Recommended Extensions: travelling into the future with Firefox
The orange-blue fox is our favorite browser, no doubt – and one of the reasons is the incredible number of plug-ins available. In FF-lingo, they're called “extensions” and they cater virtually every need: whether it's a webmaster checking his page for errors, a SEO looking for those juicy follow-Links or Mr. average surfer looking for more comfort: almost every need is catered. Recently, MacStories has compiled an interesting postings that saves power-foxers a lot of time.
10 Best Firefox Extensions, 2009 Edition #1: turn Firefox into Firefox.next NOW. is all about extensions which make daily web life easier, faster, more efficient. Some of them are all about gathering of additional information, some of them are about re-grouping contents and some dig deep into the code-structure of webpages. Even though I knew some of those plug-ins, a couple of them were completely new to me.
Some of those extensions are Greasemonkey scripts (in case you haven't installed Greasemonkey yet, you should do that right now. It's a script library which enables users to change various behaviors of websites: using Greasemonkey, one could color Facebook differently but also do a lot of useful things like improve the usability of various online services.)
There's no doubt that there are excellent feed extensions out there as well, but since I don't use Firefox to manage my RSS-Setup, I'm not using any of those. When it comes to reading news I love SnackR, while I use Snarfer, an excellent choice for dealing with large (and I mean: huge) numbers of feeds, for monitoring purposes.
But all hail to vertical browsing: I'm a tab addict, and even though I sport a huge monitor, there's never enough space for all those tabs. TreeStyleTab is great not only because it puts the tabs in vertical order, but it also comes with handy hierarchy- and grouping functions. And for those of you who want to switch tabs in style, FoxTab 1.1.2 raises the eye-candy factor and saves time.
Another great plug-in which I use is the SEOMoz toolbar which gathers all kinds of marketing-relevant information. And in case you want to surf along undetected from time to time, the Switch Proxy tool comes in handy. Those are my favorites – which extensions do you use to pimp your Firefox?
Of all twitter add-on services, Mr. Tweet has surprised me most during the last week. That basic aim of the service is to let you find folks in whose tweets you might be interested in. Since twitter is still growing so rapidly, topic-specific selection becomes more and more inevitable. Yet while I'm quite sure that in the long run the retweet-rate will act as twitter's “backlink factor”, Mr. Tweet introduces a well thought-through recommendation system.
About two weeks ago I started a blog carnival on the 
Combining amplified speakers with a slick and elegant touch-screen display sounds like a brilliant idea – in theory. But I do not even want to know about the fun Logitech's engineers had when declaring this piece of unfinished work: “Hey, we know that the touch-screen is not working well – who cares? There is not API or software anyways.” But that's not even the worst part: the speakers use USB to transmit music, which is not such a bad idea after all for laptop use, but the big big problem is this: as soon as the speakers are connected, every kind of internal or external soundcard is deactivated. Now ain't that great? I tried using the line-in, which renders all the additional touch screen functions useless and decreases the sound quality quite much. Since the product is way too heavy to qualify as a mobile laptop speaker, there's not much us for the Z-10 in my opinion. The sound is not that bad for speakers of this size – but the money is much better spent on a pair of JBL control speakers.