By Steve Bass
Firefox: Did I Get Mail
I love it when you write and pass along handy ideas. I received hundreds of messages (okay, 50, but who’s counting) sharing Firefox add-ons, extensions, and tips — and I’m successfully using many of them. Here are some of the most useful of the bunch.
But first some advice.
The day after the "7 Tools to Make Firefox Shine" newsletter published, the world almost ended for Firefox fanatics: A major security hole was discovered in Firefox. Great timing, no? Not to fret, if you upgrade to Firefox 3.51, the world will be okay again.
You’ll be happy to know if you’re still using Firefox 3.06 or so, all of the add-ons I mention will work. But if you’re a worrier, and already upgraded to 3.51, you’ll find a few won’t install. My guess is that individual add-on developers are working overtime to satisfy your overwhelming need for updates. If you continue feeling stressed, just up the meds for a week.
Most important is that you experiment with these add-ons and extensions one at a time. I don’t want to hear any whining (you will anyway, I know it) if you enable them all at once, cause new sunspots, and feel faint.
Let’s start.
10 Super-Duper Firefox Extensions
- Deskcut adds something Internet Explorer users love: A way to generate desktop shortcuts by using a right-click context menu. Now you can resume making a mess out of your desktop. (Seriously, keep your desktop neat and clean; all those icons grab system resources.)
- I searched and couldn’t believe Firefox was missing a valuable Internet Explorer feature: A way to run a downloaded app immediately rather than download it. OpenDownload takes care of the problem by adding "Open with Win32 application" from Firefox’s download dialog. [Thanks, Todd.]
- I recently talked about sites that tell me the time anywhere in the world. FoxClocks is handier: It puts customizable world times a click away in Firefox’s status bar. [Thanks, Bill W.]
If you never remember what time
it is in Singapore,
Mountain Time Zone),
FoxClocks will tell you.
TechBite’s columnist Steve Bass and PC World Contributing Editor publishes a free weekly newsletter with commentary on the technology products he loves, the strategies for getting the most out of them,and the gotchas that can cause computing misery. Sign up for the newsletter here
