FocusMinded.com

Many of you know by now that I use Firefox for about 95% of my browsing, with the other 5% to check my designs for compatibility. I was thinking the other day, am I really using it to its fullest potential. Realizing the obvious answer to that was NO, I decided to take a more thorough look into the world of Firefox Extensions and I thought I would pass on some ways to help you make the most of your browser (assuming it is Firefox).

I first took note (mentally, but you could write them down) of all the programs I use that access the web. Here is a few I came up with:

1. FTP (FileZilla)
2. CSS Editor (Top Style)
3. RSS Aggregator (Sharp Reader)
4. E-Mail (Microsoft Outlook)
5. Print Screen (PrintKey) - I use for image measurements.

Those are just a few I use the most, your list is likely to be longer and mine will likely grow as soon as I publish this article. With my list in hand (or mind) I started sifting through the inordant amounts of extensions to see what ones I could replace those programs with. Not to my suprise I found one for all of them. So in the same order here are those extensions, and a few thoughts about them.

1. FireFTP - very clean, very fast, and a solid replacement of my current ftp program.
2. Web Developer Toolbar (Edit CSS feature) - can’t say enough about this for all my css editing, although I will still use Top Style at least for a while for my initial styling, I can easily see this edit CSS feature taking my full attention as I too learn all the styling options (or use my CSS Cheat Sheat).
3. Sage - This extension is now my sole RSS aggregator, I love it. From its fancy display to its simplicity. The best: its ability to search the site you are on currently for any RSS feeds it gives, the worst: you have to manually hit the refresh, to search for new feeds (but its worth it)
4. Thunderbird - although I have not actually tried this one out yet, I have researched it briefly and it appears that it is likely to be a fair replacement of Outlook. It isn’t really an extension, but another mozilla product. If you use it, please comment on it so we can all get an idea of its functionality in comparison to Outlook.
5. MeasureIt - a quick on the fly way of measuring anything on the page you see. It ‘freezes’ the screen and allows you to draw a rectangle around anything while telling you the dimensions. Once you have finished you can even drag that sized rectangle anywhere on the screen. Quite a handy tool for on the fly measuring. It hasn’t replaced my print screen, but it has made it a whole lot easier to measure.

These are just a few I use now practically everyday and I hope you can benefit from them. Everyone is different so you may not like the RSS aggregator I have selected and that is ok, it’s the beauty of custom extensions - - just pick the one you like! If there are any extensions you use and think I should try out, by all means post them for me and I will definately give them a shot.

Till Then…

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