roachfiend.com

I’m a poet and I kind of know it. RetailMeNot, brought to you by the perspicacious minds of BugMeNot, is both a service and a Firefox extension. The extension is new and will be the main focus of this mini-review. It sits invisibly behind Firefox’s exterior, waiting to pounce on any web site that will try and make a buck off of you. As soon as it detects a web site that has possible coupon codes, it lets you know:

A slider bar indicates that there are coupon treasures that await you. If you’re not interested, you can close the bar or simply ignore it. Once you surf away, the bar discretely closes.

I have used the web site for quite a while now, usually as a last check for saving me a little bit of cash. The extension is great because if you forget to check online, it’s no big deal- it will let you know from the get-go if there’s deals to be sliced and diced.

It’s an unobtrusive little gem of an extension that I recommend. Go check it out for yourself.

RetailMeNot Firefox extension

IE Tab has saved me from ever using Internet Explorer on its own again. Now, don’t assume that I’m a rabid anti-Microsoft hater / sheep-like Mozilla fanboy, although you’d have good reason to assume so. After all, this site is about Firefox extensions, something you can’t really mirror with Internet Explorer. My only beef with the big blue E is that there are a lot of web sites out there that force you to use it. I like having one browsing program open, and I don’t really want to have to switch back and forth. That’s just a pain in the ass.

So, IE Tab saves me the trouble of opening multiple applications for one purpose, which is grand. Here’s a sample screenshot:

The icon in the tab lets you know that the Internet Explorer engine is being used on that page. Nice, simple, effective notifications- that’s what makes a great extension great. It doesn’t pop up in your face, yet it lets you know exactly what’s going on.

I first used an extension that would simply open up the current web page in an Internet Explorer window. It was basic, but it got the job done. IE Tab has taken it a step further, and actually embeds IE right in a Firefox tab. The best part is that it is customizable with a whitelist- so every time I go to my school’s web page, which refuses to function in any other browser besides Internet Explorer, it opens without a hitch, showing that little comforting blue E in the lower right of my screen.

It’s a crying shame that this extension should even be necessary, but for some reason, schools, government agencies and banking institutions love to hire designers that are totally clueless about browser behavior, or that there’s even an alternative to Internet Explorer. Until that day comes when all pages are deisgned using strict compliant code, IE Tab can make it a more tolerable experience.

IE Tab

Download Statusbar is another of my really-can’t-live-without-it extensions that immediately goes on to any new install of Firefox. The default settings that Firefox comes with is simply not even in the same league.

Without changing any default settings, any file you download is retrieved in the background, straight to your desktop. You can of course change the options in the settings to prompt you for a different location, or to ask you every time, which is nice. The alert slider is a nice visual clue that your file has arrived, but there’s nothing really useful about it as far as functionality goes. It would be intuitive for me to click the alert, which could either activate the file or bring up the folder it was downloaded to, but it does nothing. You need to bring up Windows explorer, or show the desktop in order to find it.

Download Statusbar, on the other hand, will let you open the file after a successful download, pause it or cancel it, all while letting you see the speed of the transfer, the estimated time of finishing, a progress meter, and a few other tidbits of information.

Let’s take a look at it:

It’s simplicity at it’s finest, while having any information you could possible want while in the process of retrieving a file. Everything is customizable- the information, the colors, the placement, buttons, etc. Devon Jensen has done a wonderful job with this, and I encourage anyone out there who assumes the standard Firefox behavior is fine to really try this out.

Download Statusbar

SuperDragAndGo has the dubious honor of being the first Firefox extension that I will throw out Mad Props and Unrequited Love to in this new series of blog posts. I’d like to write about every extension that I think is extremely useful, and this one is on the top of my list. I expect Firefox to use this behavior by default, so any time I have a new installation of Firefox, this is one of the first (if not the first) extension I install.

So what is it? Basically, it allows you to select text, link, or image on a page, and “throw it” any where on your screen, and a new tab will open in the foreground (or background, if you want to try out the experimental build, which works flawlessly for me). If you select text, you can do a Google search. If you select an image, you can download it. The options menu lets you customize its functions:

Works in current versions of Firefox. Check it out, I think you’ll find it pretty damned handy.

SuperDragAndGo installation page