Firefox add-ons for Facebook

After switching to Firefox 3.5, it’s time to revise add-ons that makes your connecting with Facebook friends easier, faster and much more pleasant. Here is the list of Firefox add-ons for Facebook – Firefox 3.5 compatible only!

Facebook Toolbar is one of the most widespread Firefox add-ons for Facebook users. Still, it’s reported to not always work smoothly for Firefox 3.5.x, so maybe you’d better replace it with the following toolbar:

Friendbar – integrates both Facebook and Twitter activities. It displays a running stream of text and photo updates from Facebook and Twitter, and allows you to post updates, retweet, direct messages, and replies.

Boost for Facebook – add tons of Facebook features to Firefox – autopoke, auto-login, hundreds of skins, album options, rollover pics, etc. The best is that Boost options are selectable – you can use only what you need.

FacePAD – Facebook Photo Album Downloader.  FacePAD allows you to download your friends’ facebook albums, Events albums, and Group Albums. It takes some time to get all the features working, but it does the job.

Facebook Video lets you download or convert Facebook videos, and embed videos outside of Facebook. The download, convert video, and customize code links are added to Facebook video pages in an unobtrusive way.

Facebook User Search – the name speaks for itself.  Search for Facebook users either using their names or email address.

Facebook Web Forum – Chat on any web site you browse. This extension adds a sidebar from which you can start discussions and join top or latest discussions. It’s easy to show/hide, but one can’t adjust sidebar width.

Firefox 3.5 New Features and Useful Tips

In a year after the record braking Firefox 3.0, Mozilla releases Firefox 3.5 to make web surfing even faster and handier.

Here are the new features of FF 3.5 and tips how to use them:

Private Browsing: surf the Web without leaving a single trace. Start to browse privately by clicking  Tools > Start Private Browsing or Ctrl+Shift+P.

Forget About This Site: the option to forget about a particular web site you have visited that means all entries related to that site will be removed from your browser history. To forget a site, go to History > Show all history (or press Ctrl+Shift+H) and in the Library window right-click the site you want Firefox to forget about and select Forget About This Site.

Smooth Scrolling through Tabs: if you have a lot of tabs open, put your mouse on the row of tabs and scroll with the mouse wheel through tabs to easily find the one you need. Note that scrolling works only when you have so many tabs opened that the scrolling arrows appear on the right and on the left of tabs row.

If you have not so many tabs opened, you can try this shortcut for fast moving to the tab you need: press Ctrl + the number of tab you want to view, for example, Ctrl+2 for the second tab.

Location-Aware Browsing: Firefox 3.5 comes with a new location-aware browsing (geolocation) feature that is enabled by default. It identifies your location using your computer’s IP, Google’s random client identifier, etc. and share it with the websites that ask for location data. Don’t be scared, data isn’t shared without your permission. Any time a website asks for your location data, Firefox will show you a message so that you can choose whether you want to share or not to share geolocation data with this website. Settings you chose can be remembered for this site so that you shouldn’t click buttons every time you visit the website.

If you don’t like the idea to share your geolocation data at all, try more advanced way to solve the problem. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar, enter geo.enabled into the filter form. Double-click geo.enabled entry so that its value become “false”. Geolocation feature is now disabled for you.

Firefox add-ons for Twitter

My favorite Firefox extensions for Twitter:

TwitterFox – maybe, the most popular of Firefox plugins for Twitter. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets.

TwitterBar – allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small Twitter icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.

Twitzer -a Firefox extension which lets you post text longer than 140 characters on Twitter.com.  It also shows you the true adresses of TinyURLs so that you are sure you are clicking on safe links.

TwitThat – post current page to Twitter via twitthat.com. The simple button sits in Firefox toolbar and enables you to twit current page in one click.

Social Whale – create short URLs for use with Twitter or any other service with just one click. Additionally you can upload images using the twitpic.com service.

TwittyTunes – allows to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click. You can also post the websites you’re visiting, videos you’re watching and regular updates.

Search Cloudlet – tag clouds inserted into  Twitter home-page, search page, profile page, favorites and even into public timeline. Also, on top of traditional simple tag clouds, Cloudlet adds various context-sensitive clouds, such as Author Clouds, Recipient Clouds and Hashtag Clouds. Also works with Google and Yahoo.

Twitter sidebars for Firefox:

Twitbin – allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. Send messages, receive messages, share links, and more from Twitbin.

TwitKit – has a 6-section interface, using tabs to separate content. You can view the Twitter public timeline, your user timeline, a list of your friends and their latest tweets, a list of your followers and their latest tweets, @replies made to you, and stats about your account.

Enjoy your twits!

Coming soon: Firefox extensions for Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon etc. Stay tuned!

Firefox addons for sharing and social interaction

Social networks are on the peak of their popularity. How to make sharing in social media easier and faster? Use the best Firefox extensions for sharing and bookmarking content within social networks:

AddThis – one of the most popular sharing tools is now presented as Firefox plugin. By adding AddThis to your browser, you have all your social bookmarking and sharing tools at your fingertips. Share any page, anytime, with anyone.

Shareaholic – enables you to quickly, and very easily share, e-mail, bookmark, and blog links via a wide array of your favorite web 2.0 social networking, bookmarking, blogging, and e-mail services. Shareaholic supports over 40 services including Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Delicious, MySpace, Sphinn, etc.

Share This – makes sharing any online content quick and easy. The ShareThis plugin allows you to share text, pictures and video to any contact via email, IM, text message, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter and many more services. You can also store your shares for later or re-share them with the ShareThis ShareBox.

Social Media for Firefox – status bar that shows the number of Diggs, Reddit Votes, Stumble Thumbs and or Reviews, and Del.icio.us tags, Tweets, Sphinns, Mixx, and Tip’d votes so you can quickly see how popular certain content is. Also scans said social sites to show you what content hasn’t been submitted to other social news sites so you can be the first to add it.

Yoono – simplifies your social life on the web by centralizing all your social networks and instant messaging in one easy to use browser sidebar. Get all your friend updates automatically wherever you are on the web and update your status instantly across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. Easily share these discoveries with your friends via your social networks.

Minggl – a social interaction manager. The Minggl toolbar makes it easy to manage information, communication, and navigation across (and independent of) social networks. Minggl works with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, Digg and… more soon.

SynergyShare – allows you to share any web page with over 50 social networking sites through the right-click menu. The only shortcoming is that SynergyShare is only compatible with Firefox 1.5 – 2.0.0.

Coming soon: Firefox addons for Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc. Don’t miss the next posts!

April’s most interesting and important news

What’s new this April?

1. Winamp 5.552 was released. What’s new:

• Improved iPod Sync Support
• New iTunesLibrary Import
• New Online Services Gallery
• New OurStage Radio Online Services
• New Spinner MP3 of the Day Online Service
• New Turkish, Romanian, and Portuguese Language Packs

2. Firefox 3.0.9 and 3.0.10 stability releases were delivered to fix some security and stability issues.

3. Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is available for download and testing. New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

* Beta is now available in 70 languages .

* Private Browsing Mode.

* Better performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

* The ability to provide Location Aware Browsing using web standards for geolocation.

* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.

* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.

* Support for new web technologies such as: HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms.

4. Facebook opened up its developer API stream that gave third-party developers an opportuniny to  connect to their users’ streams and let their users read their streams wherever they want. Now with the Open Stream API developers are able to create new applications and services with new user interfaces for the stream. One of the first examples of using the Open Stream API is Xobni – an Outlook plug-in which enables you to keep track of your social network activity immediately from the mail client.

5. Gmail presented two new features in Labs: suggesting new recipients while composing messages and easy inserting images into mails.

6. Hitwise company published stunning data about Twitter growth.

Twitter’s growth in Australia was 1,067 percent since the start of this year. The number of visitors to Twitter has more than tripled in New Zealand since the beginning of the year. Twitter’s share of online visits in the United States and Britain had increased by 570 percent and 621 percent respectively since the start of the year.

Firefox bets on Yandex

Cooperation of Mozilla and Google is long and beneficial for both sides. So, why did Mozilla decide to prefer Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, as the default search engine and start page for Russian locale builds, starting with Firefox 3.1? For now, there is no official statement of Mozilla-Yandex business agreement at Mozilla official site, but we can learn details at bugzilla.mozilla.org.

What’s the reason of dropping Google, one of the major revenue sources of Mozilla?

The most obvious reason is that Yandex has the largest market share in Russia (≈45%), while Google is #2 with ≈35% (according to reports of liveinternet.ru). Nevertheless, market share is not the one and only parameter to measure the quality of search provided by search engine. Market share is a result of skilful marketing more than of quality search. There is a great resource to analyze search quality of different search engines for both Russian and English language queries – http://analyzethis.ru. Selecting Russian query language, we’ll see that Yandex leads in most parameters of quality search. For English language, Google has better results. Even without analytics, in practice we can see that while being great in Russian, Yandex gives rather poor results in English. Thus, we can assume that most of Yandex users still switch to Google to find something outside the ru domain. So, the difference in Yandex’s and Google’s popularity in Russian market is not so big to terminate a beneficial agreement with Google.

That’s why I incline toward other reason. As it’s known, Google recently changed its software pack – Google Pack and Firefox isn’t a Google Pack default browser any more. The place of Google Pack default browser was given to… let me guess… maybe, Google Chrome?! Of course. Could there be other applicants? 😉 It’s hard to estimate Mozilla’s losses resulted from this change, but it’s easy to understand the prospect and Google’s plans for future. Chrome is and will be Google’s favorite, and this is natural – Google wants to promote its own product first.

So, maybe that’s why Mozilla’s looking for new partners…