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.

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.

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.

Download Statusbar

A wonderful Firefox extension that I do not want to miss is the Download Statusbar extension which displays all current and past downloads in a bar that sits above the normal status bar. The speed, the size and the remaining time of the ongoing downloads are displayed there as well which makes this an ideal extension to see those details with ease.

Old downloads can be removed from the tab to make place for new downloads. If no downloads are active the download statusbar will not be shown at all.

This is a better solution than to display the downloads in their own download window

Read More:

Download Statusbar

Fancy Numbered Tabs Extension

Are you one of those Firefox users that likes to use the CTRL (or ALT)+Number keyboard shortcut to quickly activate tabs in Firefox ? Pressing CTRL (or ALT) + a number between 1 and 9 activates the tab at that position in the Firefox tab bar. This is by far faster than using the mouse to click on the tab that you want to activate.

One problem when using the keyboard shortcut is that it is sometimes hard to tell the exact number of the tab that you need to activate it. The Fancy Numbered Tabs extension displays a number for every open tab in the tab bar at the position that the red X, which is used to close a tab, normally uses.

But don’t worry, that functionality is still available. As soon as you hover over a number the number changes to the red X making it possible to close the tab as usual.