I love me some Firefox, yes I do. (doin’ the Snoopy Happy Dance!) I decided to play this weekend – you know, it’s sort of like moving the furniture around. I downloaded some new add-ons. I think what I love best about Firefox is that you can customize it so much. Or maybe because it blocks pop-ups so well. Or maybe because it loads so much faster than IE. Or maybe because it’s not as hacker prone as IE. All of the above and then-some. Once you’ve gone Firefox, you’ll never go back to IE. And if you haven’t yet gone to FireFox (and you know who you are!) I can’t recommend it enough.
So anyway, I got these add-ons. ForecastFox. ReminderFox. SpeedDial. And ScrapBook.
ForecastFox puts the weather on your status bar. Right there. I was able to ditch my desktop Yahoo weather widget, because now I can see the current weather and tomorrow’s forecast right there on my browser. Now I don’t have to open a separate tab or minimize my browser to get the weather report. Sweet! I like that you can change the positioning of the weather info too, where you want it on the status bar. I didn’t like it on the far right. You can open up the options and play with it, like you can with many of the FireFox add-ons, choosing if you want the add-on to open in a new tab, the current tab, a new window, stuff like that. Plus, when the temperature changes, you’ll get a little pop-up notice letting you know.
ReminderFox is a nice little feature that does only what it says – reminds you of stuff. You can input things like birthdays and anniversaries, and it will remind you. You can configure how you want it to remind you too. I played with it and got a small pop up note, much like the Google Reader Notifier. You can also create To-Do lists in ReminderFox. And when you hover your mouse over the little icon in the status bar, you’ll get a list of upcoming events. You can even set up an alarm! It’s a cool program, and if you right-click on the icon, you can go to the website and get a ton of information on how you can use this nifty little add-on. No more forgotten birthdays!
SpeedDial is so way cool! Do you have pages you visit regularly? Stuff you can’t get on your feed-reader? Or maybe things like LolCats that you don’t really want in your feed-reader but would still like to check out regularly? Get SpeedDial! It creates a page for your browser that displays your favorite pages in a 3×3 grid. Yep, you can change that too, in the options section if you want. SpeedDial eliminates the need to go to your Toolbar or Bookmarks. You can configure how you want to open the pages also – whether by mouse-click or keyboard shortcut, and you can choose if you want the left mouse click or right mouse click to open the page in a new or current tab. You can also create multiple groups within SpeedDial: for instance you could have a group of news pages you visit, and then a separate group for blogs you like to read. And on and on. For me, I put in the Beloved’s DeviantArt page because DeviantArt is a closed community and you can’t get it on any feed. I have several sites that are my “regulars” and now I don’t have to go to the Tooblar, drop down the menu, find the page, click it and wait … it’s RIGHTTHERE on the SpeedDial page and with a single click I’m right where I want to be. Woo!
ScrapBook – ok, as of this writing, I confess, I haven’t had a chance to play with it, since I’ve been busy playing with all my other new toys. 🙂 It seems to be a bookmarks type of feature that allows you better organization than simply the bookmarks menu. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it though with SpeedDial now installed, and since I’ve been moving my bookmarks to Google Notebooks. But I intend to play in the near future.
Ah, I so love making life easier! Don’t you? 😀
The "Ness" in DarcNess ;) 
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