Tropophilia

Hey, I’m Jarred.  You may have forgotten me, but I write here sometimes!  Seriously, though, sorry for my absence.  Life’s been a little hectic lately — LSAT, birthday, and some other secret projects have all come between me and my blogging.  Though you’ve heard it here a hundred times before, sorry for being lame.

This week, the Mozilla Foundation released a major upgrade to their increasingly popular Firefox browser.  We’re big fans of Firefox because of its speed, safety, simplicity, and customizability.  If you’re going to trust me on anything, trust me on this: give Firefox a try for one week.  You’ll never go back to Internet Explorer again.  (If you want to show Tropophilia some love, download Firefox using the button at the bottom of the left sidebar. - Ed.)

Today, I want to focus on some of the great add-ons that you can implement in Firefox.  This where the true power of this browser comes into focus.  Add-ons are “extensions” to Firefox, usually developed by third parties, that give you new features — sometimes eye candy, sometimes extremely useful.

For example, in the 20 seconds before beginning this paragraph, I browsed to Firefox’a recommended add-ons, read a brief snipper about URL Fixer (”URL Fixer corrects typos in URLs that you enter in the address bar. For example, if you type google.con, it will correct it to google.com”), and installed it in my browser.  Boom — I just saved myself some future frustration.

Some add-ons like URL Fixer are so simple, you wonder why they’re not native to every browser.  Others, however, are super-powerful and feature-rich.

Take, for example, Xoopit.  After installing the add-on, you give it your Gmail username and password (I’m generally trustful of these sorts of things, but you might want to think it over).  Give Xoopit a few hours, and it indexes all of the picture attachments in your email, creates thumbnails, and makes them easily browsable.  It also finds all the YouTube links in your email, indexes them, and collects the screenshots so that you can browse them.  Finally, it indexes the rest of your file types.  All of this is accessible within the Gmail user interface.

Instead of telling you about it, I’ll just let you click on these screenshots and take a gander:

Cool, huh?  Try it out for yourself to, in the words of Corvida, experience the awesomesauce.

Another extension I’ve tried recently leans more towards the eye candy side of the spectrum, but has the potential to be useful in certain situations.  It’s called PicLens.  If you have used CoverFlow technology in iTunes or in OS X Leopard, then this will not be a very new experience.  Once you’ve installed the PicLens add-on, you can access its features by a handy browser button.  Alternatively, whenever you are on one of the supported sites (including Google Image Search, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr…), you can click on a little icon that comes up whenever you hover over a picture.

When you do either, you get this:

Pretty amazing stuff… but as you probably tell after a few uses, you probably won’t use this day-to-day.

That’s just a brief look at some cool add-ons.  There are literally thousands more, which you can search and browse here.  Enjoy!

Graphic used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Channy Yun.  Screenshots courtesy of CoolIris.