Being the big Firefox fan that I am, I am always searching for great plugins to further enhance my browsing experience and I’ve blogged about a few great plugins before.

I’ve come across this very cool plugin that adds a few extra icons to the URL bar of the browser. At first glance, it did seem mildly intimidating, but after using it for a few hours now, I think that its absolutely great!

I’ve found that the guys at LifeHacker also recommend it and I’ve included their review of the plugin below:

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension UrlbarExt adds 7 new buttons to the Awesome bar with a wide range of genuinely useful functionality to power up your browsing experience.

We’ve mentioned this extension before, but it has since updated with more functionality and upgraded from experimental to officially approved by the Mozilla Add-ons site (no longer requiring a login to install). The functionality of the default buttons include, from left to right:

1. Copy the current site URL or custom formatted URL.
2. Shorten the URL using your favorite service or right-click for more options.
3. Search the current site using Google for the selected keyword. Right-click opens a dialog for adding keywords.
4. Go up one level, or directly to the root of the current site with a double-click. Right-click gives you a list of levels to choose from.
5. Tag and bookmark the current page from a menu of tags.
6. Navigate through sequential URLs. (if the URL ends in a number, it will take you to the next numbered URL)
7. Surf anonymously using online phproxy servers. Right-click lets you view the Google Cache along with other options.

Once installed, the settings panel lets you fully customize which icons are displayed by default or hidden behind the “Grippy”, along with a ton of other options.

Clicking on the Shorten URL button will use your default service, but right-clicking gives you extra options to email or twitter the last shortened URL, or even switch to a different URL shortening service.

And a few other great features! I’d honestly suggest that you install it and give it a shot. Mozilla Firefox’s success is purely a result of its extensibility and the features in this plugin is certainly one that we all use daily!

Download URLBarExt from Firefox’s addon centre here!

My love for Mozilla extends past the fact that its free to use. The greatest asset that Mozilla packs into Firefox, Thunderbird and it’s other products is it’s relentless extensibility. I’ve posted previously about a few add-ons that are really cool, but Island-Chic has very recently put together a newer list of really cool Firefox addons and I’m still finding new cool stuff

With that in mind, the guys at the Mozilla camp can certainly whip out the confetti, champagne and cold fatty chicken platters today! They have served up 1 Billion addons for the products. Thats an astonishing number and further highlights the growing popularity of the open source gods!

Well Done Mozilla! I’ve been a fan for a while and will continue to patronize IE users as much as possible until you take your current 20% market share and slip it into the dominance region of about 40%!

Show your love for Mozilla Firefox with one of these really cool high-res wallpapers! Don’t forget to check out Firefox 3 and the really cool plugin selection that I suggest!

A regular to my blog will know by now that I’m a HUGE Google fan. I’ve said it before and I will stand by my statements, that if any company takes over the world, it should be Google!

They have recently been VERY aggressive in shaping the way we use the internet and have even been trying to OWN the internet, by buying up ISP’s, laying down cables and even looking at launching satellites to facilitate cheaper internet access.Google Gears was a major step towards cloud computing and Google has strategically launched an array of other products to enable a semantic web environment. Their latest product has been over blogged about recently and has definitely shaken up the browser market, Google Chrome.

Google has the habit of building really great applications and offer them free to the public. They are usually at the forefront of usability, speed and reliability, but is Google Chrome actually better than Firefox? I still find myself using Firefox as my default browser as my love for Firefox’s extensibility is yet to be challenged by a similar offering. Especially with plugins like the Cool Gmail Skin, Firebug and a host of other really great plugins available!

LifeHacker has recently done some pretty good testing on Google Chrome, Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8.0b. The test results are VERY interesting:

The Tests

As with my previous browser tests, I installed completely fresh copies of the three browsers on my Windows Vista laptop, with all settings left to defaults. With the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, I reset the browser to factory settings and chose whatever Microsoft suggested during the click-through setup.

My test system has the same specs as before: A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, and running Windows Vista Home Premium. For the time-based tests, I again used Rob Keir’s ultra-lightweight timer app, simultaneously tapping the “\” key with “Enter” to launch a browser shortcut or folder full of bookmarks. I performed each test on each browser three times and averaged out the results, while eliminating obvious oddities. (With Vista’s often empirical hard drive usage, there were definitely artificially long start-ups).

It’s the same system I used to test Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 RC3, Safari for Windows, and Opera 9.5, so you can make fair comparisons between all the browsers. It’s not scientific in the strict sense, but it’s meant to measure browser performance as real humans experience it—load, click, and wait.

Test 1: Startup Time—Winner: Chrome!

Drawing inspiration again from Mark Wilton-Jones trend-setting tests, I timed each browser loading up “cold” load (straight off a system restart) and “warm” (having run twice already). I used a locally-saved copy of Google’s minimalist home page to negate net connection variations, and, to compensate for Vista’s start-up fickleness, timed each browser exactly two minutes after boot-up. Here are the first results:

Note the small scale of the time on the X-axis: Even though Chrome was (quite surprisingly) slower at startup than Firefox or even IE 8, it’s less than a second of difference between them all. That’s a bit more than an error from my twitchy fingers, but probably not enough to rate any one browser on. Let’s check out the warm boots:

As you can see, Chrome’s noticeably fast on reload, although all the results are so close it’s hard to confidently crown a winner. Just like last time, IE 8 slightly edges out Firefox on warm boots, but lags just a bit behind when starting up.

You don’t start your browser to look at clean, white, locally-saved pages, do you? No, you speed around your must-visit sites, and often keep a bushel of them open at once. For the next test, I led each browser page-by-page through the assortment of web sites pictured at right—some heavy with interactive elements, some just text and pictures—before jumping back to a blank page (entering about:blank does this in any browser) and loading all the links at once. Each browser keeps a spinning icon on tabs as they load, so I measured from first click to the last tab settling in.

IE 8 and Chrome clock in too close to call, but Firefox fell behind. Based on the minuscule difference in cold-boot time and the two warm tests, I’d call Chrome the fastest, but definitely hand IE 8 a Most Improved Player trophy at the awards banquet.

Test 2: JavaScript & CSS—Tie: Firefox & Chrome!

JavaScript continues to grow in importance as a browser benchmark, because it’s the backbone of no-reload interfaces like Gmail, Facebook, and lots of other webapps. Once again I used Sean Patrick Kane’s revised JavaScript speed tests and averaged out three results to measure the browsers:

Firefox bests Chrome in this test by a handy lead, while IE 8 takes nearly twice as long (in milliseconds, of course) to perform all the actions Sean runs it through. It’s anybody’s guess who’s got the most objective test—CNET’s testers show Chrome wr
ecking all comers, while Mozilla’s own tests declare their orange scrapper the winner in tight races. I can only take away that IE 8 is definitely an improvement from IE 7’s fall-behind pace, while Chrome and Firefox are pretty evenly matched…

…until I ran the CSS tests, that is. CSS determines the layout and appearance of a page, and nontropp’s downloadable form makes a browser work like a page designer on an all-guarana-and-coffee diet.

In the CSS test, as you can see, Chrome takes a commanding lead, Firefox doesn’t lag too far behind, and IE 8 actually stalled and froze on just about one of every two loads I ran. When it came out of memory freeze, it did report consistent times, though—consistently behind. One could hand the Dynamic Web Performance title to Firefox for the probably weightier JavaScript test, but Chrome also shows a notable grace in running down the type frequently found on blogs. Let’s call this a tie.

Test 3: Memory Use—Winner: Firefox!

How far the great-great-nephew of Netscape has come in its respect for your system’s resources. Measured by Vista’s Task Manager from cold boots and then with eight tabs loaded, Firefox shows some serious savvy with megabytes:

Do note, however, that Chrome handles tabs differently than others—each tab loads as its own process, so that if it crashes or stalls, the rest of your reading doesn’t go down with it. So if you’ve got solid-state chips to spare, it’s not that much more of a hit to run Chrome in a busy session.

As with our last test, we’ll note that browsing is much more than speed and bit usage—many of us can’t imagine web life without our favorite extensions, or Windows integration, or, soon enough, Chrome’s unique features.

What’s been your experience with the newest competitors in the web field? Got your own criteria to compare? Share it all in the comments.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, wrote this feature in all three beta browsers. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, normally appears Fridays on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Open Sourcery feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Google Chrome launched to much limelight recently. I thought that the entire thing was quite amusing. Google managed to build an entire browser without the world knowing, until a couple of hours before the launch. On the back of the leak, they launched a cartoon depicting how it works, and hours later the world was busy installing Chrome to much ooohhing and aaahhing.

Even more amusing, is how saturated the Chrome phenomenon became and what an amazing pace. Everyone everywhere knows about it and is talking about as if it has been around for years. I think that Google really out-did themselves with their brand on this one!Unfortunately, I have to say that I am still using Firefox 3.0 as my default browser. Purely because of my plugins that I have come to love. Especially my Cool GMail Skin, I’m just not ready to trade it yet!

And now its possible to get almost all of Chromes functionality in Firefox by using an array of plugins to spruce up your browser. The latest plugin that I have just installed, aptly called Chrome Package, uses Chromes “tabs on top” look and does a great job of mimicking the look and feel of Google Chrome.

Unfortunately, Firefox is going to have to go back to the drawing board to come up with the silo process management feature that makes Chrome so cool!

In my quest for the ultimate web experience, I have tweaked my GMail CSS, added functionality like HTML signatures to my GMail and added vista like features to my tabs in my browser amongst other things.

Post my Firefox 3.0 installation, I was most impressed that the installation process included the migration of most of my FF2 plugins and those plugins that didn’t work in 3.0, were promptly updated to be compatible with version 3 of the browser offering by Mozilla.

So, here is how I built the ultimate browser:

First, ditch Internet Explorer and get Firefox 3.0!

Then add the following 11 plugins to your Firefox:

1) Tab Scope: Allows for fully functional preview screens of each tab on mouse-over. The latest version allows you to treat it as fully functional webpage that is clickable as well!

2) Stylish: Allows you to install CSS files that overwrite the default styles of a webpage as I did with my Cool Gmail Skin!

3) Firebug: A web developers dream! A must have for anyone with the slightest of technical web knowledge!
4) All-in-one Gestures: Allowing for really quick mouse gestures that opens new tabs, opens new windows, goes back, closes tabs, closes windows, minimizes windows, etc. It’s super nifty once you get the hang of things and get used to holding down the right-click to pull off these moves!

5) Cooliris Previews: This plugin allows you to view what is on the other end of a link. Simply put your mouse over a link and it will open up a fully functional window of the result page of clicking on that particular link! Veeeery cool when you are searching for something, but don’t want to waste your time by opening too many links!

6) Download Status Bar: The Firefox standard download status bar is sad! It’s an annoying popup window and gets in the way of browsing effectively. This plugin puts all the functionality into the bottom toolbar with pause and resume features, mouse-over for detailed info and even double click to open the file directly from the toolbar. A must-have!

7) Fast Dial: This is one that I have only just added. It mimics the feature of Opera and allows for speed dial type bookmarks with thumbnail images. Facilitating super fast browsing to often visited webpages. I’m still new to it and it needs some getting used to before it becomes seamless.

Flagfox: This too is a new plugin to me. It displays a small image of the flag that represents the country in which the website is hosted in. With local-only bandwidth starting to emerge as a key pricing standard by many ISP’s here in South Africa, it is good to know which websites are hosted in your country to avoid paying increased ISP rates!
9) Tabs Open Relative: If you are tab junky like I am, you will soon become very annoyed with the fact that new tabs open at the end of the queue and not next to the tab in use. This plugin solves that very problem and will open a new tab relative to the tab that you are currently using, so it becomes so much easier to manage!

10) Tiny Menu: The top menu is just plain annoying. I never used mine, unless it snowed and I’m wearing my left shoe on my right foot on a Sunday. The top menu is now summarized into one very cool, easy-on-the-eye menu item with access to all standard menu items through it. It’s true value is noticed after you install it and you realize that you haven’t clicked on it for a while clearly proving the point that you never use the standard top menu anyway!
11) Update Notifier: A simple but essential plugin that keeps track of all the plugins and the browser for latest updates, it will notify you when one becomes available. This is cool when you have so many plugins and don’t have the time to go back and check for updates manually for each of them.

My search will continue for the most kick ass plugins by sifting through the thousands available, but I will need to make sure that each one that I add to my browser actually adds value and isn’t just gimmicky.

Completely open source and thousands of free plugins already available further extending the endless capabilities of the fastest, most secure browser around, Firefox 3.0 Rocks, Nuff Said!

If you have ever used Vista, you would know how helpful the little scope windows on the taskbar is when you hover your mouse over it. But, if you have any ounce of self respect, you would probably be using Firefox as your browser of choice.

Tab Scope is a browser plugin that mimics this functionality and also extends on it, with the tabs having back, forward, zoom, reload and close functions as well.

I’ve found this plugin to be SUPER useful as I am a tab junky with at least 15 tabs open on each browser window. So, in my quest to configure the ultimate browser, I wholely endorse this plugin and it gets the HoTsTePPa stamp of approval!

If you don’t have Firefox yet, its honestly worth it! Download it here by clicking on the firefox logo above!

I have been so chuffed with my little Gmail skin and the added functionality that it brought me, that I set out on a quest to find a way to use an HTML email signature in Gmail. Currently, GMail will place the image of a signature as an attachment and it appears at the bottom of the page which is very uncool!

So, in the quest to make the most awesome email account, the “awesomest” email account, I will be looking at making subtle changes using plugins. I should also make it VERY clear, that all these plugins will run on your browser and will in NO WAY affect the performance of GMail.

Once again, this is a browser plugin for Firefox, and honestly, if you are STILL using Internet Explorer, then get with the program!

Once again, its a SIMPLE process:

• Install Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox.
• Install the script by clicking on GMail HTML Signature.
• Then open up a text editor and write a HTML signature and save it in a text file.
• Now open GMail and notice on the Compose Email window, there is a link that says CREATE SIGNATURE. Simply click on it and place your html code for the signature in the box.
• Hit Save!

I placed the image that I wanted to include in the signature on a server with a link to it in the HTML code. This makes the signature VERY light, saving you bandwidth and prized email space!

Related Article: Coolest GMail Skin!