Remember the Milk, a great to web-based to-do list application, has released an excellent plug-in for the Firefox.  It works with gmail, creating a panel on the right side of your screen with your to-do list in it.  It’s now right there and you can add, remove, change and see all of your tasks in one place.

The feature that really won me over, however, was the ability to set up either a tag or use the star in gmail to create a new task. You can create a tag (for example to-do) and whenever you apply it to a message an item will be added to your Remember the Milk task list automatically.  If you get to-do items in email, this feature saves time and keystrokes!

This plug-in has quickly become something I can’t live without!

Aardvark makes reading easier and saves paper and ink when printing. It is a Firefox extension, but is also available as a bookmarklet for Internet Explorer and Safari.

When browsing the web, I always use the printer-friendly version of a page. It frees you from all the distractions of colour and ads, letting you focus on the material itself. Pure text reduces page length and takes up far less ink when printing. However, not all articles are available in a printer-friendly version.

In this case, I use Aardvark to “make” my own. Aardvark does this by editing any HTML element in a web-site. You can see the functions below:

Step 1: Activate Aardvark by right-clicking on a page (or use the bookmarklet in IE or Safari).

Step 2: Highlight the desired text (e.g. the article, blog post, etc.) using the “wider” and “narrower” functions.

Step 3: Use the “isolate” function to focus the text.

Step 4: Use the “remove” function to erase any leftover undesirables (e.g. ads, blog comments, etc.).

Step 5: Use the “de-widthify” function to change the text layout to maximize the width of your screen.

You should now have a page that reads like a newspaper. Just be sure to actually read it instead of (insert your favourite online distraction here).

If you’ve ever needed to change a basic preference in Firefox without opening the options window, this extension is for you. The extension adds either a menu in the menu bar or an icon-button to your “customize” menu that you can put wherever you want. The extension allows you to quickly enable/disable java, javascript, adblock and popup block all in one click of your mouse. All the other options are accessible in two clicks.

Quick Preferences Firefox Extension

One of the coolest new features in Windows Vista is the way folder structure is displayed in the locations bar. Vista organizes it in a way that makes it much more readable, and adds new features such as being able to back-track by clicking on folders in the location bar.

Just like any other cool feature on other browsers, someone has taken the idea and turned it into a useful extension for Firefox. Introducing Locationbar2.

There are three main features that make it worthwhile to install Locationbar2:

1. It decodes long confusing URLs that clutter up your locations bar.
2. It allows you to clearly see the website you are on, and its file structure. It makes it really easy to detect phising sites and other fake sites.
3. It lets you click on parts of the site structure to navigate to that directory.

Locationbar2 [addons.mozilla.org]

If you want to develop a new habit, what do you do? You make it convenient to perform. So what if you want to expand your vocabulary? Easy, you install Dictionary Search for Firefox.

Dictionary Search makes it easy to look up any unknown words you may stumble across using The Free Dictionary. Never again will you skim over a word that you don’t quite understand, because all you have to do from now on is high-light the word, right click on it, and select “Lookup in Dictionary”. This is absolutely perfect for anyone who spends a significant amount of time online and wants to keep their English skills shiny.

If there is an easier way to improve your understanding of people’s writings and help grow your vocabulary at the same time, then my name isn’t Geoff.

DictionarySearch for Firefox [addons.mozilla.org]

So Firefox 3 Beta came out the other day (if you don’t know that already, you have been living under a rock). It adds a bunch of cool new features, but the problem is most extensions are not yet compatible with it. It’s not that they don’t work, it’s just that they haven’t officially added support for the new Firefox. If you just can’t wait for all your extensions to migrate to 3.0, all hope is not lost.

Nightly Tester Tools is here to save the day, allowing you to disable extension compatibility testing in Firefox, rendering all your old extensions usable! It also lets you customize the Title bar, so you can change it to something cool like “Ninja Browser”. Anyways, just remember that some of your extensions may not function properly in Firefox 3 until they are properly updated. For example Gmail Manager won’t allow me to save my passwords.

Nightly Tester Tools

If you have ever tried the popular browser Opera, you have probably noticed it’s abundance of features. Probably one of the first ones you noticed was the download manager was in a tab. If you happened to like it, but don’t want to move away from firefox, there is a firefox extension which forces the Downloads window to display as a new tab. It saves space in your task bar, and lets you see more of your downloads in a neat little tab, instead of changing back and forth between windows.

Downloads in Tab [addons.mozilla.org]

Since Facebook released the Developer’s API, you have probably been adding more and more applications to your Facebook account. With these new tools comes new annoyances that Facebook has yet to fix. One of them is that you can only put 6 apps above the fold on your left navigation menu. To access the rest, you must click on a little arrow at the bottom. There is no doubt that this makes Facebook more money, because it means their ad will be above the fold. However it is really annoying, especially if you are a Facebook power user. It seems someone just got fed up with this, and created a Greasemonkey script that auto-expands the list whenever you visit Facebook in firefox.

To install, just click on the link below. You’ll need Greasemonkey, which you can get it here.

Facebook Always Expand Applications Script