Ah, the good old Firefox extensions. Let’s see what kind of extensions I have been able bring to you in this week’s picks.

• No-NSFW: Ever accidentally click a link just to see a Not Safe For Work picture with blinking banners around it? This extension is set to help warn you if you are about to view a page not safe for work or all ages. You can help other folks by voting on an unrated page as you come across it.
• Unplug: Unplug creates links to flash videos, pictures, videos in a separate page so you can easily download the ones you want. It is similar to Download Helper extension and looks pretty good.
• AutoSlideshow: I have been a long time fan and user of the famous PicLens Firefox extension for viewing pictures from Flickr. Another worthy mention is this AutoSlideshow extension, that creates slide shows from various sources on the Internet like Flickr, Google Image, Facebook, 23hq.com, sxc.hu, wikipedia, yahoo images, etc.
• Auto Shutdown: Are you the kind of person who religiously shutdown your computer every night? What is you were downloading something that’s going to run past your bed time? Or if you were leaving town but you really don’t want to cancel that big download? This extension let’s you shutdown your computer automatically as soon as the downloads are complete.
• ReminderFox: This is an extension that brings me warm memories as I had used it in my new to Firefox times. Before I started using an online to-do-list like Remember the Milk. Very useful for managing date based tasks, birthdays or anniversaries. Perfect for thos whoe don’t need a full-blown calendaring application.
• ScribeFire: Not a new one again but one that has seen some cool improvements. This full featured in-browser blog editor has added support for Flickr images, YouTube videos and improved social network sharing capabilities. Posting to major blog platforms are supported.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s picks and if you’d like to see my past picks, check out any of the links in this series listed below. I am sure you’ll find something that you can use.

I would like to apologize to my readers for my light posting this month. I have been completely swamped with personal work with my parents visiting us this summer. They will be here this Friday and we are so excited as it’ll be their first visit abroad.

Also, I would like to extend my welcome to you, if you have recently made ShanKri-la part of your read. It would just make my day if you dropped by to say hello. Plus, watch out for some cool webapp reviews coming up shortly.

MySpace Private Profiles

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Firefox 3 beta 5 has been in the wild for a few days. If you haven’t had a chance to try it yet, you can snag this portable version of it and read this post to run Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 simultaneously. The advantage of the portable version is that there is no installation and you can even carry it in your usb flash drive. When the next beta/release candidate comes out, you can simply delete the Firefox directory and grab the new one.

Let’s look at some of the new Firefox extensions I came across in the last couple of weeks:

• CraigsToolbox: If you are a heavy Craigslist user, you will appreciate the features this extension offers. One of the primary feature is that it loads thumbnails of pictures attached to a listing in the listing page. Saves you from clicking into every listing to see the pictures. Plus, it lets you save a dollar amount and a favorite search string to search by default. Check out this video to find out more.
• Download Statusbar: A very nice download manager that can be run in full or mini mode. The full mode gives you a visual progress bar above the status bar of ongoing downloads. Also has a plenty options to set colors, etc.  No more annoying download window to manage.
• OpenDownload: Ever been annoyed by the fact that when you download .exe files, Firefox doesn’t have an option to just run the .exe. Well, this extension gives that to you.
• RetailMeNot: There are plenty of sites to find online coupons. With this extension, when you are on a site like Amazon you will automatically see if there are any coupons available. Your online shopping just got snazzier.
• BuyLater: Another one for you online shoppers. If you find an item out of stock or would like to follow a price closely, this extension adds a ‘Buy This Later’ button. It’ll monitor for updates every minute and notify you by email or Twitter. I like the Twitter idea as you can get these updates as tweets without flooding your inbox.
• FoxTor: If privacy and anonymity is in your radar when you are browsing for whatever reason, FoxTor gives you just that. Make your browsing anonymous with the touch of a button.

Hope you find an extension or two that you can use to make your daily browsing a little easier. Has anyone noticed the performance increase in Firefox 3 beta 5? I love it.

I have been a little busy this week and sorry for the slow posting this week. As my regular readers know, I try to put quality before quantity and rather post 3 good posts a week than just regurgitating news that’s circulating everywhere. I hope that don’t put you off.

Alright, I won’t keep you waiting anymore and let’s look at the new and shiny Firefox add-ons I have found this week:

• Resizable TextArea - You can resize any textarea in a form while filing a complaint or while leaving a long-winded troll message in a blog. (please don’t use it here )
• Zemanta - A content suggestion engine in the form of a Firefox add-on. While you are compiling a blog post, it analyzes your post and suggests relevant article links, pictures, etc from the Internet so you can make your post even more valuable. I love the idea of this and giving it a shot this week. It supports WordPress, Blogger & Typepad. [via Weblog Tools Collection]
• OpenInWindow - If you are in the habit of separating your work by doing different kind of work in different Firefox Windows, you are probably copy and pasting links between each other. With this Firefox extension, you get a right-click context menu and you can choose to open your link in any of your open windows. [via Firefox Facts]
• Craigslist Image Preview - For the last few weeks I have been using this cool Craigslist alternative interface for surfing the list. If you still use the original one, this Firefox extension adds thumbnail images with the listing without actually clicking through to the listing. [via Download Squad]
• FavLoc - I use a folder named ‘Downloads’ to download everything and then organize things by moving portable apps to different folder and set up files to a folder to a ‘exe files’ folder, etc. With this cool extension, I can create different favorite locations and save directly to those! Wow, what a time saver. [via Firefox Facts again, thanks Mitch]
• Customize Google - If you are one of those types who loves all kinds of optiosn to tweak, tweak, tweak until you get it just right to your satisfaction, you’ll love this extension. You get tons of options to adjust Google Search results with this extension. It is not new but has seen a lot of improvements and maybe it’s time to revisit. I know I am. [via gHacks]

New Firefox Add-ons Site Open

I had mentioned earlier that the new Firefox Add-ons site will be out with Firefox 3 release. But, it’s already live for our use and if you had clicked on any of the add-ons link above, you’d have noticed that already. If not, here is the new add-ons site.

How do you like the changed interface?

Today marks the Vernal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and Autumnal Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. In layman’s terms, the Sun will cross exactly over the Earth’s equator today. This will mean that the night and day will be about the same length all over the world!

Now on to the main intent of this post. We have been seeing a lot of action lately with Firefox. Firefox 3 Beta 5 seems to be slated for release on Mar 27. While we await the release of Firefox 3, lets look at a few awesome extensions.

• FirefoxView - If you use IE and Firefox together for reasons like some websites just don’t work on Firefox but would still like to open your links in Internet Explorer in Firefox, this extension adds context menu option in IE. Earlier, I showed you how you can open a link in IE in whatever browser you have set as default. This one works well if Firefox is your default browser. (Thanks HitMeWithIt)
• Vertigo - If you have a widescreen monitor, you will love the extra few vertical pixels you can gain by having the tabs vertically in the side. It doesn’t seem to work well with the combination of Tree Style Tabs featured in last week’s picks but it could be some other add-on messing with it too.
• Prism for Firefox 3 - When we start using Firefox 3 (if you haven’t already), we can split web applications right from within Firefox 3 with a simple click with this handy extension. You can read my Mozilla Prism review and how I use it as a GTalk alternative for Linux/Mac.
• Wesabe Uploader - If you use the excellent personal finance tool, Wesabe, you’ll appreciate this Firefox uploader that works in Windows, mac & Linux. You can add accounts and use this extension to automatically update your account trabsactions in Wesabe. It provides a cool desktop sidebar dasboard to view your recent account balances, transactions, charts, etc in a quick glance. After a recent over-draft charge, I have gone back to using Wesabe & Mint side by side to keep a tight handle on my finances.
• Microsoft Activities for Firefox - Microsoft Activities is one of the much touted features in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 release. It is similar to Operator extenion in Firefox with a bunch of differences. Read this post to get some more information on it. [Download version 0.3 here]
• WebSlices in Firefox - Another IE 8 feature that lets you see a custom tiny version of a website you are interested in and stay updated. This is now available in Firefox via this Firefox extension.

What is the world coming to? We are seeing Firefox extensions for features coming in Internet Explorer! I am not looking to start a flame war. But, if Firefox made Microsoft get up and start making its browser better after years of lethargy, I am all for it.

We are the winners, in this case.

Elliott Spitzer, the New York state Governor, resigns after getting caught in a prostitution ring. Every news outlet is repeating how he spent $80,000 on hookers. How about we take a break from that and look at some cool Firefox extensions?

• Bookmark Previews: Have you seen the CoverFlow in Apple products? It’s where the album covers gets neatly stacked with the one of interest in the front and the others waiting to be scrolled? Now, you can get the same effect for Firefox bookmarks with this extension. [via CyberNet News]
• FireVox: It is an open-source and freely available talking browser extension. It is like a screenreader designed especially for Firefox and can be very useful for the visually impaired as well as web developers who test their pages for accessibility.
• Tree-style Tab: As the name implies this extension can list tabs in a tree style showing you in the order they were opened and the pages they originated from. Check out the options to customize this powerful little extension to your needs. If you constantly find yourself having 15-20 tabs open and have no idea where you got them from, wait to thank me until you have tried this.
• gTranslate: Just select on the text and right click and choose the language you want to translate the text to. As simple as that. Check the add-on page for languages supported. [via Brown Thoughts]
• Multi-Sidebar: I have been showing you how to open Google Talk gadget, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, etc in your browser sidebar. But, wouldn’t it be nice you could open these sidebars simultaneously say at different sides of the browser. For eg. Google Talk in the right and the Google Calendar to the left? This extension lets you do that as well as remembers the position next time you open the sidebar. Very neat and I love it!
• Better YouTube: Lifehacker has put together some cool Greasemonkey scripts for YouTube together into a Firefox extension. They have recently added the simple URL hack to view YouTube videos in high resolution to this extension as an option you can turn on.

We saw the release of Firefox 3 beta 4 this week. I love the speed improvements it brings and waiting for some of my favorite extensions to become compatible with it. It’s cool that they offering free t-shirts to the Firefox extension developers to make their Firefox add-ons compatible with Firefox 3.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s list. Do you like sushi? Wait until you see tomorrow’s post.

Firefox 3 has been getting a lot of coverage here. We saw the release of Firefox 3 Beta 3 , which I am really fond of as well as the new Firefox Add-ons site that’s about to debut with the release of Firefox 3.

Let’s look at some of the Firefox Extensions that I came across this week.

• Quick Preference Button: If you tweak of lot of your options time everyday and if you are tired of clicking through to find various options, this extension gives you a menu option to quickly access your various preferences. Not sure if it justifies another extension to get this functionality but some may find it useful.
• Platypus: How would you like to create your own Greasemonkey scripts? That’s right. This extension lets you make changes to a web page as you see it, like remove parts you don’t like, rearrange the layout a little, insert your own HTML code, etc and save it as a Greasemonkey script so you get the changes everytime you visit a page.
  This sounds like an awesome tool and I will have to set aside some time to maybe come up with some examples to show you.
• iGoogleBar: A treat for the Google apps addicted user - this changes the top apps bar in Google Apps to use favicons as well as act as triggers to the iGoogle Gadgets. They also show unread counts from Gmail and Google Reader. For eg. you can see the iGoogle gadget for Google Calendar right from within Google Docs.
• Twitterfox: I am a late adopter of Twitter and find it very interesting in the last couple of days I have been using. I use the Samplace extension for GChat & to keep track of Twitter updates but this Firefox extension is also a really cool one of you just want to follow tweets. Yes, that’s what they call the twitter updates. Add me (KIntheHouse) if you are on Twitter too.
• 8aweek: It seems employee spends an average of 8 hours a week in the Internet. This extension tracks your Internet activities and shows you a neat graph of where you spend most of your time and helps you restrict time wasters and get more productive.I know, you are probably thinking ‘they underestimate the power of Internet’. It should have been named more like 19aweek.
• Multi-Sidebar: As the name implies, this extension lets you create multiple sidebars at the same time. Useful for times when you really can use more than one. [via CyberNet]

I would love to hear from you if you have used Platypus or already have examples of its uses. Also, I have been thinking about maybe showing my Twitter updates in the sidebar and kind of use that as a sideblog for things I don’t get to link here normally. I am sure there are WordPress plugins out there that make this easy, but I would like to hear from you if you have any thoughts on that.

Also, it looks like Feedburner is having some problems this morning as it seems to have dropped the RSS subscriber numbers for me from around 350 to 180! I hope I didn’t piss off my readers to see such a drop in a single day..

We have seen plenty of coverage recently about the upcoming release of Firefox 3. A lesser known fact is that this release is accompanied by a new Firefox add-ons site and is right now available for preview here.

I for one love it’s clean look and pleasing colors. They have done some nice changes to the layout as well as usability.

Some of the changes that caught my eye:

• A prominent search box in the home page with options to look up by categories. Great for quickly finding the extension if you already knew it’s name.
• ‘Themes’ has been replaced with ‘Interface Customizations‘ in Categories. One you click on it, you can still browse themes by different categories in it.
• Featured add-ons shows number of downloads as well as number of reviews
• Extension single-page is now neatly laid out showing tags, pictures & reviews. Also, I like the way they have moved the review box to above-the-fold placing.
• Nice integration of sandboxed add-ons - show up right beside the others with a ‘Experimental‘ tag. A great way to find newer extensions that haven’t made the cut yet.

The changes are nice so far but the site is far from perfect. Of course, they warn us that it is in testing but not sure if this version will have much needed things like ability to sort by rating or number of downloads or Firefox version supported or last updated date etc after a search.

In fact, ability to be able to quickly find Firefox add-ons by the version of Firefox has to be one of the most common gripes about the Add-ons site. Overall, it is a great improvement to the current site but still a work in progress.

[via Ryan of CyberNetNews]