One of the better ways to get Google Chrome or Internet Explorer-style compacted menus in Firefox is Personal Menu. The add-on comes loaded with options, so for a one-trick wonder it's pretty slick.
Personal Menu compacts your menu bar behind an icon.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)It adds an icon to your toolbar customization window which you can then drag-and-drop onto the toolbar of your choice. I stuck it on the Menus Toolbar next to my navigation and refresh button, because Personal Menu comes with the option to hide the menu bar. By getting rid of the Stop Loading button, because I use that even less than I use the forward button, and the search bar, which is functionally duplicated by the search features in the location bar, I'm able to clear up a significant amount of screen real estate.
The reason to go with Personal Menu, though, is that it lets you heavily configure the menus that it hides. From Personal Menu's Options menu, you can configure which menus appear behind the button, and in which order they're listed. These choices aren't limited to the standard File, Bookmarks, or Tools--any sub-menu from the main menus can be pulled out and added to the drop-down.
For example, if you need to access the Extensions Options menu often, you might want to put that in the drop-down to save time by having to navigate to it through the Tools menu. You can also save menu drop-down configurations, a useful feature for computers running multiple Firefox profiles.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Mouse actions can be configured to alter menu behavior, too. From the Miscellaneous tab in the Personal Menu extension options, users can adjust actions when middle-clicking or right-clicking on the Bookmarks or History buttons, as well as alter the number of pages that appear in the History. Advanced options include adjusting in which direction the menu opens, forcing the menu bar to appear via a hot key, and "emergency response measures" to bring up the menu bar if the toolbar icon accidentally gets disabled.
On rare occasion the extension has grayed-out its menus. It's a frustrating flaw that I fixed by restarting Firefox. Some of the descriptions for advanced features could be written more clearly. I still only have a vague idea of what "Position in where menu of this button shows" actually means. Still, Firefox fans looking to make the most of their screens or make menus more useful will find this to be a must-have add-on.
I'm a big fan of my browser's contextual menu. This menu, which can most easily be pulled up by right-clicking your mouse is commonplace for really useful extensions that are polite enough not to clutter your browsing experience with extra keyboard shortcuts or UI.
Firefox extension SimpleSearch is a really good example of this concept. Once installed it lets you search from a handful of sites like Wikipedia, IMDb, Google Maps, and dictionary search engine Definr. You just highlight the word or phrase you want to search and do a quick right-click to hop to the results.
The one downside is that it requires going an extra level deeper in the contextual menu compared to your browser's built-in search option, which in Firefox and Chrome defaults to Google. But for that additional step you're rewarded by not having to copy and paste into your browser's search box or open up a new page. In future releases I'd love to have the search options moved to the main right-click menu instead.
Related: Drag and DropZones adds amazing gesture-based Web search to Firefox
Once installed, SimpleSearch lets you search from one of five search engines from your right-click contextual menu.
(Credit: Mozilla)
A helpful search for my favorite hard-to-find brew.
(Credit: BeerMenus)BeerMenus.com, I've been dreaming about you at night. And now you've jumped into my world. We're a match made in heaven.
Here's how it works. Much like a boozier version of Menupages, BeerMenus aggregates bars' beer lineups so that you can search for a particular establishment or for a particular beer to find out where it's on tap (or bottled) and for how much. For those of us who prefer their beer to be a bit more esoteric than Bud Lite or even Stella Artois, this is a godsend. I searched for my favorite variety, Allagash White (a delightful Belgian-style white ale brewed in Portland, Maine), and BeerMenus gave me a list of ten establishments where I could find it along with a Google Maps mashup.
For even more hops-and-barley fun, BeerMenus indexes special events at bars as well. That's something that Going, Upcoming, Yelp, and their socially prolific brethren already handle, but it's still a nice feature.
The nifty little site, which just launched Thursday, currently only extends to New York's prolific bar scene, and within that, it still only has about 150 Manhattan bars' menus available. And unfortunately, at the moment I'm across the country in San Francisco so I can't actually do a field test. I'm guessing it's generally accurate, but beer menus do tend to shift around more frequently than food menus do--that's an area where social-networking features like comments and reviews could help.
But really. Think about what could happen if this expanded: frequent travelers could learn where to find their favorite brews in unfamiliar cities, or learn where they can try out a nice pint of a regional favorite. The site also has plenty of room for recommendations, discovery features, and reviews--like a Snooth for beer.
You'd never have to drink a crappy beer again.
Google today updated the menu structure of the word processor in Google Docs. Gone are the menus that change the toolbars underneath. Gone are the useful but unusual "revision" and "tag" items. What we have now is familiar to anyone who's used Microsoft Word 2003. In fact, the five menu items have the same names as items on the menu bar of Word 2003.
Meet the new Docs.
Google is saying that Microsoft got it right in 2003. Ironically, with the 2007 Office suite, Microsoft itself has moved on to a prettier, but not universally loved menu structure that is reminiscent of Google Docs' first versions: you select a general function category and the toolbar buttons on the "ribbon" underneath the menu change.
Word 2003: The last version of Word before it dropped the old menu standard entirely.
Hopefully, Google will stick with this scheme for a while. The frequent changeups in the user interface for Google Docs are distracting.
Updates to the other Google Docs apps--the spreadsheet and presentation app--will come later.
Via: Google Blogoscoped, which has historical screenshots of the Google word processor menus.
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