Firefox Extensions: Picks of the Week 2007-11-29

Firefox 3 Beta 1 has been released but a lot of the extension developers haven’t caught up with updates yet. Maybe the next time I do the picks, we’ll have more extensions compatible with Firefox 3 and I’ll start mentioning that as well. A word of caution before you try Firefox 3 beta 1: remember to backup your Firefox 2 profile or create a new profile for Firefox 3.

Or you could be like me and keep your Firefox 2 profile intact and run Firefox 3 beta 1 simultaneouly along with Firefox 2. Interested? You might like to read How to Run Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Simultaneously.

For now, here are my picks for this week..

• Next Please – A lot of websites or online magazines or even blogs have paged content. You have to browse through next, previous or numbered pages to read the whole content. Next Please extension makes reading these pages a little easier by adding a toolbar with buttons to navigate these pages in the website. I recommend getting rid of the toolbar and moving the buttons to your existing toolbar if you use this to save space. [via gHacks]
• OpenBook – By default, Firefox Bookmark window does not open the folders section to select where you want to store the bookmark. OpenBook extension lets you do this plus a lot of other options. You can choose to show Keyword, URL or description textbox, have it remember the last used folder or set to a default folder for all new bookmarks.
• Text Link – Often times websites don’t link to a website but simply provide the url as in ‘www.fark.com’. You would have to copy and paste the text to visit this site. With Text Link extension, it automatically adds a link to such text but you have to double-click on those links to visit the site. Isn’t that truly convenient?
• Multiple Tab Handler – This extension does one thing and does it well. It helps you close multiple tabs at once by selecting tabs with ‘Ctrl’ key and closing them all at once. I would love to see this in my favorite tab extension – Tab Mix Plus. [via TechieBuzz]
• FireShot –  Fireshot is a recent find for me. It is kind of like the ScreenGrab! extension where it lets you take screenshots of the visible portion of your browser or the whole page. Plus, it has some advanced options where in you can edit the screenshot, annotate, draw shapes, add pointers, captions, etc before saving! It adds a button to your toolbar and provides easy access to it.
  It doesn’t offer a selection tool but you can crop the image after you have taken a screenshot. I would use Fireshot for advanced capture and editing needs but ScreenGrab! would suffice for simple screenshots.

If you are new here and love Firefox add-ons, you could be spending hours here digging through my various posts in the Firefox extension series listed below. Fear not, I just don’t link to extensions but I actually try them before I recommend them to my readers.

Again, make sure you go through and uninstall extensions you don’t use anymore to keep your Firefox zipping along.

I would like to hear if you have started using Firefox 3 beta 1 release. This would help me to decide if I should start focusing on extensions compatible with Firefox 3 or atleast make a mention so it will help you.