I’m in the process the process of writing a whole new look for linickx.com, I think I’m about there so I’ve decided it was about time to give the other browsers a spin. All of my development has been with Firefox on linux (with a little epiphany for testing non logged in users) and I’ve got the look and feel pretty much as I like.

I’ve been playing with Remember the milk for some time now, I thought with my n800 it would be really useful…BUT… Actually I’ve found that the firefox extension they have released has really upped my usage, as soon as I can get my tasks synced with my n800 I’ll definitively be upgrading to their pro version.

I’ve recommended this plugin to a few friends and they love it, so if you’re looking for a new personal task managment solution then this is for you!

I saw this digg article the other day and it lead me to something interesting. …

All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-updating (see bug 378216 and this guide for more details)

Reference: Mozilla Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 Release Notes

In general this is a good thing, and I’m 100% behind any security improvements the mozilla team make….I just hope they make this amenable to the newbies, I recently had a go at writing a small “status bar” firefox addon, and the 1st thing I spotted when installing it was that it was “unsigned”… I looked into the documentation and found it very confusing, and when I finally got it to work I ran into the age old issue that I didn’t have a certificate that was signed by a main stream CA, as such I would need to distribute that as well.

I’m not a great fan of flash, it seems to eat up bandwith, processor and memory very quickly.. not to mention the hassle of trying it working on a linux x86_64 machine ! I recently came across this great plug-in..

Flashblock :: Firefox Add-ons
Never be annoyed by a Flash animation again! Blocks Flash so it won’t get in your way, but if you want to see it, just click on…

The white-list functionality is nice… i.e block all except “blah”.. the option to run it in a black-list mode would be good for those who are only offended by flash on certain sites.

yay !

FireGPG - use GPG easily in Firefox !
FireGPG is a Firefox extension under GPL which brings an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of a text in any web page using GnuPG.

Simple,effective and necessary…

Gmail Notifier :: Firefox Add-ons
A notifier for Gmail…

I’ve been using this for a while, and most firefox users probably have something in place already, so nothing new here, but I use my firefox page for prepping new installs, so perhaps this is more of a “post to self”

This is one of those extensions I couldn’t live without !

Google Reader Notifier | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation Google Reader Notifier by Mark D.B.D This firefox extension shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.

Some times the simple solutions, make the biggest difference to a user experience….

Colorful Tabs | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation
The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. An essential.

UPDATE: It seems that the Colorful Tabs authors homepage is down, as a result I appear to be getting hits from google and comments about features. I’d like to stress that I have nothing to do with the development of Colorful Tabs and you have my apologies if my post appeared that way. You have stumbled across a post from my firefox recommendations category where by I post links to firefox add-ons I like have installed and recommend to my friends.

An absolute must for anyone who uses a google service, best enhancement is adding https to things like, docs, gmail & calendar !

CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience — Firefox Extension
CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).

Been looking for something like this for a while…..

Nagios Checker | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation
The statusbar indicator of the events from the network monitoring system Nagios. Information is parsed from Nagios web interface. In the extension settings dialog simply fill the start page URL of your Nagios web interface, eg. http://www.yourfirm.com/nagios/ and let the button to locate status script url.

So firefox 2 was released yesterday , and I’ve just been browsing through the features list. The fact that some of the google toolbar features have sneaked in as default functionality doesn’t surprise me, for example the spell checker from the google plugin is an obvious feature for mozilla to include in the core.

What surprised me was how the anti phishing feature was just lifted:

Google Anti-Phising	Mozilla Anti-Phising

This is an excellent example of open source, and it’s really good to see google sharing their work , I just hope that anti customize google doesn’t sneak in or worse still targeted adversting !

For those who can’t wait for the fabled gdrive, this is worth a look, you get like an FTP style interface to gmail within firefox, I’ve found it useful for quick backups.

Gmail File Space
his extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2 GB) for file storage. It acts as a remote machine. You can transfer files between your hard drive and gmail. This is similar to “Gmail Drive” on windows platform. Your gmail account looks like a FTP host and you can upload and download your files. After you install, you get an option called “GSpace” in your “tools” menu clicking on which opens the window for transfer of folders/files. Works great for photos and music files less than 14MB.

This extension is probably more of a personal thing than actually useful, if you download a lot like me, then the download man ager can get in the way a bit, so this is a good alternative….

Download Statusbar
View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar - without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.

This is a really cool extension, if you want centrally held bookmarks, but want them private, and don’t need the full google sync functionality then this is for you !

Download Google Bookmarks Button for Firefox

I’ve always advocated CoComment for my comment tracking needs, I recently decided to check their website only to find a new firefox extension - Brilliant ! Just what I’ve been waiting for !