Judi Sohn

Reinventing myself one crisis at a time.

Neat Firefox extensions

In addition to the aforementioned Performancing (in-browser blog editor that I’m using right now), today I also installed Spellbound, a spell checker. This was at the suggestion of someone in the Performancing forums in response to my request for a spell checker feature in the plug-in. I tried Spellbound a few versions ago and it was “just okay,” forcing you to run the engine manually and check word by word in a separate window (BlogJet does this, not in love with that). This version works inline…just like in most Mac OS X applications (and MS Office) you get a little red squiggle under words that aren’t in its dictionary. Works great with the Performancing plug-in. Cool.

I also found SearchStatus, which puts some very useful SEO (search engine optimization) information in your window. More than just Google PageRank, the extension gives Alexa information, (my Alexa rank is 186,041…is that good?), Whois, robots.txt, metatags and more. Good stuff.

This isn’t new but an extension worth mentioning…BetterSearch. It puts little thumbnails in your search results page. It works with Google, del.icio.us, MSN, A9 and many others. It’s much easier to find the site you’re looking for with the visual clue.

Why anyone would stay with Internet Explorer (or even Safari, to be honest) when Firefox is this fast, this stable and this easy to extend is beyond me.

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Judi Sohn

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4 responses to “Neat Firefox extensions”

  1. I continue to use Safari because Firefox, as hard as it tries, just isn’t a Mac application. It doesn’t integrate as tightly with the system (and not in the Windows/IE way). It’s kludgier, slower, and feels a bit more monolithic. Hitting cmd-w doesn’t always close a window, and there are some other weird issues.

    For development, I often use Firefox for a few of its extensions and, naturally, for testing. Of course the choice is obvious on a PC. But on the Mac, Safari is still the best browser for browsing.

  2. I guess if I only used a Mac I might feel the same way. I don’t care whether or not my browser is tightly tied to the operating system, I only care if it’s tightly tied to my stuff. 🙂

    The few times I’ve launched Safari since upgrading to 10.4, I’ve found it to be kludgier than Firefox. I keep double clicking tabs expecting for them to close.

  3. I was going to suggest Spellbound, but I always invoke it via a right-click which didn’t work in Performancing. I didn’t even think to check the other means, such as the toolbar button.

    How did you get it to check inline, though? I don’t see any options or configuration for that.