The best Firefox environment!

The internet has been my main source of information and everything else that stems from it, fundamentally everything! In simpler terms its almost been the most important aspect of my life and for several readers of this post, I believe its true for you too. With computing being ubiquitous a lot more devices are coming into the market and the way we access the internet is changing. Yet there has been one constant force that has enabled me to access the internet: Firefox! Well I have used IE, Chrome and Opera for mobile but nothing yet beats Firefox atleast as a desktop/laptop based user-agent. On top of being the most used browser and the best one, its also free and open sourced and that makes Mozilla really awesome. I also think the following plugins make for a really incredible browsing experience:

Ubiquity - This one lets you gets a command line interface to show up anywhere, anytime in your browser and lets you do several things like perform mathematical operations on the selected data, finding the place on the map, sending emails or tweeting updates by automatically using tiny url's among several other powerful things focused around user mashups and a simple way to lookup things on the web or visualize data the way you want to. You can even create your custom commands. Is the most awesome natural language processing tool I have seen and used for over a year and half on the web.

Ubiquity for Firefox

Del.icio.us - An awesome bookmarking service acquired by Yahoo! that lets you aggregate all your bookmarks and lets you sync them across different computers or mobile phones. So you can get to access all the sites you would like to at any point of time and never lose any information by just a single click.

Yahoo toolbar - It was there some years ago. Then moved out of use and now, is back with a bang! The ability to add custom apps and preview your emails on gmail or check your facebook pages by just a hover click while you are surfing any page on the web really helps avoid the frantic attempts to open new tabs and going to the websites.

Firebug - When it comes to checking the source of the page you are visiting or designing web pages, nothing beats Firebig. An easy way to analyze complex components on the web, custom css, javascript and just examine any interesting components on the page you are viewing.

YSlow - From a developers point of view really helps understand why a page loads slow and what could be done to improve your site performance in terms of front-end engineering.

Foxtab - Need that 3D experience in your browser? Install foxtab and get a glimpse of 3D tabbed browsing. Also to dress up your browser in a style you like use Personas for firefox.

Flashgot - Don't like the way you can't really get that video you watch on facebook or youtube or some file that's taking too long to load in the browser? Well, Flashgot lets you download any media to your system with just a click; Be it flash videos or anything else and that too without leaving the current page or stopping what you are currently doing. One of the best download managers for media ever!

Of course there are a whole lot of plugins that I haven't explored and another set which have been phased out of my browser. Yet the above plugins are what make my browsing sessions truly awesome!!

...and to end with a preview of what firefox is coming up with soon:

An Introduction to Firefox's Tab Candy

Comments and reviews of more firefox related addons are welcome!

Pratik Mandrekar

pratikmandrekar@gmail.com

Random musings across T1

Apart from using blogger for scribling out randomized info about myself, I just thought I would give some space and time for some interesting things that I came across during Test1.

For those of you who use firefox(or chrome) there's this firefox extension called Mashlogic available at Mashlogic Download that really adds a lot of functionality to the web page you are viewing.Btw a mashup in web terminology is a tool that integrates existing services pertaining to a specific domain into one tool.I have been using lots of extensions and add-ons including the one on which I'm blogging right now(Scribefire & coolIRIS)but this is the best I have come across till date. Also for a reason that could be any or all of the below:
1)Network restrictions in BITS Pilani Goa Campus
2)Installing Google Gears (I'm not sure if this comparison is valid but I would rate the caching ability of Gears way above the Squid proxy used in our campus)
3)Exam time blues
..I started getting download speeds almost 10X times the normal downloads on this network without using any non-browser based software.


Fist of Rice(FOR) is a non-profit organization started by a group of students most of which are BITSians from our campus with the purpose of solving the grassroot level food deficiency problem, based on the concept that a fist of rice donated by an individual summed into hundreds of donors in thousands of locations would generate millions of rice bags helping to solve the food problem to a considerable extent.Check out FOR. Another site to check out would be Bhook and Poverty.


Valentine's and the color codes also came and went.Unfortunately for St.Valentine, there wasn't much to do with his original idea of Valentine.However Love is not something that is to be celebrated on one day.It's much much more than that 'coz it involves friendship,childrens', teachers',independence,and every other day of the year 'coz unless you work for it, you ain't understand it and till you understand it you won't get it.That's something that gphone.exe has been teaching our computers of late in BITS.The virus has inflicted almost all the CC comps and half the student PC's and lappies.The best way I found to remove it was to use Glary's utilities.Available in our software repository or free download, it's very much like a task manager which would have been otherwise disabled by the virus.

that's all folks :)

C ya

Gnite