Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for June 22, 2007

Friday, June 22, 2007 4:00 AM

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

This week: Firefox Personas and LocationBar2

Firefox Personas

Rating: 5/5

Along with add-ons, Firefox provides hundreds of various themes to suit a personality for your browsing experience. However, there is something missing for customizing Firefox with your own way of branding.

Well, Mozilla's Chris Beard has created an extension to customize your Firefox even more with a skinning extension called Personas. Personas uses a web service to provide a pre-made list of images for the top toolbar and the status bar on the bottom.

After installing the add-on, you'll notice that a Firefox avatar is located in the lower left of your toolbar. Left-click on the icon to see a list of personas for Firefox. Select one and see it immediately change your Firefox browser. No restart is necessary.

If you feel like creating your own, there is a Personas tutorial on the site. Well, kind of. To be honest, there is really not much involved in creating your own Firefox persona. When designing your Persona, the top graphic should be a dimension of 3000px wide by 200px tall and the bottom status bar graphic should be a dimension of 3000px wide by 22px tall. Submit your two graphics to him through email and, one day your Persona will show up as an option.

When I installed the extension, I didn't have any conflicts with other add-ons. Firefox Personas works like a charm and provides a touch of personality to your browsing experience. Now, Isn't that what we all want?

The one thing that I'm wondering about this extension is that when others catch wind of this add-on, will there be a limit of how many personas can be shown in that selection menu? It could get overwhelming. And to be honest, I definitely see this extension becoming more popular and possibly even becoming part of Firefox in the future.

Chris, Excellent extension and it deserves a rating of 5/5.

LocationBar2

Rating: 5/5

While browsing using Firefox, not many users look at the address when they're hard core surfing. Admit it, some of us just don't even notice the location bar.

Dao Gottwold created an add-on to provide enhanced features of the location bar, such as making the location bar easier to read. He calls it the LocationBar2. Think of it as an additional location bar integrated into the existing one.

When installed, as with all Firefox add-ons, a restart is required. After the installation and restart, I noticed that the add-on really keeps to itself and doesn't interfere with other add-ons.

The key features of the add-on include:

  • Puts emphasis on the domain (reduces spoofing risk)
  • Decodes URLs for better readability (e.g. http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F)
  • Linkifies URL segments (press Ctrl/Meta/Shift)
  • Hides http://, https://, ftp:// and file://

The second feature is the one that I require the most. How many times have you wanted to read that URL above? LocationBar2 takes care of that for you.

The preferences dialog box gives you more flexibility of how you want your location bar to look. Definitely some exceptional features included in this add-on.

Location Bar 2 preferences dialog

Overall, I like this add-on and is one of the add-ons I think that could possibly be part of Firefox with the right options included.

The add-on receives a 5/5.


Hope everyone liked this weeks reviews. I'll see ya next week.

If you want your Firefox add-on reviewed, please contact me with the URL and we'll let you know when it's reviewed.

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