Rad-Ons!

In a previous post, I covered some of my favorite tab-related Firefox add-ons. Here are some miscellaneous add-ons that make searching easier and more enjoyable.

Add to Search Bar -- One of my all-time favorites, this add-on quickly places any search box on the list of the search engines available in the search bar on the navigation toolbar. Simply right click in a search bar (say finance.yahoo.com/search or the bizjournals.com archives). This add-on can be a little persnickety, but it has worked well for the majority of engines I've added.

Resurrect Pages -- Nothing is more frustrated than a "page not found" (aka 404) error. Maybe you even saw a bit of promising text offered up in search results, but now, nothing! What's a researcher to do? Breathe new life into dead pages using this add-on, which retrieves cached versions of the pages from a few different cache sites, including the WayBack machine at archive.org.

IE Tab -- Why the heck does anyone still make websites that don't play well with Firefox? IE Tab can't answer that question, but it will help you work around this inconvenience by creating an Internet Explorer environment within a Firefox tab. Now you don't have to launch IE and toggle back and forth between browsers, just because one key site can't handle Firefox.

Extended Copy Menu -- If you do lots of cutting and pasting between websites and other programs, download this add-on today. Extended Copy lets you copy in plain text or html. Plain text copying lets you skip reformatting the text once you get to your destination document.

Morning Coffee -- This is a cute little add-on that places a coffee cup on your navigation toolbar. When you click the cup, your daily selection (adjustable by day of the week) of websites pops up. This is really handy, not only for the sites you open every single morning, but also for remembering sites that are published on a weekly basis.

p.s. Last night I had a dream that someone was telling me how totally cool Google Chrome is. So, I suppose I'll need to take it for a test drive.