By Nick Mangiaracina, Kansas City Star Contributing Writer
With the release of Firefox 3.0 (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html) Mozilla has yet again managed to improve its browser. This time around the browser features an enlarged back arrow, a star next to the URL bar to more easily favorite Web sites, and a lot of great returning add ons . Below are some of my favorites. You can find dozens of others at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox.
Stumble Upon: If you could type random things into a search engine and come up with interesting stuff most of the time, then Stumble Upon wouldn't be necessary. However, it's not. It's often difficult to find anything good quickly on the Web. Stumble Upon lets the user chose his or her interests and then it loads pages based on those interests. It doesn't always work, but I've found that at least two-thirds of the time I find something interesting. Some of my favorite things I've founds so far include a B.S. generator, a site that contains pictures from all over the world that's sorted by country on a giant map, and a video of a cellphone put into the microwave that morphs into a monster.
You can also favorite stuff you like with one click, so you can go back to the content later if pressed for time or just too addicted to clicking the stumble button over and over again. You can also add filters so you don't have to slog through text heavy pages if what you're looking for is photos or videos. There's also a stumble through YouTube feature, so if you want to just load videos from YouTube, it will do that for you.
Pic Lens: Ever tire of endlessly scrolling down a bright white page in search of video or pictures? Fear no more, Pic Lens seeks to revolutionize the way people interact with images and video online. The add on translates often poorly designed pages into a simple movie-like screen, where you can scroll horizontally across the page like on a time line or on a film strip.
The all black background is less grating on the eyes and adds contrast to the images or videos. Unfortunately this add on doesn't work on all sites, but all the major video and photo sites like YouTube and Photo Bucket support it. Expect to see more sites enable it as time goes on though.
Foxy Tunes: Deriving its name from the classic Hendrix song, this extension enables you to control most major media players while you browse the Web. It does so by adding a little bar at the bottom of the Firefox window. You can adjust the volume from there as well as skip to the next song or return to the previous song. You can also search the Internet for more information about the song, artist, or album playing. Some media players supported include iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player, Music Match Jukebox, and VLC player. It also has a “generic player” option, which I haven't used yet, but I assume this allows you to use another player not specifically listed.
Temporary Inbox: This is a great extension to experiment with. What it does is create a temporary vailid e-mail that you can check. You can use this for checking out e-mail sent to you without risking downloading spam or possibly a virus. Or, you can use it for “free offers” online or registration forms that require an e-mail address. This way you don't have to worry about receiving offers you have no interest in. You'll never have to worry about giving your e-mail out online ever again, because you won't have to use your actual e-mail address or go through the pain of registering for a free e-mail account elsewhere because you're weary about giving your real e-mail to someone you don't know or don't trust.
Ad Block Plus: As the name suggests this is an ad blocker. The add on, or in this case the “ad off,” which takes the form of a giant stop sign, allows you to customize what images are viewable on a web page. Thus, if you frequently go to sites with lots of ads on them, you can block all of them or just some of them if you want. Take that advertisers! But shhhh! Don't tell them about it.
Down Them All: This is almost the opposite of Ad Block. This allows you to download a plethora of content from a site all at once and lets you choose what content that is. Not only can you choose to download all files, but you can also download only all video, images, audio, archives, or executable files. You can also download any combination of these file types, so if you wanted to download only all video and all pictures you could do that. Also, if you really wanted to get picky, you could individually select what files you wanted to download.
