entries, clearly identifying duplicates, some of which you may … Read more

Google in your Lightning

This add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning might be a one-hit wonder, but it provides a impressive service: it allows you bidirectional access to your Google Calendar in Lightning. To use it, you need to grab the XML link for your Google Calendar, under the Settings tab. Then go to new calendar in Lightning, choose Google Calendar, and paste in the XML URL. Voila: instant Google Calendar access, so that you can create, edit, and delete events in your Google Calendar from within Thunderbird. Likewise, changes made to your calendar on the Web are instantly reflected in Thunderbird.

There are … Read more

Extensions return to Chrome dev for Mac

Extension support is active again and bookmark synchronization has arrived in the Google Chrome developer's build for Mac OS X. Default extension support was disabled in Chrome for Mac in December, followed by promises that it would be re-enabled within a month.

Bookmark sync does not yet work flawlessly: a known bug related to the sync process will crash the browser when you add a new bookmark folder.

The latest developer's build, version 4.0.288.1, is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Windows users will only see two bug fixes: one prevented HTML5 audio and video … Read more

Select multiple links at once

Multi Links lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It's just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme of the box and the outlines of the selected … Read more

Keep those tabs private

What do you do with your tabs if a friend, family member, or boss wants to borrow your computer? How do you play it cool and hide tabs you don't want them to see? HideTab can help you out.

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 … Read more

Smarten up your Start page

WebReview attempts to make your Start page smarter and more suggestive, based on past browsing habits. If you've used Google's Chrome, or have been keeping up with Mozilla's latest efforts to change what users are seeing when they first fire up their browser or open a new tab, the idea behind WebReview is the similar.

When you install WebReview it will give you four different sets of links. Like other browsers, it will tell you both the last few tabs you had open, along with some of your most visited pages. It shines at showing you a … Read more

Dive into your wiki history

Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche-based, Web history tracking and organizing tools. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page. Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia … Read more

Zip multiple pages into one

If you're annoyed by short articles spread over multiple Web pages, Firefox add-on PageZipper will "zip" them into one seamless experience. It will automatically load the next page in a series of links, right below the existing page. It's almost like you have a second tab open, right below the screen you're viewing.

It's not a perfect system, and relies heavily on publishers formatting their content a certain way. For instance, if you're looking at a Flash- or JavaScript-powered slideshow of photos, it won't work. However, to get standard links to open … Read more