Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for January 19, 2007

Friday, January 19, 2007 4:00 AM

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

This week: FareFirst, Operator, and Percula.

FareFirst, The Airfare Extension

Rating: 5/5

In February, I'll be taking a little bit of a needed rest (Haven't taken a vacation in five years). I've been looking around for some deals on airfare. So I thought why not find a Firefox extension that can help me out with my travel arrangements.

I heard about FareCompare and researched their site. I love the way they organized their web site. It provides a lot of options, but didn't say anything about an extension for IE or Firefox. So I went back to Mozilla, searched, and found FareFirst.

FareFirst Screenshot

I installed the FareFirst extension and started looking for it immediately. It installs on your status bar (man, you should see my status bar) and is disguised as an FC icon. Right-click on the icon to define your departure and arrival locations. The feature I liked the most was the lookup for your departure and arrival location. At first, I thought it was using AJAX, but it was prebuilt into the extension.

A nice feature is the you can even set an alarm to go off when a certain airfare goes below a dollar amount.

Even though there isn't much to the extension, it does an exceptional job communicating to their server. FareFirst's interface is a nice and compact package, meaning everything is in visually in order, very intuitive, and not intrusive at all.

The extension is a great complement to an already great web site and receives a rating of 5.

Operator

Rating: 4/5

Microformats are becoming the latest and next greatest thing for the web it seems. If you are interested in finding out what microformats are, visit the microformats web site.

Alan Faaborg from Mozilla Labs created the extension. The extension is installed as a toolbar and detects hCard, hCalendar, geo, hReview, hResume, and rel-tag microformats. If it finds any microformats, it enables certain items on the toolbar. Click the toolbar and you'll be able to export the address, events, or business card to an external format.

On the far right of the toolbar, you'll see the options button which contain various ways to display the data on your toolbar, how do you want to handle each microformat, and what do you want each microformat to do.

Microformats are fast becoming a trend by injecting HTML with additional formats that are recognizable by the browser. Eventually, you won't need an extension to recognize microformats, they will be an innate feature of the browsers. The Operator extension is just one step towards browsers detecting the microformats automatically.

The Operator extension is a good start, but I would love to see custom applications integrated into the extension. I understand the other application would require the intelligence to read the microformats, but that's something we can all shoot for with future web and desktop applications.

 

Percula

Rating: 2/5

Percula is an interesting...umm...monster.

I say that because it's built for the career site, Monster.com. After installing the extension, you access the extension through the context menu on a web page. Highlight the word or phrase you want to search on, right-click to get the context menu, and select "search on monster.com..." That's it. It will take you to Monster.com and search for the words you highlighted. Hmmmmm....

One of the things I've come to love about Firefox is the search engine box in the top right corner to the right of the address bar. You can add additional pre-built search engines by clicking on the icon and select "Manage Search Engines...", click on the link "get more search engines" and you'll be taken to the mycroft web site to select from a ton of already existing search engines. Firefox can even help you integrate other sites into Firefox's search engine box. There is even a Monster.com search engine at the site that you can add to your list.

Percula is good for quick searching, but I don't think it'll replace my search engine box at the top right. If the extension had more features, I would keep it, but installing Percula to search through Monster.com when I don't need the overhead is just asking for trouble, in my opinion.

Just my $0.02.


Have a great weekend, everyone!

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

 

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