Fireday - Firefox extension reviews for May 25, 2007

Friday, May 25, 2007 3:00 AM

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

This week: GMail S/MIME and IGoogle Sidebar

Let's do some Google extensions this week.

GMail S/MIME

Rating: 4/5

When GMail came out, invites were the big thing just to see Google's new web mail. Now, it seems that everyone can't get enough of GMail extensions. The one problem with GMail is that is doesn't look like it's that secure (http, not https).

GMail S/MIME provides a secure method of sending your email without worrying about snoopers. Install the extension and restart Firefox.

You won't see the extension doing anything for you until you go into your GMail Web Mail. If you are using a email client like Outlook or Thunderbird, this will work for GMail as well.

This is not your basic extension that you can just install and go. You need a personal certificate from one of the security experts like Thawte or Verisign. The way to receive your certificate is already well documented and takes a little more time before you can begin sending secure emails. Read the document on how to create an S/MIME Certificate.

If you use the web mail portion of GMail and your certificate is properly installed in Firefox, when you compose an email in GMail, you'll notice a lock in the top right corner of the body area where you compose your main message. You'll notice a lock is enabled. Compose your email and send it on its way and you should feel secure (sorry, bad pun) that your email won't be viewed by anyone else but you and the recipient.

A couple of downsides to the extension are that file attachments aren't supported in this version and the padlock doesn't appear in Firefox 1.5 (stick with Firefox 2.0).

Are they going to provide support for file attachments in a later version? I sure hope so. This extension is the closest thing I've seen for sending secure GMail.

GMail S/MIME is a great extension for providing a piece of mind to make sure your emails aren't read by prying individuals.

GMail S/MIME receives a 4 out of 5 rating.


IGoogle Sidebar

Rating: 2/5

Google's personalized page, now called IGoogle, provides every user with a dashboard of what's important to them on one screen or multiple tabs.

Even though this technique was posted on Lifehacker.org and Google Code, making an extension to provide the same kind of functionality needs re-evaluated.

After I installed the extension and restarted Firefox, I opened the sidebar with my options displayed. I noticed my personalized page couldn't fit in the sidebar. I had 5 tabs of data. I resized it and it took up half of my Firefox real estate. Yikes!

There was no way to slide through my tabs to access my content. If you do have a lot of widgets on your personalized Google page, all widgets will be flush to the left side of the bar. If you have tabs on your page, you may want to rethink this extension or putting your page in a sidebar. There are pages that utilize the sidebar...and then there are pages that do not.

The IGoogle sidebar looked like a good idea at the time, but after installation and using the extension for a week, it really didn't serve an absolute need for me. I actually uninstalled it after day three.


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

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

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