Minimalist Gmail is a Firefox plugin that gives you control over whether to hide or show each part of the Gmail interface. You can take out individual buttons and menus and, yes, even ads. There are Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things, but not every Firefox user has delved into userscripting, so this simple add-on makes a nice alternative.

One of the nicest things about Minimalist Gmail is the way it handles chat. You can hide the chatbox, but as long as you're signed into chat, you'll still see new messages if they come in. If you're using other Gmail skins, Minimalist Gmail might be compatible with those, too. It works with my favorite clean Gmail look, Helvetimail.

[via Lifehacker]

That was fast! Google Wave's barely been available for a week, and there's already a Google Wave Notifier extension for Firefox. The notifier sits in your status bar and shows the number of waves with unread messages in your inbox (not the total number of unread messages, mind you). It's small, unobtrusive, and checks for messages at an adjustable interval.

Of course, you can also manually refresh the notifier. Double-clicking it will take you to Wave, so you can deal with those unread messages. It's a pretty basic extension, but it's the first one out of the gate, and Google hasn't released anything official with similar functionality.

Live Bookmarks in Firefox are a great idea in theory, but in practice they're a clumsy solution for in-browser feed reading. Brief is an add-on that breathes some life into Live Bookmarks with a nice-looking, usable front end. Setting up Brief is a quick and painless process: just install the add-on and point it to a folder full of RSS feeds. A toolbar button and a status bar button (with your unread items count) will automatically appear, and clicking either one pops open the reader.

Brief's not a bad little reader, either. The layout is attractive, and having a reader inside Firefox means you can quickly click through to the full versions of articles. If you're a CSS whiz, you can even customize the Brief's appearance. I recommend turning on the option to open Brief in a new tab. Otherwise, it can quickly become annoying when it loads in your active tab and takes you away from a page you still wanted to look at.

[via InstantFundas]

History Tree is a (Windows only) Firefox add-on that makes your browser history easier to navigate by displaying it as a tree diagram. It gives you a quick visual layout of the tabs and windows you've opened, and lets you find the page you're looking for even when the browser's back button won't reach that far. You can also switch to a page thumbnail view that makes it easier to find the page you need at a glance.

Like any good history browser, History Tree has a search function, but you might not need to use it. Its information is color-coded according to whether each page is currently open and whether it's accessible via your back button. Each page in the tree is also timestamped, so you can look for pages according to when you last saw them. If there's a page you don't recognize, you can click on the ? button or a thumbnail. If the tree's too cluttered, you can collapse part of it, display just one tab at a time, or set a filter to show only part of your history (only your current open tabs, for example).

[via Ghacks]

Google Reader is great for keeping up with your favorite news feeds, but when it comes to reading blog comments, it doesn't really deliver. GReactions is a Firefox extension that fills the gap. It collects comments from the blog post itself, FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit and more. You can access all of this by clicking a link that GReactions adds to the end of each post in Reader.

Don't confuse GReactions with comments on shared Google Reader items. It doesn't allow you to comment, it just pulls in comments from other sources. I'm not sure how reliable GReactions is, though, because it mostly displayed Twitter mentions for the posts I checked out. It could be that Twitter is just quicker to index than some of the other sources, though, and not every post gets added to Dugg or Reddited. Your mileage may vary with GReactions, but it definitely deals well with high-traffic, comment-heavy blogs.

[via Webware]

There are a lot of slick ways to launch an application on a Mac. OS X's built-in Spotlight does the trick fairly quickly, and a lot of people swear by Quicksilver. If you're a Firefox addict, though, you might like having the ability to open your apps from the Firefox URL bar. Quickfire does just that.

Once you install it, app names will autocomplete in the Firefox Awesome Bar, just like URLs you've bookmarked or visited before. For my money, you might as well get the power of Quicksilver, which opens from anywhere and does more than launch applications. But if you're in Firefox all the time, and you have to be able to do absolutely everything from the browser, Quickfire might be worth a look.

[via Webware]

Googling someone to get more information about them is a pretty common practice these days, whether you're an employer, a journalist, or just curious. A new Firefox plugin called Identify makes the task of information-gathering easier, by displaying information and links to someone's blogs and social profiles with just one keypress. From any page with a "rel=me" line -- that's most blogs, Twitter pages and other profiles -- hitting control-i on a Mac or alt-i on a PC will show you the info.

Identify is good for finding info on others -- including contact info like phone numbers and addresses, sometimes -- but you can also use it to see much information you're revealing. If you want to make sure you're easy to find and all of your profiles are linked, give it a spin and correct as needed. Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Flickr and LinkedIn are just some of the sites Identify searches for info.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

With the advent of tabbed browsing, almost everyone has multiple sites open in the same browser window. With the Foxden extension for Firefox, you can take things a step further: multiple sites in the same tab. Activating Foxden opens a window with whichever sites you pick, laid out however you want them.

Foxden works really well as a place to check Twitter, Gmail, Tumblr or one of your favorite blogs, all at a glance. Foxden's also not limited to websites: you can also put in the location of a file on your hard drive, like a text file you dump notes into. The setup for Foxden isn't all click and drag: you actually have to do some typing, but it's pretty simple, and there's a straightforward tutorial you can access from the preferences window.

[via Webware]

One of the most obnoxious consequences of websites struggling to score advertising dollars is the "next page" phenomenon. Even some very credible sites split their longer pieces up across pages, so you have to click through, which results in time and effort wasted for you, and more ad views for them. A lot of people just stop reading when they hit the end of the first page, but maybe they would change if they installed the PageZipper extension for Firefox.

PageZipper automatically loads the contents of "next page" links right underneath the current page, so you can scroll down instead of clicking through. It's quite similar to another extension called AutoPager, and I like that it doesn't show its page breaks the way AutoPager does. Where PageZipper hasn't caught up with AutoPager yet is in the way it deals with tricky "next page" links. AutoPager lets you find them manually and train it, while PageZipper relies on its own (granted, very good) autodetection.

Sure, Firefox has built-in hotkey support, but sometimes it's nice to have a visual reminder. SiteLauncher is a new experiemtnal Firefox addon that does just that.

It's highly customizable - colors, font sizes, and transparency can all be changed. If you'd prefer a wide display, you can use up to eight columns. Don't like rounded corners? Square them off. Your list can also be ordered by hotkey or shortcut title, or you can arrange it manually. To display your list, just press ctrl+space (a la Launchy).

You can also choose to dispay SiteLauncher at startup instead of your home page.

The author has chosen to map ctrl+shift+s as the combo to quick-add your current page to the list, which will cause issues if you've got the Delicious addon installed - that's also the default combination for its bookmark search.

[ via gHacks ]

OpenID is a really great concept. The ability to use a single digital identity across the web and avoid having to sign up for yet another user account is a real productivity boon. More and more high profile sites and services are adopting OpenID, but the project still hasn't gained the traction that many of us think it deserves. This is partially because it still isn't easy to use OpenID -- or even find out if a site supports OpenID -- on all services. MySpace, Flock and Vidoop think they've come across a solution: let the browser handle it.

Back in June, MySpace announced support for OpenID and also became an OpenID provider. In order to help users more easily manage their online identity across other sites and services, MySpace teamed up with Flock and Vidoop to create OpenID for Flock, available today at https://extensions.flock.com. OpenID for Flock is an open source plugin, part of the larger Identity in the Browser (IDIB) project which is focused on having the browser, not the user handle, authenticate and mange multiple user identities.

I had the chance to demo the plugin yesterday and it is pretty cool. Essentially, once installed an OpenID icon appears on the right of Flock's chrome bar. The extension scans a page for OpenID compatibility, and if a site supports OpenID, the icon starts to glow. You can then automatically choose to populate the OpenID fields with your designated OpenID URL or associate that site with a specific OpenID account. You can manage all of your OpenIDs, choose what sites to associate certain profiles with and view the login history and OpenID-to-site-relationship with each site.

On my list of 14 extremely useful Firefox addons I included ScreenGrab for capturing web pages to PNG or JPG images.

Today, I replaced it with Screen Grab to Wordpress. As you probably guessed, it's got the same core functionality with one major addition: the ability to send images directly to your Wordpress-powered blog.

Configure the URL, username, and password to all your Wordpress blogs an you're ready to go (just make sure you have XML-RPC remote publishing enabled).

Click the icon in your Firefox status bar to display SGW's menu and choose what to capture and where to send it. You can save locally, copy to the clipboard, or post directly to Wordpress.

If you're blogging a capture, you can enter a title, tags, body text, and even set your new post to publish - if you don't check the box, the post defaults to draft status. After successfully uploading, you're taken directly to the Wordpress edit page to put the finishing touches on your new post.

With less than 600 downloads to date, this one is a bit of a diamond in the rough. It's a tremendous timesaver for anyone blogging about items discovered while browsing with Firefox.

Safari users have been enjoying the search-as-you-type extension Inquisitor for a long time, and now Firefox users can, too. Although it was originally developed independently for Safari by David Watanabe (creator of apps like Acquistion and Newsfire), it was acquired by Yahoo! back in May. Apparently, that resulted in a preview of a Firefox version, which seems to work just as well as its Safari counterpart. If you like the idea of instant search results, displayed as you type, give it a try.

Inquisitor for Firefox is still in preview, so you'll have to sign up or log in to download. Once installed, it goes in your list of search engines, and is enabled by default. If you decide you don't like it, just click the Inquisitor icon next to your search bar and switch back to whichever search engine you were using before.

The only drawback of the latest versions of Inquisitor, depending on how you look at it, is that they use Yahoo! Search by default. You don't notice this so much when you're going straight to a webpage from the Inquisitor results, but you definitely do when you perform a full search. (You can choose between Yahoo! and Google in the add-on's preferences, however.)



[Via Cybernetnews]

I've never been particularly put out by needing to click the "Next" button on a blog. Sure, there are always exceptions, like when I find sites that archive oddly or only have a few posts per page. And don't get me started on the "Next" buttons and surprise ads (do I want two free iPod Nanos? Only if I can beat the advertiser about the head and neck with them).

LifeHacker introduced me to the AutoPager add-on for Firefox. The idea behind AutoPager is a good one. It takes a web page with continuous content (such as a blog) and allows you to scroll through it all as if it were one page . So that you're not waiting for years for your page to appear, AutoPager allows you to choose the number of pages displayed at a time. It also has a few pre-configured web pages in its clutches, like Digg and Twitter.

The good news is that AutoPager can be set to scroll through just about any site with a next button. The bad news is, it's not really apparent how to do this. I was pointed to the Site Wizard, which worked just as well as many wizards I've encountered -- not at all. I couldn't select the "Next" link, and it kept aborting (and it's too early in the morning where I am to be doing that).

I know little about XPath (the underlying AutoPager mechanism) or how it works, but I did still get AutoPager to give me several pages of Download Squad at once. Truth be told, I'm still not sure what it was I did. I clicked the AutoPager icon on my toolbar, and got a sidebar that popped up in the browser and seemed to autodetect both the "Next" link and the content I wanted to see. I clicked the green checkmark on the sidebar (did I need to? no clue), and we were finally in business.

AutoPager is great for getting your eyes on a lot of information quickly. Once it's configured to the sites you want to see in this manner, it's really handy. But for the first few sites you configure, make sure to take frequent breaks for deep, cleansing breaths.