I’m a big fan of Firefox’s extensibility, and I thought that it would be helpful to others considering Firefox or using Firefox to share some of my favorite addons to the web browser. In part 1, I looked at some of the most crucial addons to web security. Here in part 2, I will talk about addons that will make browsing the web easier and more convenient.

FoxyTunes
If you listen to music when you surf the web, FoxyTunes can come in really handy. It’s functionality is pretty simple — it adds music playback controls in your web browser. You no longer have to switch back and forth between your browser and media player to pause, skip, or change the volume. FoxyTunes works with most popular music software, including iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Player, and Pandora. You can download skins for FoxyTunes to make the playback controls look however you like. There is also a version of FoxyTunes available for Internet Explorer, but so far it seems fairly buggy in Internet Explorer 8.

GooglePreview
GooglePreview is another simple but very handy addon.As the name suggests, it inserts preview thumbnails next to search results in Google. This can help you get an idea of the pages your looking at before you decide to click through, and it can help you avoid clicking on pages that you’re not interested in (or those that are potentially risky). Google search results just don’t look right to me anymore without the thumbnail images — they make the process of finding what I’m looking for a lot quicker.

Easy DragToGo
There are a lot of addons out there that allow you to highlight text and select a number of options, such as searching Google or Wikipedia. In fact, Microsoft added this to Internet Explorer 8 and labeled the feature “accelerators”. Easy DragToGo is similar to these extensions, but instead of right-clicking and selecting you just click or highlight the object you want and drag it in a direction. It feels easier, faster, and there’s something about it that I just like. The program is intelligent — if you select text, it will search for the phrase in your default search engine. If it’s a url (even if it’s not a link), it will open the page. If you click and drag a image or link it will open those in new windows or tabs (depending on the direction you drag). It gets very intuitive, and seems to do what you want it to whenever you drag an object. The addons with drop-down menus do add a bit more functionality, and if you’re looking for one check out KallOut, but this addon just feels faster in use.

Speed Dial
Speed Dial imitates one of the best features from the Opera web browser — whenever you open a new window or tab it gives you click-able thumbnails for sites of your choice. This lets you get to the sites you frequent more quickly, as they are now just two clicks away (new tab and then thumbnail). Speed Dial is also an easy way to separate out the sites you visit most often from the rest of your bookmarks list. There is another app called Fast Dial which is practically identical. Fast Dial is a little more customizable, but I prefer Speed Dial because it feels, well, faster.

Related Posts:

• My Favorite Firefox Addons, Part 1
• Article: Web Browser Faceoff
• Web Browser Faceoff Update

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I say that you should use Firefox because it is the most secure out there, but the real reason that I’m not about to switch browsers is because of Firefox’s extensibility. There’s a whole range of addons and plugins out there that can open up a lot of new uses and functionality in your web browser. Plus, it seems that most every new featured added to a competing browser is quickly duplicated and sometimes improved by an addon to Firefox.

I thought I would share the Firefox addons that I personally use. Some of these make Firefox a little more useful, and some you really shouldn’t be browsing the web without.

In part 1, I tried to concentrate on the four addons that I felt were the most crucial to my web browsing and security. In part 2, I’m going to look at addons that make the Firefox a little (or a lot) easier and more useful.

Adblock Plus
This addon just makes web surfing better, period. It does what it says – it blocks most every web ad out there (it blocks primarily banner ads, as Firefox itself has a built-in popup blocker). With no ads to load, pages come up quicker, and there are less annoyances surfing around in general (if there’s one thing that web ads have gotten great at, it’s being annoying). You can set permissions for certain websites for the rare occasion the Adblock is interfering with something. For dealing with ads that are served using Flash, there are other addons available such as Flashblock, but I don’t use these because they usually disable all Flash on a webpage and there are a lot of Flash-dependent websites out there. One important thing to note: when installing for the first time, make sure you select a database for the program to use (the first one listed is usually fine). One time, I forgot to do this, and the program had no reference for which to block ads.

Web of Trust (WOT)
Web of Trust helps make browsing the internet safer, and for that reason everybody should be using it. WOT places an icon in the browser that is green, yellow, or red depending on how safe the page is. It will also stop you from going to a really dangerous page unless you confirm you’re sure. The application will even put a colored icon next to Google links, so you can make sure you’re not clicking anything misleading. The app uses user feedback to determine which sites are safe, so the more people who use WOT, the more safe the internet will be for everyone. WOT does require you to register an account, but it’s quick, painless, and free. There is an Internet Explorer version of the app available too, so not having Firefox is not an excuse to not browse safely.

DownloadHelper
DownloadHelper helps you download embedded content on the internet, most notably videos from YouTube. There are a lot of applications out there that do this, but DownloadHelper is one of the most popular and most feature-packed. Not every embedded video or audio clip out there can be downloaded, but that’s a universal trait with these apps. DH works on a fairly good number of sites though. DH has a lot of features, but one I find handy is that the addon itself can convert downloaded video from .flv format into a more useful format.

Lazarus: Form Recovery
Lazarus remembers what you have entered into forms, so that if the form is lost you can recover your work. It has saved my life a couple of times, especially when filling out online applications. Thankfully, you can password protect Lazarus so others can’t access the saved data. Even though it is saving and storing information in the background, there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable hit in browser performance and the app is unobtrusive. You shouldn’t notice it’s there until you lose that important form.

Related Posts:

• Article: Web Browser Faceoff
• I’m Giving the Mozilla Thunderbird Email Client a Try…
• Web Browser Faceoff Update

Tyler the Tech Guy is now on Twitter. http://www.twitter.com/TylertheTechGuy.

…and it’s pretty good. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve used a local email client instead of an online one, so I wasn’t completely sure what to expect.

I’ve been using my school email as my primary email account, and the school is switching over from using Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) to Gmail. The Gmail web interface is pretty good (in fact, many would say it’s one of the best), but what hangs me up is that there is no preview pane for reading messages. In Gmail, the only way to see what an email says is to open it, which takes more time and clicks. It’s harder to quickly go through and delete messages when you have to open each one. For a lot of people, this isn’t really a problem, but it got me looking at other ways to view my email.

I wanted to try a local client, because it would allow me to backup my emails to my hard drive and view my messages when offline. I’ve actually been meaning to do this for a while, because there have been many times when I’ve needed to consult an email and there was no internet connectivity. (In such instances, I usually then turned to my iPhone).

I decided to try Mozilla Thunderbird because 1) I’ve heard good things about it, 2) it’s open-source, and 3) it’s free. I downloaded Thunderbird 3 Beta 2, because while it’s a beta it promises faster and more aggressive downloading of messages using IMAP. I haven’t noticed any bugs or crashes yet, so I’m not regretting downloading the beta instead of the last major release.

My first impression of Thunderbird is this – it’s fast. It was very quick to download emails and folders from the server, and practically everything I do in the program is instantaneous. Even downloading messages for offline viewing only took a few minutes. This is refreshing after OWA, which usually lagged a second or two for any given task.

Setup of Thunderbird was a little tricky, but no worse than inputting IMAP settings on any other email program. I spent a good 20 minutes rummaging through the settings and making it work the way I like it. There is one item I’m a little confused about, but it may have less to do with Thunderbird and more to do with IMAP (with which I have fairly limited experience) – sometimes when I delete or file messages in Thunderbird, the changes are reflected in the web client, and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know why that is, but ideally I want everything I do in Thunderbird to be mirrored in the web-client when I need to access my email online.

The interface for Thunderbird is not terribly exciting, but it gets the job done. It’s kind of boring, but things are laid out logically. And, yes, there is a preview pane. Skins are available for previous versions of Thunderbird (and probably for Thunderbird 3 once it gets out of beta), but I wouldn’t want to decrease the speed of the application any or increase the RAM footprint of the program.

The program has a lot of built-in shortcuts that I have yet to learn how to use. However, I already appreciate the built-in spell-check and junk-filters.

Overall, I’m impressed with Thunderbird in the limited time I’ve been using it. It meets my relatively simple demands, and it meets them well. With the program, I can manage email efficiently and quickly. It’s hard to ask for more than that. I do need to figure out how to make IMAP work better for me, but I think that is outside Thunderbird’s purview.