Archive for: firefox
Most people know about Outlook competitor from Mozilla, Thunderbird. Unlike Outlook it is completely free, it’s multi-platform, it’s multi-lingual and most importantly, it’s highly customizable featuring lots of useful addons and themes. Therefore, if you are using Thunderbird we have put together a great list of the top 10 addons you should be using.
Contacts Sidebar – handy addon that lets you display all available address books in Thunderbird sidebar. This lets you easily access all your contacts from the main window, quickly edit contact details, drag’n drop files on top of a contact to send it as an attachment and more… (Thunderbird: 1.5b – 2.0.0.*)
QuoteCollapse – automatically collapses all the quotes within any message, making it look neat and less cluttered. To expand quotes back to standard view just click inserted ‘+’ button. (Thunderbird: 0.7 – 2.0.0.*)
QuickMove – must-have addon letting you quickly file messages to your frequently used folders using keyboard shortcuts. (Thunderbird: 0.5 – 2.0+)
Signature Switch – allows you to create multiple email signatures (Private, Business, etc.) and quickly switch between them right from the main toolbar. Also provides configurable signature auto-switch option based on the email recipients. (Thunderbird: 0.7 – 2.0.0.*)
Remove Duplicate Messages – helps you quickly locate and remove duplicate messages from the selected folders (and its subfolders). (Thunderbird: 1.0 – 1.5.0.*)
Nostalgy – lets you assign single-key keyboard shortcuts to common thunderbird operations i.e., move/copy/delete messages, change folder, add/remove/view tags, add attachment, scroll the message while keeping the focus on the thread pane and lots more. (Thunderbird: 1.5 – 2.0.0.*)
GMailUI – adds Gmail-like mail archiving and powerful message search (i.e. ‘from:Makeuseof to:Aibek’) functionalities into Thunderbird. Makes excellent addition to already existing ‘Saved Searches’ feature. (Thunderbird: 0.8 – 2.0.0.*)
Attachment Extractor – integrates one-click attachment extract option from selected messages. Once attachments have been extracted it can delete, detach or mark messages as ‘read’. Way easier than going through messages one-by-one. (Thunderbird: 2.0 – 2.0.0.*)
Auto Zip Attachments – adds an ‘AutoZip’ button to the compose toolbar allowing you to compress all attached files to a single ‘zip’ file. (Thunderbird: 1.5 – 2.0.0.*)
Send Later – integrates extra ‘Send Later At’ (’Ctrl+Shift+Return’) feature to the message compose window, allowing you to send messages on a particular future date and time. It can be a contract cancellation notice, a ‘Happy Birthday’ or a friendly ‘Don’t Forget’ note. (Thunderbird: 1.5 – 2.0)
Microsoft has released the latest version of their web browser for Windows, and you can download Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) now. Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 claims to block upto four times more malware attacks than other browsers and reduces time to complete common tasks on the Web such as searching, mapping and sharing.
Some new features worth looking out for are
- Accelerators - make it faster to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it.
- Web Slices – makes favorite information from sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available when you go online.
- Instant search – The Instant Search Box enables real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information.
Download Internet Explorer 8 now in 25 languages.
The other day I came across a great new multiplayer 3D shooter game. The site is Cmune and they claim to have the first browser-based multiplayer 3D shooter built to be social.
Cmune allows users to play a 3D paintball shooter game within any web browser. Additionally you can play the game in either Windows, Mac or even within Facebook. The game itself is very simple, a user needs to just download a small plugin and then they can create or join in on a game. Paradise paintball has very simple controls and is easy to use and graphics are ok but nothing out of this world.
When the site first opens you are able to choose which game you want to join or even able to create a game and play against your friends. Cmune is a great time waster!!
Previously here on Crenk we have talked about the top torrent trackers on the web and this time I want to outline the top 5 multi-search torrent tools.
NowTorrents. Searches up to twelve sites at once. I like the file type tabs and health indicator, and they offer a Firefox and IE compatible search plugin.
uSniff. I wrote about uSniff before, and I use it quite often. I don’t really search a lot of different sites, usually just Pirate Bay and IsoHunt, and they’re both supported (along with six others). The interface is clean and responds quickly – the search box throws some people off, though. I don’t understand why, it’s giant, orange, and says “search” on it. They also have a search plugin for IE and Firefox.
ScrapeTorrent. Offers a nice preference page and searches nine sites at once. Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and Demonoid are included, and they’re my go-to sites anyways. I approve!
Speckly. I hate the way it displays results: gobs and gobs of text, Google style, and all on one page. There aren’t any sorting options, though you can at least view by file type.
Torrentz. Technically it searches multiple sites, but you’ll get a general results page first. Clicking one of the results will take you to a listing of all the individual torrents. I find it an annoying process, and don’t use Torrentz as a result.
In less than a year, Zemanta has made a name for itself in the blogosphere. By becoming the premier add-on to the FireFox browser, bloggers now had access to an amazing set of tools to provide further depth to their posts. With hundreds of thousands of downloads, it seemed like a surefire winner, and there was little doubt that Zemanta has room to expand, but where and when?
Zemanta late last year supported another FireFox add-on called ScribeFire, a simple blogging tool that opened up in your browser without having to log into any other site or leave the page you are on. This allowed for amazingly quick posting to the blog of your choice, but also provided the same depth that you had available to you from within most popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad.
Recently it was announced that Zemanta has made another move towards mass market exposure, it has integrated with Gmail and Yahoo Mail, offering users of those mail clients the ability to attached related articles, pictures, and keywords to their emails that the recipients might need to fully understand the topic. I personally can’t imagine a better mass exposure opportunity than attaching yourself to two of the largest mail clients on the internet today.
Zemanta is a key tool that I recommend all bloggers install, but now with mail enhancements, I’m happy to see them growing. I’ve always been a big supporter of their efforts as it’s nice to see innovative ways to breathe life into a long standing medium like blogging.
It’s apparent that Zemanta will continue to offer what it always has; by offering photo suggestions, article suggestions, and keyword suggestions, as you type, updating every 300 words, there is bound to be another leap into further integration.
Perhaps a jump into an office platform for document and presentation creation, like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Only time will tell!
It was reported over on Techcrunch and Crunchgear that there wa a virus that was running rampant across the YouTube network with the certain embedded videos. It was reported that Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox were targeted, later reports said it was just IE.
The virus was reportedly named Actns/Swif.T and contains a phishing scam that directs uses to a website with an embedded .SWF and then installs a program called “Antivirus 2009.” Users were warned of this potentially damaging malware by avoiding weird pop-ups, requests for personal information, or re-direction to unknown sites.
The story was later recanted as it appeared to be a YouTube specific situation. On the back end the virus protection service being used was returning false positives identifying code within certain embedded videos as malware. The entire incident is harmless, and there is no security breach on the YouTube network. Spokesperons from YouTube are handling the situation and ensure us that YouTube is currently safe and free of any malware problems.
If you are someone who loves a great dark Firefox 3 theme, then here is a amazing list for you. Mozillalinks has put together have put together a list of 6 great Firefox 3 themes you should download right now.
avant.garde.10011:nerom created by Rob Holian. (experimental)
Black Steel by Ben Griscom. (experimental)
Dark Revisited by Matthew Baerbock. (experimental)
Gradient iCool by Edward Mak.
Midnight Fox by TwisterMC.
Ruler Dark by dkgo. (experimental)
Here at Crenk we really like talking about Firefox and extensions, as you can see from previous posts, but this time I wanted combined Firefox with the feed reader I use Google Reader. There are so many Google Reader Firefox extensions out there, but here are the top five I think are worth using.
As with any list of Firefox tools, please do not install all of these at once unless you’d like to slow down your browser. And, honestly, how many notifications do you need to show you that you have unread items in Reader?
AideRSS – Brings AideRSS to your Google Reader, allowing you to see ranks directly in your reader, as well as letting you group feeds by rank. Also allows you to add your own thoughts on each feed.
Better GReader – Combines several Greasemonkey scripts in one extension. Includes things such as skipping the iGoogle choice page, the ability to preview the item as it appears on the actual Web page, shows the favicon for each feed, and several other choices.
Google Reader Notifier – Shows you how many unread items there are, provides an itemized list, lets you customize where the information appears in your browser, different icon sets, and more.
Google Reader Watcher – Based on a Greasemonkey script by the same author, Google Reader Watcher will check your account at an interval you set and will show you how many unread items you have. It can show this broken down by feed and more.
IntenseDebate in Google Reader – This plugin will add a link to each item in your Google Reader to allow you to post comments directly to IntenseDebate.
As Mashable has reported this morning, Joost has now moved to a web based version. If you don’t know what Joost is, it is basically a television streaming service but without the ads. There are hundred of channels to choose from and you are able to watch programs straight in your browser.
Joost has channels in a variety of sectors, old television programs, sports, news, music videos and more. It is totally free to watch and can be viewed from any country in the world, unlike Hulu.
When you head over to the site all you need to do is register and then download the plugin that launches the application within your browser, and thats it.
Yesterday Google’s new browser, Chrome was announced so today I downloaded and installed it onto my work Windows XP box to see what all the fuss is about and check for cross compatibility on sites we work on. I spent about 5 minutes poking around, if I can’t figure out how to use a browser in 5 minutes, it’s too complicated for anyone but the most 733t 1337.
Download was very small; it then opens an applet and downloads the rest of the software. Installation requires Firefox to be shut down so Chrome can import all your bookmarks, favorites, history and passwords; this goes quickly and rather painlessly. Next you get a TOS about reporting options for crashes, I denied their request and the install was complete.
Upon launching Chrome for the first time an unusual question is asked, “Do you wish to keep Google as your default search engine?” It’s unusual in that, it’s a Google product and the first thing about this new killer app is to strip out Search, the one thing Google does very, very well. I selected to keep it.
All my bookmarks and history imported, what didn’t was my homepage. I’m a long time iGoogle user and rely on the RSS feeds to get me caught up quickly at a glance to what is going on with the sites I follow. Not there. Instead six white boxes stare at me. A little note tells you that these are your most visited sites. Nice idea, but not for me. I easily look at 50+ sites in six different tabs of iGoogle. There is no apparent way to set a traditional “homepage” only what Google wants you to see.
The other thing lacking is an option to show the status bar. I rely on the status bar while at work and home to see where any link will take my, by hovering over it. There are also several add-ons for Firefox that sit in my status bar that I’ve come to love, from what I can tell in Chrome, there is no status bar option.
On the plus side, it is fast. How fast? I don’t have scientific numbers or pretty pie charts, but it really feels fast. One site that I know uses a fairly common Java plugin to run an app wouldn’t work and there was no option to install it but everything else on the dozen or so sites I quickly browsed seem to work.
Is Chrome the next killer app? Hard to say now, Firefox has such a loyal, loving fan base to it, but I think this could compliment it very well.
Google to launch a web browser today to 100 countries, and it will be named Google Chrome. There is a lot of buzz already about this new product and Im sure you have probably already read about it on Techcrunch, AllthingsD, Sizlopedia and more.All of this was just a rumour until it was confirmed by the Official Google Blog.
For a long time now there have only really been 3 key players in the online browser market, IE, Firefox and Safari (MACs). I’m very interested to use this product today and see how it compares to all these other browsers.
For a long time also Google has been funding Mozilla by paying to have their search engine as default in the browser, so if Google Chrome becomes popular and out grows Firefox, will they still pay top dollar to be the default search in Firefox?
Searching is big business. Those listings on the right side of any Google search are there because someone paid money to advertise there. Same goes with the top 2 or 3 links. Google makes a lot of money off of these paid placements, which are there based on their dynamic search technology. Google has also come under fire for the way in which it ranks sites, called Page Rank, it is a top secret way they calculate what search results should be at the top for any given term, based on their algorithm that, some have suggested, is based on the number of in-bound and out-bound links from other sites.
Google is the killer app of this decade, no one is doubting that. It is so popular it has become a verb, people just say, “Can you Google this for me?” which is almost impossible to do with anything anymore. So what if a new search engine comes along and tries to flatten the playing field?
That is exactly what Cuil (pronounced Cool) is trying to do. They claim to index three times the number of sites Google does and display them in a three-across pattern. That alone is kind of unique for searches, as they have always gone vertically. They have also implemented tab searches, a kind of, well maybe if you were looking for camera you might also want to look for digital camera. The search engine works, that really isn’t a question, but why should I use it?
Google does so many things now, like simple and complex math problems, fast weather look-up, package tracking from UPS and other services, all the way to stock quotes and word definitions. For me, it has eliminated the need to go to specialized sites if I can just put a special query in the Google search bar in Firefox. Cuil is also missing an image search function, something even Microsoft and Yahoo have worked into their site.
Cuil has some cool features, like roll overs, drill-down menu’s and the tabbed feature mentioned earlier. They are taking on the proverbial 800 pound gorilla by going after Google too. My two cents say that Cuil will have a small cult following for a while but ultimately, this will only make Google stronger.
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