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?

I come across friends & family who are forking out big bucks for everyday software like anti-virus, Office, spyware, photo editing, etc. They do so, not because they like to spend the money but because they have no idea that there are excellent, free, open source alternatives available. Today. Right now.

I have nothing against paying for excellent software or services that provide value. But, if there is a quality free alternative for your everyday needs why not save that money you would have spent for a better product/equipment that you wouldn’t have been able to afford before?

In fact, one of the most popular (all time number 3 .. if you looked at the footer) posts here has been about Free Software for your Computer. I should update that post soon with my new finds.

I recently wrote in a guest post at Techie-Buzz about a very cool project called WinLibre. WinLibre was a project where they put together some of the best in breed open source software available for free into one downloadable package.

A reader (thanks MechMike) quickly pointed out that WinLibre hasn’t been updated in a while and told me about the OpenDisk project. Here is an excerpt from their About page which summarizes this cool project!

OpenDisc is a high quality collection of open source software (OSS) for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The two main goals of the project are:

• To provide a free alternative to costly software, with equal or often better quality equivalents to proprietary, shareware or freeware software for Microsoft Windows.
• To educate users of Linux as an operating system for home, business and educational use.

OpenDisc project gathers some of the best free & open source software out there into one easily downloadable CD image. They also list the programs in the cd image with description and link to the individual software home page if you’d like to get them A la carte.

Here are the list of programs that are included in the OpenDesc project categorized by its function:

Design

• Blender - a 3D graphics modeling program
• Dia - a Visio like drawing program
• The Gimp - Adobe Photoshop alternative
• InkScape - Adobe Illustrator alternative
• Nvu - WYSIWIG Web page editor
• Srcibus - A professional desktop publishing program
• Tux Paint - Free drawing program for young children

Games

• The Battle of Wesnoth - Turn-based strategy game
• Enigma - A puzzle game
• Neverball - A fun game where you tilt the floor to get the ball in a puzzle
• Sokoban YASC - Yet Another Sokoban Clone

Internet

• Azureus - A cool bit-torrent client
• Filezilla - FTP client
• Firefox - An excellent Internet Explorer alternative
• Httrack - Offline web browser utility
• Pidgin - Multi-protocol IM client
• RSSOWL - A Feed reader client
• Seamonkey - Web browser, IRC client, newsgroup client and HTML editor in one
• Thunderbird - A modern email client
• TightVNC - A remote control software
• WinSCP - Full featured SFTP client

Multimedia

• Audacity - Sound editing program
• Celestia - Simulation of entire universe
• Really Slick Screensavers - Collection of some cool screensavers
• Stellarium - Planetarium in your computer
• Sumatra PDF - Lightweight alternative for Adobe Reader
• VLC Player - Media player supporting numerous audio & video formats

Productivity

• GnuCash - QuickBooks alternative
• MoinMoin Wiki Engine - A wiki building software
• NotePad2 - Windows Notepad alternative - with syntax highlighting and other features
• OpenOffice - Full featured alternative for Microsoft Office
• PDFCreator - Generate PDF documents from any Windows program with the Print button

Utilities

• 7-zip - Packing & unpacking archives tool with support for a lot of formats
• Abakt - A backup tool
• ClamWin - Powerful anti-virus program (misses an on-access scanner - so it can’t replace a full time scanner yet)
• GTK+ - Toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces
• HealthMonitor - System monitoring tool
• TrueCrypt - Powerful encryption software to protect your private data
• WorkRave - Protect yourself from Repetitive Strain Injury

Whew.. isn’t that an excellent collection of free software? There are a few in here like InkScape & WorkRave I haven’t tried yet.

Download OpenDisc iso image | bit-torrent

OpenDisc uses a K-Meleon interface in the cd image so far and is experimenting with a Kiwix interface that’s supposed to be leaner and better for the next release.

Also, OpenDisc has a pretty active forum if you have questions about any of these or if you’d like to see something included to this list. I have downloaded OpenDisc and I am going to make copies and give it to friends who have an open mind about trying new things. I am sure some of them are going to chase me away but hey it’s worth a try, isn’t it?

If you feel like I am preaching to the choir, I would love to hear about a (more the merrier) open source software that’s not on this list but that you feel should be.

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.

It’s no secret GTalk client is for Windows only. Linux and Mac users have so far sought out other IM alternatives thanks to GTalk using Jabber protocol for their IM client. I use openSuSE 10.3 as my primary desktop and have had trouble getting some of the excellent IM clients like Pidgin to work behind a proxy.

Thanks to GChat in Gmail, I have been able to use IM even if it has to be within Gmail. I even used a Greasemonkey script for Gmail 2.0 to alert me with the tab flashing when there is a new IM. However, I did find this a little annoying to keep going back to Gmail to check on IM messages. Because, everytime I go into Gmail to see IM messages, I would also end up checking my Inbox and before I know 20-30 minutes would have vanished. This kind of goes against my goal of trying to increase productivity with all these web apps and hacks.

So, I started to run Google Talk gadget in my browser sidebar with a browser bookmarklet. This freed me up from using GChat in Gmail to GTalk in my browser sidebar.

You’d think I’d be content at this point. Not.

Run Google Talk (GTalk) gadget with Mozilla Prism

Mozilla Prism released their 0.9 version last week and I am smitten by the usefulness of it. If you haven’t heard of it, check out my Mozilla Prism review. In that post, I also show how you can run it from behind a proxy at work or school. Since it’s a beta version and a work in progress, they don’t have a straightforward setting for proxy in it’s options yet.

If you don’t want to click over, Prism is a prototype from Mozilla Labs which lets you split your web applications from the web and run it in your desktop as a standalone application. They even allow separate profiles for each Prism app which means you can have multiple Gmail accounts open in different Prism web apps in your desktop.

I have taken this idea and created a Prism web app for the Google Talk gadget and now I have a GTalk client like app running standalone in my desktop!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Install Mozilla Prism - Windows, Mac & Linux installers (v0.9 at the time of writing)
2. Create a new web app with url https://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client
3. Give it a name and choose to save it on desktop
4. You are done!

If you are a Mac or a Linux user, you can now run GTalk standalone in your computer with Mozilla Prism. If you are already using Firefox 3, with this Prism Firefox extension you can just open this url (or any other web app) in Firefox 3 and then directly create a desktop application for GTalk right from your browser.

I see that Prism has an option to install extensions. It doesn’t look like it’ll accept Firefox extensions as it complains that they are not compatible. I even tried turning off compatibility checking but didn’t have much success. I would love to hear if someone has succeeded installing extensions with Prism as that would open up a whole new world of options to these Prism web apps. I am sure it will be obvious in the coming releases. But, I want to make it work today!

GTalk makes it the fourth web app I run in my Linux desktop with Prism after Gmail, Google Reader and Remember the Milk.

What other web application do you see yourself running on your desktop with Mozilla Prism?

Firefox 3 beta 4 was released recently and some of you voiced that you’d rather wait until Firefox 3 was released as a stable version. I am going to tempt you again to try it.

There is a portable version of Firefox 3 Beta 4 now available for download that you can try risk-free along with your Firefox 2 install. However, see here if you’d like to install Firefox 3 simultaneously with Firefox 2.

I love portable applications that I can carry around in my usb drive and this is my latest addition to my favorite portable apps.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 4 Portable

[via Lifehacker]