Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for December 15, 2006

Friday, December 15, 2006 4:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Fireday | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

This week: Netscape's Digg Tracker and easyGestures.

Ok, everyone, DCS Media will be going through some changes in the next two weeks (the anniversary is coming up, dontcha know) and since the holidays slow down to a crawl (sometimes), I wanted to let everyone know that this will be the last Fireday for 2006. But it will continue strong in 2007.

Anyways, on to the extensions...

Netscape's Digg Tracker

Rating: 3/5

The time has come. You know Digg.com has made it to the big time when other companies are writing extensions to assist Digg.

The Digg Tracker extension is used for tracking the news that your friends are "digging", submitting, and/or commenting on. Now, I understand everyone is into Digg.com, but is it feasible for an external company, especially competing with Digg to write an extension to help them? Hmmm...makes you wonder.

The extension doesn't provide enough functionality that Digg.com doesn't provide on their web site. The only thing you gain is a convenience of a sidebar. When installed, the first intro dialog box is displayed (shown below).

If you need preferences adjusted, you have that option as well on the Intro screen.

When Firefox returns, the Digg icon is displayed to the left of the address toolbar. When you receive news about your friends digging fresh news, it notifies you immediately by holding up the shovel. If there isn't enough news, it keeps its hands down.

If you click on the icon, this enables the sidebar and displays the top 5 news items your friends have "dugg", submitted, or commented on.

The only thing I would see this extension good for is the notification of fresh news through the icon at the top. The Digg Tracker extension is great for those who are die-hard Digg fans and constantly want to be updated with the freshest news and trend-setting friends, but why Netscape made it is beyond me. :-)

easyGestures

Rating: 5/5

I used an extension of mouse gestures, but didn't look like easyGestures. This is my first time revisiting mouse gestures with easyGestures.

easyGestures allows you to immediately navigate between web pages quickly and efficiently. As soon as it's installed and Firefox is restarted, you'll notice another icon at the bottom (a curly blue arrow). That icon is the easyGestures toggle to turn it on or off. If its blue, you're switched on. Yeah, baby! (Sorry, Austin Powers humor).

To activate easyGestures, the default action is a middle-click of the mouse button, but you can configure the behavior of how you want easyGestures activated (more on this later).

The "pie menu" pops up and gives you a logical separation of how to move through web pages using just this pie chart. For example, if you middle-click and move to the left, it means that you move back a page. Move the mouse to the right and you move forward a page. Very intuitive.

Now, the customization. I have never seen an extension provide as much customization as I've seen provided with this extension. If you want to change the looks of the pie menu itself, you can change it into a navigation bar instead. If you want to use the right mouse button while holding down the shift key to activate the pie menu, go ahead. The amount of customization is overwhelming at first, but provides a solid level to appease even the pickiest power-user.

Another feature I like is the way easyGestures has integrated a location bar directly onto the pie menu. Type in what you want and your there.

easyGestures includes statistics as well to find out if you've been clicking backward or forward too much. :-)

Overall, I like the way easyGestures provides an over-abundant feature set with a ton of customization, but keeps it simple enough to turn off with the click of a button on the status bar. This may even provoke me to turn off everything except my Bookmarks toolbar when surfing since this covers just about everything included in toolbars.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

If anyone has questions, please post them below or Contact me directly.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Fireday, Fireday, Firefox, Firefox extensions, Firefox extension, Digg Tracker, easyGestures

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