What new Firefox extensions would you like to see?
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October 18th, 2004 at 6:02 pm
RichCorb said:
> I’d like to see an extension created that’d be like an Instant Messaging client built into Firefox (using XUL).
Here are a couple:
Jabberzilla is a Jabber (jabber.org) client. It’s not done yet, and it looks a little messy, but it’s the most developed IM extension so far: http://jabberzilla.jabberstudio.org/
Msnmsgr does MSN Messenger, though it might have stopped working when Microsoft started blocking third-party clients: http://msnmsgr.mozdev.org/
Sean said:
> I’d like an extension to add a search button to the toolbar that’s independent of the search bar and that opens a search engine in the sidebar (sort of like the old Netscape sidebar search).
The Searchsidebar project has this: http://searchsidebar.mozdev.org/
cppjavaperl said:
> I would like to have the ability to rearrange the order of my tabs (perhaps drag the tab itself–the same way you can move the columns in Mozilla Mail’s message pane).
miniT(drag+indicator) lets you rearrange tabs. It also gives you a little arrow to tell you where the tab is going to be moved to: http://v2studio.com/k/moz/
Duplicate Tab lets you open a page in a new tab or window, and it stays at the same part of the page you were looking at: http://twanno.mozdev.org/duplicatetab.html
woo said:
> svg
You’ll need to download special, unofficial builds with SVG support:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/contrib/latest-0.9/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/contrib/latest-trunk/
(choose the file for your platform with “SVG” in the filename)
Gizmo said:
> A “Méta-extension” : an extension which install with only one click some others extensions.
If you select the Custom install option when you install Firefox, there’s a (currently disabled but selected) option to install Developer Tools. In the future, there will probably be other “Extension Packs” to choose from.
Daniel Glazman said:
> 1. an extension allowing to hide/show portions of a web page on a per-click basis.
Hmm, interesting. Maybe it could rely on the DOM Inspector to delete nodes.
Tom Williams said:
> ability to set a periodic refresh for the selected url.
Reload Every lets you do that: http://reloadevery.mozdev.org/
David Latapie said:
> An anchor detection plug-in.
This can be handled with Jesse Ruderman’s Named Anchors bookmarklet: http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html#named_anchors
Drag that to your bookmarks list, and click on it when you come across a page like the one you described.
Nelson Yee said:
> I had this idea for an extension that I’ve always wanted, a Translator extension for firefox, so that it would be able to read user dictionaries for any language, and if the current encoding of the page matched a language, it would switch to that dictionary.
It’s not quite as compact as what you’re describing, but Translation Panel is a sidebar that will do some of that for you: http://nazodane.hp.infoseek.co.jp/extension/translation.xhtml
It doesn’t automatically switch languages, but that’s a great idea. Mozilla can already determine the page’s language based on the HTML lang attribute, but not based on the encoding.
Fabiano G. Souza said:
> A extension to do bookmark Syncronization.
Bookmarks Synchronizer does this. It lets you upload your bookmarks file to an FTP site: http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=14&vid=946
Be careful with this one. It caused Firefox to crash whenever I started Firefox, but that’s probably because I’ve been using the same profile for a long time.
Bjorn said:
> Bookmark hotkeys. Each bookmark could have its own custom hotkey combo.
Sounds like bookmark keywords to me, except that you can’t have modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Win) with those.
Nelson Yee added:
> I’d like the ability to save the currently open tabs, so that they’re automatically reloaded on a restart.
1.) Open up the tabs you want.
2.) Go to Tools | Options…
3.) Under the General category, under Home Page, click Use Current Pages.
Adam said:
> 1. Automatically saving a page using its title, rather than the filename.
Firefox has always done that. Or am I misunderstanding your question?
Wow. That was a long comment…
October 18th, 2004 at 6:37 pm
A typing-tutor. No need to be full-featured, but I want to use different Chinese IMEs when I use this program. Gecko is preferred because of Unicode support.
October 18th, 2004 at 6:50 pm
How about a “Push That Freakin Button” extension? You know how some websites force you to push the same button whenever you visit them? e.g. Yahoo’s login button, or your library’s Start Session button? Well with this extension you would right-click any such button and select “Push That Freakin Button!”.
(There is a great freeware product for Windows by the same name that does this, but for dialog boxes).
October 18th, 2004 at 7:40 pm
Something like in Opera – ability to display turned off images WITHOUT whole page downloading! And, possibly, ability to download only image which I’ll choose.
This extension should show images already available in cache.
October 18th, 2004 at 8:55 pm
I’d like a userContent.js to go along with my userContent.css, so I can run javascript automatically on any given website.
October 18th, 2004 at 11:54 pm
[Pardon me if this shows up twice, I wasn’t sure the first posting attempt made it. All I saw were what appeared to be headers.]
Something to turn off location bar autocomplete.
I want to keep my history and completely disable the function that expands URLs as I type them by bringing up old URLs from my history or URLs I’ve typed before (Mozilla suite calls this function “Location bar autocomplete” in the preferences).
I can do this very easily in Mozilla suite with a preference toggle, but Firefox has no preference to disable this.
October 19th, 2004 at 12:09 am
I’d like an extension that when you click a “keyword” bookmark (whether in the toolbar, menu or sidebar) it launched a textbox asking what term I’d like to search. That way I could use keyword searches without having to remember all the keywords. Don’t know much coding (let alone XUL) so I can’t really do it myself.
October 19th, 2004 at 2:26 am
>Daniel Glazman said:
>> 1. an extension allowing to hide/show portions of a web page on a per-click basis.
>Hmm, interesting. Maybe it could rely on the DOM Inspector to delete nodes.
Surely that’s the Nuke Anything extension? http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/
I’m amazed at how many requests here have been for things which already exist.
The one I’d like to see is Glazman’s proposed page->image extension. One click and bam! there’s a JPG or PNG version of the full page saved to disk. So useful, especially for doing web design and layout.
October 19th, 2004 at 4:34 am
Some more ideas
1) Ability to turn images on/off without reloading the page. So I can have them off by default, but click on placeholders if i want the image to appear.
2) a % zoom feature like opera (i think) where the whole page is resized, including images, fonts, etc.
3) Session saving that WORKS (I’m aware there’s already a session saver extension, but it only seems to work occasionally. I use ‘save session copy on shutdown’ so when i restart firefox i can manually choose to restore my last session if i so desire – this does not work very well with the current extension).
4) An extension that will help me get chicks. I told this one woman at a bar that I was using the latest nightly build of firefox and she just looked at me with a blank expression. not what i was hoping for.
October 19th, 2004 at 6:54 am
I would like to see an integration between Firefox and Thunderbird. Here is the project someone has worked on before.
http://xulwebmail.mozdev.org/
If anyone can revive this and implement, that would be super!
Hem Ramachandran
October 19th, 2004 at 7:38 am
Phil Wilson wrote:
> Surely that’s the Nuke Anything extension?
> http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/
A great extension, but i need the extension to be able to delete a portion of a webpage for good (so it doesn’t appear again on reload). Sort of like adblock, but not only for ads (images/flash etc.), but for every possible object on a webpage….
Then you can customize any webpage on the web to your own liking….
October 19th, 2004 at 7:43 am
1. “Add Multiple Bookmarks”
Select the links on a web site and add them all at the same time as bookmarks. Or maybe show the “Add Bookmark” dialog for each link one after another.
2. “Shortcuts”
Assign Keys like Ctrl + Key to menu items or buttons.
I know, there already exists sth. like this:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/keyconfig
But the author seems to have forgotten it.
And there’s even not a homepage.
October 19th, 2004 at 8:42 am
an extension that will put the extension menu back into Tools > Options..
October 19th, 2004 at 8:48 am
Thanks, Minh, I’ll look at that Translator extension you mentioned.
Regarding your suggestion about using “Current Pages”, that’s not really the solution I’m looking for, because I’d have to set it each time I wanted to save the tabs state. It’s close, though, so I guess as a hack someone could just have something that set that attribute prior to the browser closing. It’d probably be nicer to do it as a non-hack, though.
October 19th, 2004 at 8:56 am
Took a look at the Translator thing, and from the looks of it, it’s not at all like what I’m describing. I probably should not have used the word “Translator” as much as “quick Dictionary lookup by mouseover or highlight”, since I don’t want the page to actually be fed through a translator and a bad translation to be made, but rather, someone with rudimentary ability in a language to have their language ability assisted. I know enough Chinese to generally understand the structure of most sentences, but have a very small vocabulary, which is where this would come in real handy. I can see the same for other people reading languages which they’re somewhat familiar with, but not really fluent in (the way I can also guess at German because it has a fairly English sentence structure, but I sometimes run into words that are not analogous to English).
Anyhow, if any really proficient developers want to discuss this with me, shoot me an email.
October 19th, 2004 at 10:52 am
One of the very few things I still like about IE is that I can right-click on any page and chose the “Create Shortcut” to have it place a Shortcut.url file on my Desktop. Would it be at all possible for an extension to do this?
October 19th, 2004 at 11:24 am
Make an extension that would allow Firefox to work in Coral mode, that is that it would use the NYUD system to surf to relieve load on servers.
For more information about this new system: http://www.nyud.org/coral/
This thing ought to be of great use on sites like Slashdot, so servers can be accessed even when handling high loads.
I imagine that the extension could simply make an extra context menu on links such as “Open link through Coral”.
October 19th, 2004 at 3:09 pm
I’d like to get rid of the separate search bar, and just have the address bar default to Google …. like Mozilla does.
October 19th, 2004 at 4:09 pm
> I’d like to get rid of the separate search bar, and just have the address bar default to Google …. like Mozilla does.
You can do that by going to about:config, changing keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=, and restarting Firefox. See http://www.squarefree.com/archives/000570.html.
October 19th, 2004 at 10:48 pm
An extension to anonymize the Google cookie ;)
Something to allow Firefox’s cache to be indexed by Google Desktop Search. There’s already an extension which’ll do that here: http://www.kenschutte.com/firefoxext/ , but at the ‘expense’ of a full duplicate of the cache. How about something which writes an indexable copy to disk long enough for GDS to index it (or until GDS is ‘seen’ to index it), then mops up afterward by deleting the copies.
Or something that fiddles with the cache format so that GDS recognises that it could index it, if only it would try.
> Posted by: Minh Nguyen
>>David Latapie said:
>>> An anchor detection plug-in.
> This can be handled with Jesse Ruderman’s Named Anchors bookmarklet:
> http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html#named_anchors
> Drag that to your bookmarks list, and click on it when you come across a page like the one you described.
There’s also an extension :-
http://jpeters.no-ip.com/extensions/?page=fx_na
“Named Anchors
This extension adds a new tab to Page Info with information about the named anchors in the current document.
Drag & Drop the address of a named anchor to the browser to open the page at the specified “
Jesse, I hope you’ll think about converting the good ideas to (Opera-compatible) Bookmarklets too, if possible …
October 20th, 2004 at 3:29 am
Some ideas:
1. a byte counter: counts how many bytes I’ve download in a page/for session/for today
2. speed meter: like “netpersec” show current bandwidth, average and max kbps sent and received
3. a font rendering – more accurate and customizable than MS cooltype – like acrobat reader does
4. like Opera, a button for switch/disable style sheet (already in webdeveloper)
5. like Opera, a button for view only cached images (useful for gprs connection)
October 20th, 2004 at 11:14 am
1. Extension to open external links (e.g. links from a Thunderbird email) in an existing empty tab (i.e. the Untitled-tab) if it exists and there is no other tabs in that Firefox window. Else, open in new tab.
2. Page count. Display a X/Y page count in the status bar so that you know how many pages there are for that web-page. It’s like the dynamic size of the scrollbar, except that it’s more concrete with numbers.
October 20th, 2004 at 3:28 pm
I’d love to see a “stealth” extension, where when you click it, all of your private data (cookies, browser cache, etc) gets inaccessible and invisible, only to be restored when you leave stealth mode. I believe Safari has this?
–Christian
October 21st, 2004 at 6:48 am
Show external (not loop back) IP in status bar.
Ideal
– Small IP icon that expands to IP and vice versa upon click.
– Context menu that includes copy IP.
– Automatic refresh upon reconnect.
October 21st, 2004 at 7:53 pm
I would like to block access to window.open for everything except my own bookmarklets.
October 21st, 2004 at 11:46 pm
>I would love to see an extension which handles IE’s >*.mht (Web Archive format) . If that is not >possible how about a similar format for FF.
MAF 0.4.2
http://maf.mozdev.org/installation.html
This has both *.mht support and a similar format for FF called *.maf that can save all tabs as well into a single archive.
October 21st, 2004 at 11:48 pm
>I would love to see an extension which handles IE’s
>*.mht (Web Archive format) . If that is not
>possible how about a similar format for FF.
Meant to be.
October 22nd, 2004 at 11:41 am
I would like an extensión that allows programming new extensions… in python :-)
October 22nd, 2004 at 6:11 pm
cyfer on the network structure:
If you can find a Mac (OS X) take a look at MacWarrior’s Trailblazer. Impressive.
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/projects/trailblazer/
October 22nd, 2004 at 6:12 pm
They also have a video
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/projects/trailblazer/TrailBlazer.mov
October 24th, 2004 at 6:26 am
i would love to see a custom style sheet extention i know theres one that lets you do it by putting css in your usercontent.css but i want one that i can click on veiw then change style sheet and it asks me where the style sheet is that i want to load