Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Mozilla
Interclue for Firefox: Getting a clue is now easy (and unobtrusive)
by Kristin Shoemaker Jan 4th 2008 at 11:00AM
It pains us to say it, but sometimes tabs are a waste of time. We hate when we're on a site, and see a story with an accompanying link that promises to be the epiphany we've been waiting for all our lives. We eagerly click the link, and feverishly switch to the new tab. Our hopes and dreams are tragically dashed to pieces when we find the link is to a parked domain that has nary a thing to do with the subject at hand.Interclue is a Firefox extension that allows for previewing web pages before you click the link. It gets a little less buzz than the similar Cooliris extension, but we think it's just as worthy. Cooliris doesn't require clicking on the preview icon to pop up a preview window, a simple mouse over will do. It's amazing how often we mouse over the icon, not meaning to, and get the preview.
Interclue gives the option to click on the preview icon, which might give us carpal tunnel in the long run, but is much easier on our psyche than having preview windows seemingly appear at random. From the Interclue preview window, we see the contents of the page in question, as well as some optional vital stats for the site we're viewing (called metaclues). We can bookmark, email, open in tabs, and paste the site link to the clipboard. We can easily resize the preview window and change our settings to not recognize certain links or certain pages.
Interclue 1.5.1.4896 was released January 2nd, and works in Firefox 1.5 and up. Despite its impossible version number, its simple interface and unobtrusive application is a breath of fresh air for those poor souls traumatized by dead end links and madly popping preview windows. We highly recommend it for those wanting link previews who have been less than happy with other applications' execution.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
koolio said 3:29PM on 1-04-2008
This little similar to GooglePreview extension. Instead, GooglePreview show a thumbnail next to the link.
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Seth Wagoner said 12:26PM on 1-04-2008
Hi Kristin,
Thanks very much for the review! Just thought I'd let you know that the activation method for Interclue is configurable - it doesn't have to be a click. The default activation is actually "mouse over link for .2s" and then "mouse over the icon for .2s" - but those numbers are configurable (like most things in Interclue). One of the great things about Interclue is that even if you do accidentally activate it, the clueviewer never covers your mouse cursor, so closing it takes no time at all, whereas Cooliris will often force you to move the mouse a long way to get rid of the window after it's appeared on top of where your cursor is.
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Kristin Shoemaker said 12:42PM on 1-04-2008
Hi Seth
The click to view was a HUGE selling point for me, personally. I played a bit with timing the mouse overs, and it was definitely an improvement over what Cooliris does, but I found clicking was my best option. This is a great little extension, as I really like previewing links, but just couldn't handle things popping up everywhere. Thanks!
Donov said 1:29PM on 1-04-2008
It's a coooool add-on to improve user web experience, i like it. It has some similar factors with Snap(http://www.snap.com).
There is an another Firefox add-on here i want to recommend to downloadsquad, it called Linkmug(http://www.linkmug.com) , which is used to instant web experience sharing in a browser-to-browser way, it's also very cool.
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Winkyboy said 2:32PM on 1-04-2008
This review doesn't motivate me to swap out CoolIris... but I will investigate. CoolIris is configurable too, everyone knows that, right? I set mine to preview only when I hold Control while hovering over a link.
I also like CoolIris for the quick & easy Send Link via Email ability. Sometimes I don't WANT to post something to the socialnets.
CoolIris has a "stack" ability - but it needs a little more refinement. It creates a thumbnail list of a website, but it's only a temporary list and is dumped when you restart Firefox. I'd like (the option) to be able to save my stacks.
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Kristin Shoemaker said 2:43PM on 1-04-2008
Actually, lest anyone get confused... Interclue doesn't actually post any links to the 'net or share your links and information with anyone. It's a completely anonymous process. (That was a different piece of software with different functionality that Donov was mentioning.)
I found the level of configurability with Interclue, as well as the presentation of the options, easier to deal with than Cooliris' config, personally. I think a lot depends on what you're used to though.
The stacks feature is a neat one, though, unique to Cooliris. I didn't find it was enough to make up for the issues I had with it.
Winkyboy said 3:46PM on 1-04-2008
After testing it out... I now have both CoolIris and InterClue installed. I like them both, and each has features the other doesn't have. Incidentally, I think InterClue's configuration screen is MUCH heavier than CoolIris's. Not that that makes it difficult, but when I first looked at it I thought, "OMG that is a lot of options."
Note: With InterClue installed, I was able to uninstall LinkPreview, so I'm 1-for-1 in extensions-installed.
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Seth Wagoner said 4:17PM on 1-04-2008
At last count, about 100 options, which is why we had to introduce the presets tab so that people could set the most important ones by answering 3 quick multi-choice questions.A lot of people find that it works well "out of the box" and completely ignore the options, but we've been working on Interclue for quite some time, and discovered that there really isn't one way of doing things that suits everyone. Hence, lots of options.
michael said 7:27PM on 1-04-2008
Is there a quik way of making Firefox extensions work as IE7 extensions?
I don't do Firefox, and this sounds neat enough for use on my browser.
So is there a way of changing the code or whatever to make it work on IE7?
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Kristin Shoemaker said 8:06PM on 1-04-2008
It seems as though Interclue is thinking about porting to other browsers (IE, Opera and Safari), see: http://interclue.com/other-browsers.html
michael said 9:06PM on 1-04-2008
@Kristin: Thanks. I'll check out the link.
I hate how all these Firefox-only extensions just seem so cool. I don't think it's that hard to support other browsers.
Seth Wagoner said 11:20PM on 1-04-2008
@Michael, Firefox actually does make it a heck of a lot easier to build add-ons in some respects. We've been trying to get an IE7 and/or IE6 version going for quite some time now, but there are some highly problematic bits. On the other hand Safari doesn't officially support addons at *all* - the ones that do exist for it are basically clever hacks, and well, Opera is the poor cousin due to the realities of market share and limited programmer time. However, we do intend to support all of them to some extent in the fullness of time. You might want to give Firefox 3 a shot when it comes out of beta tho, it's going to be great (by which I mainly mean *faster* and less memory hungry). I'm told Interclue runs pretty well on Flock, but IE7 is a completely different architecture so you'll never get a Firefox extension to run on IE7 without significant re-working by the programmers.
Cheers,
Seth.
michael said 12:19AM on 1-05-2008
Thanks Seth.
Glad to hear how browsers really 'work' from a programmer's point of view.
And yeah, never liked Firefox because of the memory-eating and it is kinda slow to me.
Looking forward to see what both Firefox 3 AND IE8 will be like. Not like I'm expecting it, but I heard that IE8 suppose to be something 'revolutionary' since MS is all mum about it. But that's a rumor and speculation.
I'll be glad to try both and see which one's better overall.
Thanks for the info.