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Randy Cassingham's Bonzer Web Sites of the Week: Recognizing Interesting Sites that are Beyond the Microsoft/AOL-Time Warner/Media Megalith |
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Way back in 2004, I recommended the Firefox browser. One of the reasons Firefox is so great is the ability for people to create add-ons to it. The featured site has a huge collection, and they're really easy to install. Here are several that I particularly like:
- ColorZilla is great for people who design web sites: it lets you point to any color you can see, and it will tell you what it is -- great for matching something on a page.
- SearchStatus gives you "popularity" information about a site without having to have the search engine toolbar. What does that mean? When you surf, it gives you the page's Google PageRank and the site's Alexa Rank, which are useful to help you determine how good the site is. The higher the PageRank, and the lower the Alexa ranking, indicates how many quality sites link to the page or site you're looking at, and how popular it is with other users. It also has several other functions that are handy, but those rankings are what I use it for.
- Mouse Gestures is really cool: it lets you send commands to the browser with mouse movements, rather than having to find a button and click it. For instance, holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse to the left means you want to go "Back" one page. I get so used to it I try to do that in Explorer, where of course the gesture is ignored.... And you can program your own.
- Last, I do a lot of copying and pasting from web sites in my research. Anytime I highlight text, Auto Copy copies it into the paste buffer so I don't have to hit "Ctrl-C" or Edit → Copy. Those keystrokes add up!
These are only a good start: look around a bit on the site and you'll find hundreds more add-ons that make Firefox such a great browser.
From This is True for 18 March 2007
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