If you’re like me, absolutely obsessive-compulsive with your applications, I’m sure you haven’t left your browser alone, either. I’m sure you have your very own favorite browser, and if it supports extensions, I’m sure you’ve configured it to the max. Like I have. Hee hee.
I, for one, used to be a Firefox baby. Until Camino came along and changed the landscape of my web browsing on my Macbook forever. Camino is light years faster, and I do have a kludge to these pretty one-click buttons. They may not be as pretty, but they do do the job. :p
And while there are a plethora of them one-click buttons, bookmark links, and extensions, here are the main extensions I wouldn’t ever have wanted to live without:
- Foxmarks
- AJAX for Yahoo Mail by Viamatic
- Mail Notifiers
- Google Toolbar
- One-click buttons to all the main sites that I frequent created through Google Toolbar’s Custom Search feature.
I cannot live without Foxmarks because I sorely need bookmark portability. As I told you, I sometimes find myself holing up in an Internet cafe, using a computer that is not mine. Poor me. So when that happens, Foxmarks comes to the rescue because at least then I would be able to access my bookmarks and go to the websites I need to go to, even though I haven’t memorized the URLs. Yes, I’ve memorized a lot of URLs. :p
Foxmarks has come in handy for me for more or less five times by now, and I expect it to come through for dozens more, until someone comes up with a better system. What it does is that it stores your bookmark info on a server, and then you can access it from any other Firefox browser on which you have Foxmarks installed. You can even access it from the Foxmarks website. Truly essential for the road warrior.
The AJAX extension for Yahoo Mail, on the other hand, is absolutely essential to me because I do not like the New Yahoo Mail because of its monotonous cream color. If you’ve noticed, I absolutely adore pinks and purples and would use it with any and every application that I have, if I could. AJAX allows me to use my old Yahoo Mail format, configure it to have a Purrrrrrrrrple theme, then for the one-click scan, where you can just read your messages right on the inbox, I’ve installed the Viamatic AJAX extension. So I have the in-inbox mail reading functionality of the New Yahoo Mail, and also the purple theme of the original Yahoo Mail. So it’s absolutely the best of both worlds!
Mail notifiers also prove essential to me because I do not use the Yahoo Messenger client for my Instant Messaging needs. Though I am on Yahoo, I use Adium as my client, because I also have Google Talk and AIM contacts and I use all three accounts simultaneously on Adium. Thus, mail notification has to be done somehow else.
Another reason why I love having mail notifiers on the browser itself is that when I am working through the browser, I need not look far to see that I have mail. Absolute email convenience in its finest!
I also listed the Google toolbar as a “never-live-without” extension because I need to check the PageRank of the pages I visit sometimes, as part of my work. Not only that, I also realized the potential of the Google Toolbar only recently, when I discovered the Custom Search feature. Because of that feature, I have been able to create one-click buttons to every site I usually frequent, as I said. How to do it?
- Put your cursor on the search field of the website you’re on.
- Right click while the mouse is pointed on the search field.
- Click “Generate Custom Search.”
- Go through the next few windows: modify the title, etc.
- Click ok, then in seconds, you now have your very own kick-a$$ one-click button to everywhere!
Also, being able to search Google without actually having to go to the Google homepage shaves crucial seconds off my research time. So it’s really something I cannot live without in my line of work.
Apparently, all these are put in my browser to save me time and to lazy-fy me further. But heck, if I can go to Twitter in one click to complain about my day while waiting for Paypal to finish loading, I’m actually saving time and being more productive? Right? Right?
However, in the interest of productivity, I have had to let go of all my extensions. Because though I love Mozilla Firefox, I had discovered that it usually crashes on me. When I finally downloaded Camino, and saw how much faster and reliable it was (rare crashes), in fact, it was far more reliable than Safari and less prone to maxing out my RAM, I had to choose productivity over the pretty buttons. So while back then I had these:
I now have these:
These are shabby substitutes to my Firefox extensions, but I have to choose: productivity/reliability or fun/eye-candiness.
Well. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be”. :p