New Firefox Addons
HyperWord
With an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars, 749,154 downloads (as of March 2, 2009) and 11,771 weekly downloads, Hyperwords is very popular. The Mozilla download page is here. The author's page is here. Hyperwords is one of the more complicated add-ons and somewhat hard to explain. Essentially, it makes it easier to explore information found on the web by highlighting and searching, or looking it up, or shopping for it or more.
Two examples:
When reading an article about cell phone location technology, I found a picture of a guy referenced in the article.
Or, when reading a review of the Acer Aspire One, I checked prices:
The program is very configurable, so you can choose which of the possible 30 or so reference sources will appear when you click on a word and select reference. The best way to get a feel for it is to watch their demo. I've been using it for a couple of months and like it a lot. Clearly it is a program that you can deeply explore, or simply utilize a few features.
Tiny Menu
I got Tiny Menu for my netbook, but I use it with my normal computer as well. I see no need to waste perfectly good real estate on menu options, so the whole File⁄Edit⁄View etc. menu is compressed into a single menu as shown here:
After installing Tiny Menu, right click on the toolbar and select Customize. Then drag all the items up to the menu bar until the Navigation bar is empty. Then uncheck the navigation bar from the view menu. Voila, space has expanded. This and small Icons is particularly useful with small screens, but why waste space in any case?
Dated: March 2009