Firefox is already pretty amazing, but we're always looking for another add-on to make it even more kick-ass. Enter CyberSearch, an update of AwesomeSearch which adds tons of search functionality to your browser. It even displays results right in the Awesome Bar's drop-down.
Search results without Adsense ads? Oh, it's possible.
CyberSearch also lets you set up keyword or letter patterns that tell it to restrict sites to specific URLs - preface your search with 'techy' and you'll only get results from Lifehacker, CyberNetNews(go figure), and Download Squad (we had nothing to do with that, we swear!).
Since it's built on Google's API, you're still getting the same results you'd get if you went to Google first anyways. Hello, efficiency!
Anyone that blogs about websites and has tried before knows that getting a decent screencap of a web page can be tricky. Enter FireShot, a Firefox extension that makes quality captures child's play.
Install the add-on and you're given FireShot creates a tiny menu on your navigation toolbar that gives quick access to full-page and visible area capture functions. It does a great job at rendering pages, even those with Flash animations. Support for saving as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and BMP is built-in, as well as exporting to just about any editor.
What really sets FireShot apart, though, is the integrated upload feature. Select it, and you can resize your image on-the-fly and post it to FireShot's free image hosting repository with minimal effort. If there's one feature that helps sell a piece of software to us, it's how much time and effort we can save by using. FireShot makes putting browser screencap online so easy we almost feel lazy doing it. Almost.
You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.
If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.
Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.
File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!
Grab and Drag is a Firefox extension that can turn your mouse icon into a little hand, enabling you to scroll up, down, and side-to-side much like you would with the little hand in Adobe Reader.
In the end, it makes Firefox scroll like the iPhone browser, even allowing for one-time flicks that can send the page conveniently scrolling with momentum in any direction. Best of all, Grab and Drag is free, so if you're curious, give it a go.
Overall, we're pretty pleased with it, but it's not perfect. Grab and Drag really messes with Blogsmith, our blogging platform, so getting the first half of this post together was really funky until we shut it off. We're sure the program would mess with other advanced web sites too, but it can be conveniently turned off via the hand icon in the toolbar if necessary.
When we saw Surf Canyon, we figured it was just another search add-on. It was obvious after installing it and searching around on Google for about 3 minutes that we were wrong.
Here's why.
Surf Canyon wants to bring those meaty good search results to the forefront. You know, the ones that we never see on page 2,3,4,100 on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Do you ever search past the first 2 pages? We don't.
That's where Surf Canyon differentiates itself. It has developed search technology that recommends posts to you based on the content of the top search results on each of the search engines.
It sticks a bull's eye next to the results and when you click it, you'll see results that are recommended. Not only that, it'll tell you the search result page it was found on. See this example here:
The question that a lot of people bring up when they're talking about open source extensions and plug-ins is that "What happens when a new version of X comes out, will my favorite plug-in for it work?"
In some cases, especially with Wordpress, unfortunately the answer is often No.
But Firefox has a dedicated community that does a really good job of porting over the most popular extensions to new versions of the browser. This makes not only the community strong, but the browser and the Firefox initiative itself stronger.
Sage is an extension that basically replicates a desktop RSS/Atom reader, but it's really lightweight and integrates with Firefox well. That's what Firefox does well. Seamless experience with software and the web.
The new version that works with Firefox 3 is called "Sage-Too". Kind of like Teen Wolf Too, but better. And with no wolves. And without Jason Bateman. He was great in Juno and Arrested Development, but Teen Wolf was not his shining moment.
We digress.
Here's a Sage-Two feature rundown:
Reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds
Newspaper feed rendering customizable via style sheets
Feed Discovery
Integrates with Firefox's bookmark storage and Live Bookmarks
Support for a number of locales: Argentine Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish
There's been a lot of discussion about a Debian bug going around.
The bug affects SSL certificates on servers, which means visiting a compromised server could leave your info in the open, without you having the faintest idea.
Here's a quick rundown: "All RSA & DSA keypairs generated with OpenSSL on affected systems (any Debian-based system between roughly Sep-17-2006 and May-13-2008) are trivial to guess. The fix is not so simple. After updating OpenSSL on an affected system, you need to figure out if any of your crypto keys are affected." [...] "You need to regenerate all such keys and replace your SSL certificates as well. "
That's all very techy, but if you're running a Debian server, you know exactly what's up.
Now there's a handy Firefox extension that will alert you when visiting a potentially compromised site. The extension works a little magic in the background to determine if the SSL certificate you're trusting to keep your transaction safe is one which could be dangerous, thus giving you a little added protection from the rough and ragged world of cybercrime.
Are you sick of having multiple tabs open at one time because you have numerous items that you want to read or research? The Taboo Firefox extension will help cure your "tabitis" (their term, not ours, so don't hate on it) and minimize the glut of tabs on your tab bar.
Once Taboo is installed, you'll have two new items on your toolbar. When you click the first button, Taboo will take a snapshot of any web page you are on, including session state information (such as the scroll location and any data you've entered into forms), and store it for later. You can do this with as many tabs as you need.
When you want access to one of your saved tabs, click on the other Taboo button, and Taboo will load thumbnails of your saved pages into a new tab. From there, all you need to do is click on a saved page, and it will automatically load, complete with scroll location and any text you may have entered.
The saved pages are kept through browsing sessions and shutdowns, and for as many days as you like. Taboo even has a calendar view of all your saved tabs, if you want to access pages from days or weeks ago. You can also search among your pages using the url or page title as a keyword.
Taboo requires Firefox 2, and isn't yet compatible with the Firefox 3 beta.
Safari always had an interesting and convenient way of searching for text: it dims the background and highlights text-matches throughout the page. It's too bad Firefox can't couldn't do that. It's now possible to easily add that functionality to everybody's favorite open-source browser thanks to a recent mozillaZine post.
The install process is pretty simple if you use the better set of instructions and files, and it shouldn't take more than a few minutes of copying, pasting, and mouse clicking to complete. The animation process in between "Next" clicks is also fun, and if you're still on the fence about it, you could check out a video or two on the custom feature.
When you go to download a file from the web using Internet Explorer, you can choose to save the file or run it from its current location (which basically means download the file to a temporary directory to run it without cluttering up your default download directory). But when you go to download the same file using Firefox, you can only save. There's no option to run the file. OpenDownload is a Firefox add-on that adds a run option. When you select "Run," the file will be downloaded to a temp directory and then launched. 24 hours after the file is downloaded, it will be automatically deleted it.
Aside from keeping your download directory clean, the main benefit of the Run box is that you can now download and run files with a single click instead of two clicks, thus saving you a valuable fraction of a second.
RetailMeNot, an online coupon-sharing site from the founders of BugMeNot, has been around for a while, spreading the joy of savings both far and wide. Now, with the RetailMeNot Firefox extension, keeping informed of the latest coupons is as simple as browsing the web.
With the add-on installed, you are automatically informed of sites RetailMeNot users have shared discount coupon codes for. If you browse to the Amazon website, for example, a notification window will drop down from the menu bar signifying that there are coupons available. Clicking on the "View Coupons" button will open a new tab and take you right to the coupons for that particular site.
RetailMeNot assures us that no data is sent back to their website, and that the plugin will not adversely affect your browsing experience (though, if you read the user reviews, they are complaining of exactly that).
The RetailMeNot Firefox extension works with Firefox 2 (sorry, Firefox 3 beta users).
FavLoc is one of those FireFox extensions that should really have been built into the web browser. What it lets you do is create a list of download folders that is easily accessible from the right-click menu in Firefox.
Normally when you want to download a link or file you can either just download it to your default folder or click "Save Link As" and browse to a folder. With FavLoc installed, you can choose from a list of predefined folders, no browsing necessary. For example if you always download programs to one location, music to another, and videos to a third, you can create three favorites and save yourself a lot of time.
Firefox has a ton of customization options. So many, in fact, that listing them all would make the Firefox Tools menu resemble War and Peace. So Mozilla hides some of the options you might not need to change as often away so that you can only access them by typing "about:config" into the location bar. The problem is that many users don't even know about about:config, and once you discover it, it's still not clear what all of the settings do. Configuration Mania is a Firefox add-on that organizes and displays many of the options that are normally only available through about:config. Here are just a few o the things you can change using Configuration Mania:
Location bar auto-complete behavior
Default domain guessing behavior (should Firefox add www or .com when you type a word into the location bar?)
Tab behavior (where to display the close button, default tab width, etc)
Hide the Go button next to location bar
Change your user agent
Adjust cache settings
Configuration Mania is available for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 beta.
Tab Kit is an add-on for Firefox designed for the sort of person who likes to keep a ridiculous number of tabs open. If you've ever tried open a few dozen tabs, you're probably well aware that Firefox tends to cram the tabs closer and closer together each time you open a new window until it's almost impossible to tell which tab is which. Tab Kit will keep each tab wide enough for you to view a preview of the page titles. It achieves this either by letting you roll your tabs over into a second row of tabs. Or a third or fourth row, if you don't mind losing some more screen real estate.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Tab Kit will also let you move all of your tabs over to the Windows sidebar, or to the bottom of your screen. You can also:
Adjust the size of your tabs
Switch tabs with your mouse scrollwheel
Reorder your tabs by domain, last loaded, last viewed, order of creation, origin, or title
Group tabs
Decide whether to display a close button on all tabs, just the active tab, or no tabs
Mozilla has released an updated version of Prism, an application that lets open web applications like Gmail, Google Docs, or Zoho Writer in a stripped down Firefox-like browser. The result is that you can quickly launch web applications and treat them as if they were desktop applications.
The most noticeable change is that Firefox 3 beta users don't need to download and install Prism as a separate application. They can just install a new Prism extension for Firefox 3. Once installed, you can visit any web site in Firefox and convert it into an application and place a shortcut on your desktop or in your start menu.
If you're not using Firefox 3, you can download the standalone installer for Prism 0.9 for Windows, Mac, or Linux. The latest build also includes the ability to pick an icon for your shortcut, and create a separate profile for each web application.
Firefox is already pretty amazing, but we're always looking for another add-on to make it even more kick-ass. Enter CyberSearch, an update of AwesomeSearch which adds tons of search functionality to your browser. It even displays results right in the Awesome Bar's drop-down.
When we saw 
The question that a lot of people bring up when they're talking about open source extensions and plug-ins is that "What happens when a new version of X comes out, will my favorite plug-in for it work?"
There's been a lot of discussion about a 
