Free Downloadable Add-Ons Make for Speedy Browsing

Mozilla’s Firefox Bookmarking Add-Ons make browsing on-line faster, more organized, and more convenient.  While there are hundreds of free Bookmarks Add-ons to choose from through Mozilla’s AMO website, only a handful of them have received a coveted “Recommended” rating.   Features vary wildly, and though some are a slight improvement over Internet Explorer’s “Favorites”, others succeed at being both simple and sophisticated.

If you just want to take the bookmarks names off the Bookmarks Toolbar to allow for more bookmarks to appear, Smart Bookmarks Bar 1.4.3 is an okay option.  It’s straightforward, but doesn’’t  give you much in the way additional functionality.  Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar 4.0 does just what it says.  As you get too many Bookmarks for one row, additional rows will appear.  Of course as you add more and more bookmarks, you won’t have much space left on your screen.

Xmarks 3.3.2 is popular because it synchronizes your bookmarks and passwords and allows you to access and update them on each computer you keep.  Plus it supports Firefox, as well as Internet Explorer and Safari.  One slightly worrisome feature of Xmarks is that it captures all of your Google searches (and other search engines) so it can interject websites into your Search results (they call this their “discovery service”).  Just like Google, it keeps a history of websites that you visit, so security is a concern.  Although Xmarks says it’s encrypted, it doesn’’t seem impossible for its server to get hacked and all of a sudden have all of your passwords for sale to the highest bidder on the net.

The best feature of samfind Bookmarks Bar 2.0.3 is how fast it gets you to the sites you visit most often.  It’s totally customizable, and starts you off with some of the most popular websites already configured.  Bookmarks are organized by Topics and it’s easy to add websites, even letting you drop and drag sites you want to add right from the address bar.  You can position the samfind Toolbar where you want it, and you can select the look of websites on the Bar as icons, icons and text, or text.  You can also change samfind’’s layout to fit several times as many websites as you normally could, saving valuable screen space.

Shareaholic 1.9 supports over 60 social sites, allowing you to choose your favorite social services and access them from a single drop down menu.  This add-on is tightly focused on bookmarking/sharing, blogging/publishing, as well as emailing, and link shortening.  You can have instant access to shared web pages with the websites in these categories.  In this respect it is similar to some of the other add-ons mentioned, although with fewer numbers of websites to interact with.

Mozilla’s Recommended Bookmarks Toolbars are all free downloads, and they offer a variety of features that will appeal to virtually any level of web browser.  Once installed, they can all make repeated visits to the Internet a whole lot quicker and a lot less cluttered.  Now if we could only find our car keys…

Tags: firefox firefox addons mozilla samfind shareaholic xmarks