extensions

Overcoming traffic trauma

There are two major lessons to be learned from this weekend's fiery freeway collapse in Oakland, California.

The first lesson is that, despite all that concrete and steel, when faced with intense heats close to 3,000°F, freeways built to withstand earthquakes crumble like toys.

The second is that we generally take even heavily congested commutes for granted. San Francisco Bay Area commuters are now looking at months of overcrowded and out-of-the-way alternative routes while contractors and engineers clean up the mess of melted roadway.

Thankfully, software developers are commuters just like you and me. I've … Read more

Put Google on steroids

With dominating Web search and the increasingly popular Gmail service, Google's dominion grows larger each day. The company makes powerful search and e-mail apps, but it's never been known for front-end interfaces.

Luckily for you, free downloads for Google Web search and Gmail can help you customize Google services to look and work they way you want.

You likely already know about the major Google software--Google Toolbar (for Mozilla Firefox or IE), Google Desktop, Google Earth, and Google Talk--but the lesser-known utilities and extensions often have the most interesting features.

One of the best I've seen … Read more

Coop for Firefox imagines browser-based social networking

Earlier this week, Mozilla Labs made news with its announcement of a social networking add-on called The Coop. According to the official post on the Mozilla Labs blog, The Coop is "a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the Web browser." For those of us who know about Flock (download for Windows)--a Firefox-based browser with added "Web 2.0" features--that sounds like a very familiar concept. So what does it all mean for the future of Firefox and Flock?

Yesterday, I had a chance to briefly discuss The Coop with Chris … Read more

Surrealists rejoice: here's a power strip for you

Are you one of those artsy-fatalist types who has a poster of Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory up on the wall? That's the "melting clock painting," also known as the backdrop of the 1938 cartoon short "Porky in Wackyland." (Yes, it's on YouTube.)

If so, we've found something perfect to further indulge your fantasies of things that appear to be melting into a puddle of surrealist goo. Called the "ElectriciTree," this stretchy power strip/extension cord is technically supposed to look like the branches of a tree to remind … Read more

New Firefox extension, Firekeeper, lets you surf safe

Do you trust that the Web site you're visiting is secure? By now most people know to avoid sketchy sites with complicated URLs, misspellings, or seedy graphics. But what about legitimate sites, such as the one for this year's Super Bowl, which was defaced just days before the event to include a link to a malicious Trojan horse?

In tests by CNET Reviews, we found that safe surfing tools such as the Netcraft toolbar and McAfee SiteAdvisor, while effective at stopping sites designed to be fraudulent by nature (aka phishing sites), tend to miss recently defaced legitimate sites. … Read more

Weezu puts floating head chat in your browser

Weezu is a downloadable chat app that runs as an extension in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Like some of the other chat apps we've covered lately, Weezu resides in a sidebar on your browser. It's a bit more graphical than some of the other extensions out there, and if you want something that's a little prettier than plain text, Weezu's for you.

One of the things that attracted me to Weezu was its eccentric interface, which puts you in several different locals and is completely skinnable. My favorite is the sea floor--if you had kids … Read more

Firefox add-ons site goes on a diet, gets face-lift [video]

This post has been updated from the original. Added: Video interview with Mike Shaver, Technology Strategist at Mozilla Corp.

On Monday, Mozilla launched an updated version of its add-ons page for its popular browser Firefox. The new page has redefined genres, language localization, and snazzy Ajax-enabled previews for screenshots. Mozilla also is adding a user community element that allows users to add their own reviews, complete with a rating system. Previously, you were only able to add comments. Mozilla also has cut hundreds of extensions to make room for the more popular ones, making the updated site more of a &… Read more

FoxyTunes Planet gets music discovery right

The team behind the popular browser extension FoxyTunes is hard at work on a new mashup site that integrates the music controls of FoxyTunes with an aggregation tool to give you more information and media about your favorite musical artists and new discoveries.

Each FoxyTunes Planet artist page has several customizable widgets. There are Flickr photos, YouTube videos, albums for sale from Amazon, and even various Internet radio stations such as HypeMachine and Last.fm where you can listen to the band's other songs. If you're like me, you might be listening to a Shoutcast feed on iTunes … Read more

Clippings makes browsing and online shopping easier

Clippings is a superhandy Firefox browser extension that allows you to easily paste text from a list of saved clipboards. It may sound boring, but using Clippings for Web forms and multiple e-mail signatures lets you complete those tasks more quickly, saving your keystrokes for something more important, such as actual communication.

Clippings installs as a contextual menu. Right-clicking an empty form or writing area lets you select a saved snippet from your clipboard. It took me only a minute or two to set up a fairly extensive list of commonly used entries.

The big question: How is Clippings better … Read more