Theme and Extension Updates Week 46

It is time again for last weeks Firefox extension and theme updates article which takes a look at all the official add-ons and themes that have been newly released or update and are available on the official Mozilla website. This is a selection of what has been released, it is definitely subjective but should cover the most important updates of the last week.

There have not been any noteworthy theme upgrades in the last week unfortunately.

Zotero a must have add-on for Students

Doing research has become a tad easier with Zotero which is not only useful for students but also for everyone else who is doing research. One of the main features is the ability to save book information from sites like Amazon, libraries and newspapers. Those information can be sorted in different categories, tagged, extended with notes, edited and attachements can be added as well.

What I like is that you can add multiple sources at once which is useful if you found a good reference list of books on a website.  Zotero adds an icon on the right side of the url whenever it senses information that can be added. A click on that button automatically saves the information if one item has been found. In the case of more items a list of those items is displayed with the option to save all or some of them.

The created references can be exported which is excellent if you want to go shopping or visit your local library searching for those books or papers.

Should I Use the Read Me Later Add-on ?

Some buzz was recently created around a new Firefox add-on called Read Me Later published on IdeaShower. The add-on lets the user add websites that he find interesting to a Read Me Later list which acts as a storage for all those links. The idea is not bad at all because I often find myself in a position where I’m unable to read through a website at the moment.

The Firefox add-on  adds two buttons to the navigation toolbar which are called Read Later and Reading List. The Read Later button adds the active URL to the Reading List where they can be loaded again at a later time. Bookmarks can be synced by using browser syncing tools and are accessible as well in your Bookmarks folder.

The main problem that I encountered while using the add-on was that it was not possible to move the Reading List button from the navigation toolbar to another toolbar. I do not use the navigation toolbar at all and it is kinda puzzling that one can only move the Read Later button.

Football Fans need Footie Fox

The chance is high that you do love Football, that is Soccer for you Americans, if you live in a country that is not the United States. Footie Fox is a extension that helps keeping up to date with the latest football results worldwide. That is right, you find all major leagues (Premier League, Bundesliga, Seria A, Primera Division and many many others plus all the national and friendly matches that you can think of.

The whole interface and what is displayed can be customized. You could for instance search for your favorite team and only display the latest results of that team. It is however as possible to add a league, all leagues of a nation and national teams.

Extended Add-ons Manager

The Firefox add-ons menu is not displaying lots of information and provides only buttons to uninstall or disable an extension and open the options if the extension offers any. There is no information about the date that extension was installed or the extension id which are both useful information if you want to analyze or test something.

There is also no way to open the containing folder which really does help as well because it opens the folder of that extension. All extensions are saved in the extensions folder of the Firefox profil folder and the ID of the extension as the subdirectory. It is quite hard to locate a add-on in that extensions directory unless you do know the Id.

The Extension Manager Extended changes the default add-on menu to display those additional information and options.

NextPlease makes navigating websites easier

Don’t you hate all those websites that divide their articles into several tiny parts to display more advertisement and generate more page impressions ? I know that I do hate them, clicking those tiny numbered parts of the article sometimes guessing which number comes next.

Nextplease is a extension for Firefox that offers a solution to this problem. Instead of clicking on those pages of the article you simply click on the next button or previous button to navigate the different pages. It is also possible to use shortcuts instead of those buttons in case you do not want them added to one of your toolbars.

By default a new toolbar is added to Firefox by NextPlease which probably does not suit the needs of most users. I decided for instance to move the icons of that toolbar to my main toolbar and disable the NextPlease toolbar completely.

Install Add-ons for all users

Installing Firefox add-ons for all users can be a great way to reduce your workload and provide all users that use a computer with the same basic extensions that can add functionality, privacy and security. Even greater is the fact that those add-ons are also available to all future users with an account on the system.

You need to use the command line in Windows to install a Firefox add-on for all current and future users. The basic command is firefox –install–global–extension “full path to the xpi file”. The only difference between installing an add-on for the current user and for all users is that you have to download the xpi file for the latter.

Change the Firefox window size to a custom size

What would you do if I asked you to test a website in the resolution 1024 x 768 for me while the native resolution of your monitor would be higher than that ? Would you reduce the resolution in your operating system to match the given figure ? There is no way to reduce the window manually to fit that resolution.

Enter  Firesizer. This Firefox extension lets you change the Firefox window size with the press of a button. Several default sizes are available which are the most used sizes websites use these days. Those are 640×480, 800×600 and 1024×768.

Additional sizes can be added to the extension and are available in the menu once they have been saved. This is a great way for  checking websites in different screen resolutions without actually having to change the resolution in Windows.

Theme and Extension Updates Week 45

I’m looking back at the last seven days and explore which wonderful new and updated themes and extensions have made their way into the Firefox world. I try to narrow down the selection which naturally means that I will miss the occasional extension or theme and I would be very happy if you could add it in the comments then.

Lets begin with the extensions and move on to the themes afterwards. I hope you find something new and / or interesting in there.

Updated and new Extensions Week 45:

Download Statusbar – Changes the way downloads are handled and displayed in Firefox
Fast Dial – Fast Dial is Operas Speed Dial for Firefox.
Firefox Universal Uploader (fireuploader) – upload/download files from any website (including Flickr, Youtube and Facebook) using a friendly interface.
Gmail Manager – Manage several Gmail accounts on one computer
Gspace – Use Gmail as a file storage.
NoScript – run Java, Javascript and other scripts only on trusted domains
Stumbleupon – A new version of the Stumbleupon toolbar
Webmail Notifier – able to check various webmailers for new mails without visiting their website.

Updated and new Themes Week 45:

View Sources in Tabs

Firefox opens page sources and selection sources in new windows instead of a tab which would make more sense in my opinion. If you do like to change the default behavior and open all sources in tabs instead of new windows you should install the Firefox extension Source Viewer Tab.

Another nice feature of this extension is that you can open the source tabs again by selecting undo close tab which would not be possible if the sources would be opened in a new window.

Useful for webmasters and developers.