What Is It?

Statusable provides a second statusbar in Firefox that displays the “progress bar” and some standard text

Why Would You Want It?

Numerous add-ons in Firefox use the statusbar to display information. Statusable provides a second statusbar displaying progress and some standard text. This frees up the standard statusbar to display other information. This is very useful, particularly when combined with other add-ons which help with displaying the information that you need or using add-ons options to limit what is displayed in the statusbar. So if you need a bit more room in your statusbars this certainly helps.

ProReviewer has previously reviewed Statusbars by Marius Gunderson which did a great job in helping to organize what is displayed in multiple statusbars for Firefox 2. Unfortunately this has not been updated for Firefox 3.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides a second statusbar
• Shows Progress and some standard text

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Simple to Use
• Provides extra statusbar space for other add-ons

Cons: What’s Not So Good?

• Limited functionality

More About What it Does in Detail:

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What Is It?

Tab Counter (by Morac) is a very simple Firefox Add-on that simply displays the number of tabs that are currently open in a Firefox Window. You say “Is that all”, I say “Read on”

(Note: Not to be confused with a similar add-on TabCounter by felipc)

Why Would You Want It?

As you open more tabs in Firefox it uses more and more resources. It is very easy to open a lot of tabs, particularly if you have Firefox set to open links in new tabs or, if like me, you use an RSS reader to open interesting posts in Firefox. At some point  Firefox will stop displaying pages or grind to a halt due to lack of available memory and the performance of your computer will also suffer. When this happens will depend on many things such as your PC hardware, the number of other programs in use, the Firefox add-ons you have installed and the information on the web pages. My experience with Firefox 2 Portable on my main PC was about 100 open tabs before Firefox started to misbehave. With my Firefox 3 Portable setup (and less add-ons than the old setup) I can open over 130 tabs without to many problems). Each setup may be different and you would need to work your own limits out, but once you know these you can keep an eye on the tabs you have open and take action before problems occur.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Displays the number of Open Tabs
• Options on display and placement

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Helps manage Firefox resource use

More About What it Does in Detail:

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What Is It?

Clear Private Data is a Firefox Add-on that provides a toolbar button, a Tools Menu Option and a Hotkey to clear private data. It uses the standard Firefox Private Data functions which can be accessed through the Tools_Options menu and selecting the privacy tab. However, it gives much quicker access and the ability to clear user set options at the click of a single toolbar button.

Why Would You Want It?

There are many reasons why you may want to clear private data and the ability to do it quickly and easily is a bonus. I won’t go into the reasons some are perfectly legitimate and some not so.

However, a word of warning to anyone who thinks this will completely cover their tracks, it won’t,  You will need to take other measures to remove all information from your PC which may be held in all sorts of different places and in files that, although deleted, can be recovered.

But, apart from the obvious privacy aspects there are other things you can do with it that are very useful.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides quick access to Firefox Privacy Functions
• Allows Private Data to be cleared by a clicking on a single toolbar button
• Alternatively Private Data can be cleared using a Hotkey

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Quick clearing of selected private data
• Good user set options

Cons: What’s Not So Good?

• A few little tweaks would help

See What Would Make It Better at the end of the post

More About What it Does in Detail:

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Find in Tabs is a Firefox Add-on that extends the standard find functionality of Firefox to search through the text in all open tabs not just the current tab. Results are displayed in a separate pane and provide one click linking to the appropriate tab/web page

Why Would You Want It?

To allow you to find words or phrases in all the web pages you have open in Firefox at any one time rather than just the current page/tab. I find that I often have multiple pages open relating to the same subject or that I have opened lots of pages, such as when I am using the Brief RSS Reader Firefox Add-on. Quite often I might want to find:

1. All the tabs containing information on a certain subject
2. A single tab containing a subject which I can’t easily find because I have so many open.

Find in Tabs is a great solution, it works quickly and efficiently with really good integration into the standard Firefox Find tool.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Finds text in all Firefox Tabs (Open web pages)
• Integrates into Standard Firefox Search
• Highlights text found
• Provides instant link to tabs when clicking on Results lines

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Quick searching
• Switched from Firefox Search bar
• Good highlighting Options
• Simple to Use
• Resizable Search Results Pane
• Compatibility check with other add-ons

Cons: What’s Not So Good?

• Can’t turn off page highlighting with Search Pane open

More About What it Does in Detail:

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Tab Scope is a Firefox Add-on that displays a reduced size version of the webpage under a tab when the mouse cursor is hovered over that tab. This provides a very quick and easy way to see what the webpage contents are in an instantly available popup window

Why Would You Want It?

If you have many tabs opened at one time (as I often do) then the page title (or part that is displayed) in the tab may not be enough to quickly determine what is on the webpage. Tab Scope shows a popup of the webpage just about instantly when you hover the mouse on the tab.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Displays a popup version of the webpage
• Allows 2 switchable different user set sizes for the popup
• Allows navigation of the page within the popup window

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Quick access to page details
• Good options
• Page scrolling and navigation within popup
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Lack of scroll bars in popup webpage
• Fixed zoom sizes in options 

More About What it Does in Detail:

Tab Scope is available for installation at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons Tab Scope page:

Preview and navigate tab contents through popup.

Shows a popup on tabs and enables you to preview and navigate tab contents through popup. Major features are:
* Real-time preview of tab contents
* Navigate (Back/Forward/Reload/Stop) through popup
* Scroll pages or frames in preview with mouse wheel
* Click links or buttons directly in preview

NOTE: Tab Scope doesn’t work normally on Mac OS X.

Works with:

Firefox: 1.5 – 3.0.*

 

General Use of Tab Scope

Once installed Tab Scope “instantly” displays the page in a popup window when the mouse is hovered over a tab. Moving the mouse to another tab again almost instantly shows the contents of the new tab. The response time is very impressive.

This review will follow the usual format of presenting the majority of information as screenshots backed up by further information where necessary.

(click on any picture to enlarge where necessary)

The popup can be displayed in one of two user defined sizes.

Personally I use the large zoom setting as this allows me to read the contents of the page, navigate, open links etc. if I want rather than opening the tab itself.

Each popup has the title of the page and a small toolbar at the top:

The toolbar can be used to:

• Go forward and back in the page history where this exists, when it doesn’t the arrows are grayed out
• Refresh the page
• Stop loading (reloading) of the page
• Zoom between the user set sizes
• Close the page (tab)

Options

The Options can be accessed in the usual way through the Tools-Add-ons menu items and then clicking on the Tab Scope add-on Options button

The Options are self explanatory in the screenshot below:

The alignment for the popup can be changed to suit the position of the tabbar (in case you didn’t know this can be top or bottom as standard or vertical with another add-on)

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A Firefox Add-on that automatically copies text in a Firefox window to the windows clipboard with many useful options.

Why Would You Want It?

Essentially Autocopy will save you having to click on selected text with your mouse and then choose Copy or using Ctl-C if you prefer to use the keyboard for copying and pasting. In a single instance this is a small saving of time, probably less than a second, but if you use copy and paste a lot then the small savings all add up. A really big advantage is if you use a clipboard extender to store multiple clipboard copies of text and images, such as Cipboard Magic, Clip Diary, Ditto or one of the several other freeware clipboard extenders available. When you use a clipboard extender you can copy multiple selections of text to use in another document without having to keep switching back and forth on each copy/paste cycle. I find this very useful when I am researching for ProReviewer or work and want to collect multiple pieces of information and then use them as background information rather than a straight copy and paste into a document.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Automatically copies selected text
• Provides Search options for selected text
• Provides other useful options

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Quick copying to clipboard
• Simple to Use
• Remembers previous 10 copy operations
• Can speed up research type work
• Works with Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird

More About What it Does in Detail:

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A Firefox Add-on that allows you to save and view web pages in a handy single file often known as web archive or “mht” files (from the .mht extension which is for MIME HTML)).

Why Would You Want It?

Firefox doesn’t natively handle the web archive single file format. The advantage is that using this format saves all the elements of the web page as a single file containing graphics, text, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to save web pages to archive, send by email or transport on removable media, flashdrives, etc. As the screenshots below show , where I saved the ProReviewer Homepage, it is a far more simple and tidy solution:

(Click on screenshots to enlarge where necessary)

as the statusbar shows there are a total of 74 files saved in the folder with a standard page save.

This is now all contained in a single file using UnMHT

See below for more details about the mht/web archive file

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Saves web pages as web archive files
• Views mht files in Firefox
• Allows all current tabs to be saved to mht files

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Provides a function that should be standard
• Active development appears to be ongoing
• Bulletin board/forum for discussion on issues etc.
• Good Options setting
• Save/Import Options
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Lack of documentation*

*Although it is simple to use this is a problem with so many Firefox Add-ons, the developers don’t even provide the most basic of help or explanation which highly useful in just deciding on whether to install. 

More About What it Does in Detail:

UnMHT installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons UnMHT page:

Long Description

Save webpage into single file as MHT (MHTML, RFC2557) format,
and view saved MHT files.

Works with:

Firefox: 1.0 – 3.0.*

There is also some further information at the developers website UnMHT for Firefox

including some known issues:

• Built-in keyboard shortcut is fired when UnMHT’s one is same to it.
• You cannot save to MHT from the default save dialog (you can call it from the context menu of statusbar/toolbar icon or the [File] menu).
• If you have a very old Firefox, this MAF (Mozilla Archive Format) extension installed and the UnMHT extension too, UnMHT can not open a local MHT file.
• This extension conflicts with IETab, while you use IETan in default setting.
• Delete the following Site filter from IETab.
• /^file:\/\/\/.*\.(mht|mhtml)$/
• Firefox/Mozilla Suite will not respond while extracting large files.
• If Content-Type of file is "text/plain", its source code will be shown while extracting.
• It does not support MHT files that have been exported from MS Office (e.g. PowerPoint).

Web Archive/mht Files

Wikipedia has some good information on mht (MHTML):

MHTML stands for MIME HTML. It is used to bind resources which are typically represented by external links, such as image and sound files, together with HTML code into a single file. The content of an MHTML file is encoded as if it were an HTML email message, using the MIME type multipart/related. The first part is the HTML file, encoded normally; subsequent parts are additional resources, identified by their original URLs.

This format is sometimes referred to as MHT, after the suffix .mht given to such files by default when created by Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer or Opera.

Web browser support

Many browsers do not support this format, and the process for saving a web page along with its resources as an MHTML file is not standardized across those browsers that do. Due to this, a web page saved as an MHTML file using one browser may render differently on another.

General Use of UnMHT

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A Firefox add-on (extension – I use the words interchangeably) that provides a list of installed Firefox add-ons with user definable level of detail. Most importantly one option is to see what Firefox versions the extensions are compatible with.

Why Would You Want It?

Provides a quick and easy way to list all the extensions you have installed and their details. I have used this add-on in the past to list extensions when installing a clean version of Firefox to make sure I have added back in all my add-ons. Recently I decided to try Firefox Beta 3 Portable and downloaded it, then transferred my current Firefox 2 Portable profile complete with all extensions over. On starting it up Firefox duly sorted the compatible extensions and checked for updates so behave perfectly well. At this point I found that many of the  add-ons I consider to be essential for my day to day use were not yet compatible. OK, so you can use the nightly tester tools on a hit and miss basis to see whether the non-compatible extensions will work. This is slow and painful plus some incompatible extensions will completely crash FF on startup meaning you have to delete or move the extension folder. I tried it and gave up in the end as I could not justify the time. Later I looked at Extension List Dumper and realised this was a quick way to keep an eye on the compatibility of my important extensions so I could gauge the time when a changeover to Firefox 3 was going to be acceptable.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Lists all the currently installed extensions in your Firefox setup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Provides lots of information
• User definable options on the level of information
• Copy to clipboard
• Copy format is compatible with spreadsheets in dividing separate headings into columns
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Latest version not available at Mozilla at time of writing

More About What it Does in Detail:

Extension List Dumper installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons Extension List Dumper page:

 Extension List Dumper

by Sogame

10 reviews

This extension adds a button ("Dump list") to the Add-ons window. When this button is pressed, a new window is opened with the list of installed extensions, themes or or plugins.
The browser version and the Operating System are also dumped.
This extension is useful to keep a list of your extensions and themes, or when reporting a bug or a conflict to an extension author.

And a more detailed quote from the developers home page where the latest version is available

Extension List Dumper

This extension adds a button ("Dump list") to the Add-ons window. When this button is pressed, a new window is opened with the list of installed extensions, themes or plugins (as plain text, as HTML or as CSV).

In addition to the name, some other information can be added to the list:

• The version number.
• The description.
• The homepage URL.
• The add-on ID.
• The application (Firefox, Thunderbird…) min and max version.
• The add-on status (incompatible/disabled).
• The browser version and the Operating System.
• The total number of installed add-ons.
• The date the list has been generated.

The list can be saved, printed and copied to the clipboard.

This extension is useful to keep a list of your extensions and themes, or when reporting a bug or a conflict to an extension author.

General Use of Extension List Dumper

(Click on pictures to enlarge where necessary)

Once installed it displays a "Dump List" toolbar button in the Add-ons screen or Sidebar:

Clicking on the button brings up a window showing the installed and available extensions

Various options can be chosen to filter the amount of information depending on your requirements, there is also a dropdown filter that allows

• All
• Enabled
• Incompatible
• Disabled

extensions to be viewed

Options Dialogs

The options are generally self explanatory from the screenshots and allow default displayed information to be set as well as options to save.

Clipboard

All the information can be copied to the clipboard as text (tab separated) this means you can paste it into any text or word application and also into a spreadsheet where the information is automatically assigned to rows and columns. This means you can then us the spreadsheet to edit, filter and sort the data to display what you need.

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

I find this a useful Firefox add-on that I use occasionally list extensions in order to review what I have installed or to set up a new clean portable version of Firefox. I will now be using to check when my favorite/essential extensions are updated to use with Firefox 3.

I rate this as:

Simple – Does the Job – Good Options

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

Brief 1.1 – Firefox Add-on – Simple BUT Very Effective RSS Reader

Firefox Add-on – Statusbars – Get Your Statusbars Organized

Why I decided to Write This Blog

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A Firefox Add-on that provides a simple RSS Reader based on Firefox Live Bookmarks contained in any bookmarks folder.

Why Would You Want It?

Provides a quick and easy way to read your Firefox Live Bookmarks RSS feeds from within your favourite browser and make full use of Firefox tabbed browsing and other add-ons to read pages in tabs, save pages, save sessions, etc.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Displays Live Bookmarks in a simple interface

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Overcomes need for a separate RSS Reader
• Use Firefox features and add-ons with selected pages
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Sorting Feeds (Alphabetically)

(This can be overcome using another Firefox add-on – “Bookmark Sorting”)

More About What it Does in Detail:

Brief installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons Statusbars page:

Brief makes reading RSS feeds as easy as it gets. It is designed to have the right set of features to be both powerful and simple. Brief stores feeds on your disk and presents them on a seamless, interactive page.

Long Description

Easily mark articles as read and star the interesting ones. Browse your feeds anyway you want – view the unread or starred entries, display a single feed or a whole folder, show full entries or only their headlines. Quickly find a piece of news using full text search. Be notified when feeds are updated in the background and track the number of new entries using the status bar. Customize the Brief’s look by creating your own styles. Use keyboard shortcuts to faster navigate through the pile of news.

General Use of Brief

(Click on pictures to enlarge where necessary)

Once installed it displays a toolbar button to the left end of the address box.

and an icon in the status bar showing the number of unread items and with a mouseover popup giving details

Left Clicking on the toolbar button or Status Bar Icon displays the main Brief Page and Feed Sidepanel. The first time you use Brief it will request which bookmarks folder you wish to use.

Right clicking on the Status Bar Icon allows you to update all feeds or mark all feeds as read.

Working across the controls to the left over the feed side panel you have:

allowing you to

• Refresh all feeds
• Search for text in a particular feed item (results are displayed in the reading pane)
• Open the Options dialog.

Over the main reading pane you have controls as follows:

• Mark All as Read
• Toggle Show Only Headlines or Full Feed Information
• Viewing Options Dropdown Menu
• Change Pages

There is also an icon to the left of the reading pane header which toggles the feeds sidebar on and off:

There is also the option to mark posts as Starred and display all these starred posts in the reading pane

Options Dialogs

The options are generally self explanatory from the screenshots

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

I find this a highly useful Firefox add-on that I use daily to go through the feeds I watch as a blogger and feeds that I am interested in generally. I use the options dialog to switch the folder of feeds but see “What Could Make it Better” below. I like to be able to watch my feeds in Firefox as I want to use several other Firefox features such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks, Scrapbook and Google Notebook to capture information and session manager to reopen sets of pages I am interested in.

I rate this as:

Simple – Does a Great Job

What Could Make it be Better?

Switch between different sets of feed folders by a simple dropdown or as a menu item in the Unread – Starred – Trash section at the top of the feeds sidebar

Undo “Mark as Read” in Unread section

Star option for all posts in a particular feed (manual or automatic as an option)

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Firefox Add-on – Statusbars – Get Your Statusbars Organized

Why I decided to Write This Blog

What are the Tags?

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Add-ons, Freeware, Pro Reviewer, Programs, Software, Utilities, Windows, Windows XP

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A Firefox Add-on that allows you to set multiple status bars and move content between them to display what you want to see.

Why Would You Want It?

Many of the Firefox add-ons use the status bar to display information or as a clickable control to set options or display a menu to use the add-on. This can not only leave the statusbar cluttered but also create problems in the width of the page being wider than the screen. This in turn creates problems in viewing the page and not being able to see all the tabs. With Statusbars you can get rid of the width and clutter problems quickly and easily

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides multiple statusbars
• Allows statusbar items to be reorganized

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Overcomes statusbar clutter
• Overcomes Firefox width rendering problems
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Lack of documentation
• Not entirely intuitive in use (without documentation)
• Settings don’t always “stick” to the defined bar
• Would only display the first two bars in customize mode*
• Unhides elements that should remain hidden
• Developer has not updated in over a year

This is a rather long list but I think the problems Statusbars overcomes outweighs the “Cons”

*This may be a problem created by other Add-ons I have installed or some other quirk of my test system.

Update – I have found this is on my review version of Firefox. On another version all 3 statusbars show for customisation. However, I also find on this alternative version that some elements won’t drag and drop between the bars. 

More About What it Does in Detail:

Statusbars installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons Statusbars page:

To switch statusbar you simply scroll while the mouse is over the statusbar. You can also right click and select the statusbar you want by name. You can set up your statusbars so you have one for the site you are on (greasemonkey, adblock, rip, etc), one for general information (forcastfox, gmail notifier, stock ticker, etc) and one for webdesign (tidy, web developer, firebug, etc).

Works with:

Firefox: 1.0 – 2.0.0.*

I also missed this important comment from the developer when I first tried it out:

Developer Comments

This version works on FF2. It lets you drag and drop the statusbar icons when you are in customize mode, making it easy to rearrange things the way you want.

It took me quite a while to work put you could drag and drop the elements between the bars.

There is also some further information at the developers website

General Use of Statusbars

Once installed it displays a coloured square to the left end of the statusbar.

Right clicking on the coloured square displays a menu that allows you to select the bar you want or customize Statusbars.

Clicking on customize displays the Customize Statusbars window and stacks the statusbars at the bottom of the screen where the elements can be dragged and dropped between bars or within a bar to reorganize.

(I named the bars 1, 2 & 3 for ease but you can use more meaningful names)

Two issues occurred in the review setup, sometimes the reorganised elements don’t stay put but revert back to their original position or original (default) status bar. The second was that only the first two statusbars were stacked, meaning that you couldn’t drag and drop element to or within the third bar.

Clicking on the New Bar button or the Edit Bar button brings up the same edit screen (just a different title)

The screen above shows the colour picker accessed by clicking on the colour box.

Clicking on the Advanced button changes the Edit screen as shown below

A list of the text names for the statusbar elements is now displayed. By cutting and pasting the text elements from one bar’s edit window to another or moving the text lines within the window you can achieve the same thing as dragging and dropping edits. Albeit this is a slow and painstaking process but it overcomes the problem of a status bar not being displayed in edit mode.

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

I find this a very useful Firefox add-on that overcomes particular problems I have with a lot of Add-ons installed which use the statusbar in one way or another.
As previously noted these problems are clutter of information but more importantly the fact that the status bar width effects the page width. This results in the page being wider than screen but with the horizontal scroll bar and the tab rows being cut off in the middle as in the screenshot below.

(The above screenshot is from a resized window to fit on the blog page but the same thing happens in full screen, Statusbars is also installed but the elements have not been assigned to the second and third bars))

Personally I rate this as very useful but would benefit from further work:

Simple – Does a Useful Job

What Could Make it be Better?

Deal with minor bugs to fix items in the bar they are allocated to

Display all bars in customize mode  See Update note above

Stack bars option to display all bars in general use

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Why I decided to Write This Blog

What are the Tags?

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Add-ons, Freeware, Pro Reviewer, Programs, Software, Utilities, Windows, Windows XP

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