Browsersphere

I caught this back in September and it took me until now to post it. Nice.

Anyway, without further ado, Dwight Silverman offers up his take on IE7Pro and how it brings parity with Firefox’s “Restore Session” feature to IE7. He also lists several other advantages to using IE7Pro, including built-in spell checking, an ad blocker, support for mouse gestures and a feature that sounds similar to Greasemonkey support in Firefox.

The folks over at the Maxthon Blog have explained why the answer to the question of whether or not Greasemonkey scripts work in Maxthon is both “yes” and “no.”  However, after you read the post, you realize the real answer is “no.”  They just support similar functionality.

Carnival (via microformatique) is “a free microformat parser for Safari. Download it, fire it up, and whenever a microformatted site is viewed in Safari, Carnival will glow green. Click on the icon to view the available data.”

According to the extension’s author, “This is an alpha, proof-of-concept release. Only hCards are supported, and you can’t actually do much with the data yet.”

Think of this as Operator Lite for Safari.

When it comes to web browser extensions, you’d be a bit off-base to suggest that any browser has as many options for users as does Firefox.  Therefore, in this edition of Extension Watch, we’ll take a look at some Firefox extensions that have been getting some attention around the browsersphere lately.

• According to Mozilla Links,  Chris Finke has developed an extension that converts Facebook email images to hyperlinks.  You can download that extension directly from here.
• Mozilla Links also points to Daily Dilbert, an extension for accessing several popular comics directly from your Firefox status bar.  You can download that directly from Firefox Add-ons.
• Mini Map Sidebar (via straydog scraps) lets you drag-and-drop an address from the web page you are viewing into the Firefox sidebar to get a map of the address quickly.
• HyperWords allows you to select any plain text on a web page and select from a list of search engines, online references and translation services to use with the text you’ve selected.  You can download that directly from this site.
• Spotter apparently lets you do something with RDF, but I’m either not bright enough or have simply been watching too much football this weekend to comprehend exactly what it is that it allows you to do.
• The developers of the Forecastfox extension have switched their provider from Weather.com to AccuWeather.com, and the latest version of their extension is available to download from Softpedia.com.
• Even with an explanation, I’m not really sure what it does, but you can get the latest version of the SuperDragAndGo extension here.
• Social Media apparently lets “you see what stories have been submitted to which social bookmarking and media sites, as well as how many votes the story has received across these networks,” according to Mashable.
• Firefox Clock puts a clock and a Firefox download counter “on your desktop.”  Not sure if that makes it a widget or if they really mean you have access to it in your browser.  However, TickerFox, which actually comes from a friend and former colleague of mine, is probably the better choice if you can live with your system clock and only want to see how many times Firefox has been downloaded (which we now know is over 400 million).
• deliGoo, according to Read/WriteWeb, mashes up del.icio.us (which will soon just be Delicious) with Google Custom Search.  However, the review doesn’t really give it much of an endorsement.
• The Giacomo Vacca Blog points to Firefox VoIP, which “turns Firefox into a VoIP client.”
• If you’re into bookmarking, CyberNet has a list of the best Firefox extensions for bookmarking.
• Neil’s World mentions Rock Your Firefox, another Facebook-related extension that “lets you show what extensions you have installed on your copy of Firefox, and see what your friends have installed.”
• If you live in Chicago and use the “L,” you may, like Tom Sherman, find this Firefox add-on from Clay Smith extremely useful.
• CashAddOn requires an account to use, but claims to “help you earn cash [back] on the purchases you make while shopping online.”
• According to the AdGlobe Tech Blog, Snap Links “allows you to easily open multiple links in new tabs by drawing a box around them.”
• Fast Video Download lets you quickly save embedded video files from sites like College Humor, Daily Motion, Google Video, MySpace and YouTube.
• Thumbnails in Your Tabs looks kind of useless to me, simply because the thumbnails it shows are very obviously squished to fit into each tab, but I’m sure there are people out there who will find it useful (probably the same people that find Snap Previews useful).
• Boost for Facebook apparently “blows the official Facebook toolbar out of the water,” but I’m not sure what that really means because I use neither Facebook nor its official toolbar.
• All-in-One Sidebar is “Opera 9-like” according to Tech[dot]Blog and “lets you quickly switch between sidebar panels and view Firefox features such as downloads, extensions, bookmarks, addons, etc in the sidebar.”
• Mozilla Links says that Auto Shutdown “adds a check box to the download manager to tell Firefox to shut down your computer after all downloads are finished.”
• Miguel Guhlin is a fan of TinyUrl’s Firefox extension.
• And last but not least (this one has to be my favorite of the list), Tobi’s Timemachine “warps you back to the amateur web of 1996.”

On a semi-related note, Firefox extension developers can head over to the Mozilla Developer Center to find out how they can update their extensions to be Firefox 3 compliant.

I’m always keeping an eye out for the latest buzz-worthy extensions, and not just for Firefox, so stay tuned for more extension-related news here at Browsersphere.  Also, if you have a favorite extension or see something out on the web that you think would be of interest to Browsersphere’s readers, please drop me a line at browsersphere@gmail.com.

The browsersphere is a busy place, and only gets busier as I start to hone in on all the web browsers that are actually out there. Without further ado…

• Bryan Clark asks, does anyone use a homepage for their browser anymore?
• A member of the Ars Technica Forums wants to know why there’s no official browser for the Xbox 360.
• Jesse Ruderman has filed 3,000 Firefox bugs.
• The WebKit Detection Script has been updated to support the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
• Matt Brett believes that IE7 has done nothing but add more garbage to the pile.
• Kenneth van Wyk believes that Firefox is safer than Internet Explorer.
• Mashable has a list of 30+ skins for the Opera web browser.
• Software Battle calls Mouse Gestures Firefox’s killer extension.
• Mozilla Links reports that there’s a brand new Firefox start page.
• Have you tried split browsing in Firefox?

I stumbled upon a minor player tonight by the name of Wyzo. Beyond a product with a cute and clean website, Wyzo is a web browser built off of Firefox that seems to focus on BitTorrent and social sites like YouTube, Flickr and Digg.

I downloaded Wyzo to get a quick feel for it, and it became very clear that it is indeed a Firefox clone with a few added touches here and there. As someone with some skinning experience, I have to say that I am impressed with the skin they came up with. I’ve definitely seen worse. You can get a feel for what the browser looks like on first launch in the following screenshot (click it to see the full-sized version):

The bottom-line is that Wyzo doesn’t seem worth a download just yet when you can just as easily run Firefox and get the same feature set. My guess is that adding something like the AllPeers extension and the Orange-look theme would give you a similarly looking and functioning browsing experience while using the more popular of the two browsers.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Wyzo, though, check out their website or download it and play around.

I’ll let you know if I read any more about Wyzo once it matures beyond alpha quality and toward its first stable release.

Alex Faaborg has written about CoScripter over at the Mozilla Labs site. CoScripter is a new Firefox extension, and Alex describes it as follows:

What do you get when you mix one part automation, one part natural language interpretation, two parts programming by demonstration, and three parts online collaboration? If you stir all of these research areas together and toss in some XUL, you get one of the most innovative extensions for Firefox: CoScripter.

CoScripter was created by a research team at IBM led by Allen Cypher, and it allows you to record your actions on the Web, play them back, and share them with others. For instance, one popular script quickly automates the process of adding your phone number to the national do not call registry.

Head on over to his original post for the full details.

In an article titled What Are Google’s Browser Plans?, TechCrunch touches on Google’s tie to Maxthon, the browser in which Google invested nearly a million dollars earlier this year.

The main reason I mention this is that Maxthon is among the many browsers I intend to cover here at Browsersphere (and it’s always interesting to think about where the shoe will drop when it comes to Google and the web browser market).

To get us started thinking about Maxthon in particular, I should point out that users of that browser can now download Microformats Button, the Maxthon equivalent of Firefox’s Operator extension.

I should also point out that there is apparently a Maxthon Lovers Group on Facebook, and that there will be a worldwide Maxthon skin contest starting in the coming weeks.

Paul Kim announced Firefox Campus Edition today, a customized version of the Firefox browser focused on the back-to-school crowd. The Firefox bundle, which has its own landing page, reportedly comes pre-packaged with FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero extensions. For more details and some additional insight into the release, be sure to head on over to Paul Kim’s announcement.