The other day I was raving on...

About the cool and skeezy addons that you can get for FireFox these days thanks to all the wonderful coders out there who see something they like, but think it could be improved, and rewrite it as they would like it to be. It's because of this relentless tinkering that people are able to customize their computer/browser to a level that makes it truly individual without needing to know how it is done.

Take Speeddial for example. This little addon enables you to have all your favorite websites on a tab in FireFox so you don't need to bother with all the hassle of clicking your bookmarks open and remembering where the link is. With a little bit of tweaking (downloading images that you wish to associate with your favorites) you're able to create a really neat looking startpage that suits your needs. Thanks to the easy to use controls, how easy it is to customize and it's use-ability Speeddial is going to be a favorite of mine for a long time. Download it and give it a try, you won't be disappointed. Here's my speeddial page.

Another recent addon to my Firefox is Foxclocks. Which does exactly what it says on the tin. It puts clocks for different timezones on the status bar at the bottom of FireFox. (You can see my Foxclocks on the bottom left of my browser.) Foxclocks is a lot more trick than it initially sounds when you realise that Foxclocks helps you keep an eye on the time, locally and around the world, by putting clocks in your statusbar and comes with other features such a Google Earth location finder built into it.

"That's all well and good Ross, but don't all these addons clutter up the right-click menu?" I hear you ask. And you'd be right to question me on that. But this is where Menu Editor comes into play. Menu Editor is an addon that gives you full control over what is shown on your right-click menu and all your other menus such as the File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools and the Help menu. And now you don't have all those unnecessary links kicking about in your menus.

The next thing to make my browsing more engaging is Better Gmail 2. Better Gmail 2 works with the new version of Googlemail, if you're using the classic version you need Better Gmail 1 instead, and vastly improves the functionality of Gmail. Google Ad's are removed and the skin function, there are four at the moment until someone designs more, makes Gmail look light years better.

The final addon I have installed is Customize Google. This is an addon that makes Google's search pages as good as they should be. You want links to other search engines on Google? You got it. You want to make Google stream search results so you have one page of results instead of the usual amount? You've got it. You want the same for images? You've got it. You want to prevent cookies from being sent to Google analytics and anonymize the Google cookie UID? You got it and a lot more.

Enjoy these addons if you choose to grab any of them and remember to recommend them to your friends. If you have any. I don't, I'm too busy playing with FireFox addons.

Mahalo.