This post deals with a few useful Firefox Add-ons, which makes your Firefox more comfortable than before.

Tiny Menu:

If you are not using the menu bar frequently and you feel that the menu bar is occupying more space in your browser, then you can shrink it with this add-on. It will help to replace the standard menu bar in Firefox with a single popup icon in the menu bar. Customization on menu to be collapsed can also be made simple with its option.

IE Tab:

For some web pages, we still have to use internet explore so we have to change the browser to continue with it, but now it very easy with IE tab in Firefox. Single click will change the Firefox tab into IE tab and you can continue browsing with it without any disturbance.

Convert Web Pages to PDF:

No more tiring HTML formats for saving web page! With this add-on, web pages can be saved in PDF format. This add-on can be also used as PDF management tool in Firefox. Sometimes opening PDF files in low bandwidth makes Firefox crash but this add-on will provide the pop up option to save or open, using which the PDF file can be downloaded.

Tab Popup:

This add-on pop up displays the tab content on doing a mouse-over, which enables us to see what’s inside the page. So, no need to switch between tabs until pages are completely downloaded. Pop up size of the tab is customizable.

Splash:

It adds a screen before Firefox opens up. Any image, text or audio file can be used in the splash screen to “welcome” you.

Extended Status Bar:

This add-on provides images, speed, percentage, time and loaded size of the web page.

Source: Devils Workshop

Wakoopa provides a very useful service of tracking applications and discovering new software. By using this service, we can find out how productive we are. And it lets us know what software we are using and for how long, at the same time also suggesting suitable applications to manage our time and work.

Day before yesterday, Wakoopa released a consolidated report for the first quarter of 2009 -totaling 525 million hours of software usage data, across over 200000 applications from 75,000 members.

Some of the key findings publicized includes:

• Facebook acts as an exception in Social networking sites. Facebook usage is steady throughout the day but on others, the usage tends to peak between 9 and 10 PM. Other web apps tend to peak between 4 and 5 PM.
• Twitter usage is on a bull trend and most of them use Twitter desktop client.
• Google Friend Connect showed large declines in usage in the first quarter.
• Google Chrome is capturing its market share very quickly, and it created a significant impact in browser market with 15% share.
• Firefox is unbeatable and it stood first among Wakoopa users. It also reveals people are using 7 times longer in Firefox than Internet explorer.
• Windows Live messenger is dominant across world between any age group.
• The e-mail peek checking time for weekdays and weekends is during 11am and 9pm respectively.

Source: Devils Workshop

Google is now competing with popular services like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit by providing the same. Google launched a new iGoogle gadget “What’s Popular”. This simple and easy to use gadget may out smart other service providers in long run.

What does this gadget do?

This gadget helps users to discover many interesting items on the web and allows viewers to pop stories that they find interesting. Based on pop and user activities in a number of Google services like Google reader and YouTube, Google can decide what’s popular and display popped stories on it.

Users have the option to rate items that they like or dislike by clicking the ratings buttons which come with each item. There is no comment option in this gadget but users would like to share there views about pops. I think by adding comment option in this gadget may attract more users and fetch an additional edge to compete.

This new gadget has four tabs namely All, My Pops, My Adds and About.

• ‘All’ tab shows the most popular stories
• ‘My Pops’ shows the stories which user have allowed.
• ‘My Adds’ tab displays URL added by the user.

Click here to add this new iGoogle gadget.

Source: Devils Workshop

NewsGator launched FeedDemon 3.0 Beta 4, which brought out the Google reader synchronization feature. This will allow you to read Google reader subscriptions on the desktop.

To get started, download this feature from FeedDemon.

Existing FeedDemon users can also use this option. If you are using FeedDemon and want to move to latest version with Google Reader sync, then follow this steps:

1. Move your Newsgrater feed to Google Reader. In order to do this, go to Tools | Synchronization Options | Advanced | Convert Now.
2. Run the set up you’ve downloaded.
3. Enter your Google User ID and password to start synchronizing. It might take a few minutes based on your subscriptions.

Now, you can manage your Google Reader with FeedDemon. Sync speed is also good but note that this is a pre-release software, which means that you will run into bugs while using it.For example: FeedDemon is marking all the unread items as read while syncing with Google Reader.

If you’re not comfortable using this ‘unfinished’ software, please wait until the final release before downloading it.

Source: Devils Workshop