20 Essential Firefox Add-ons for Web Shoppers

Online shopping can sometimes get really confusing especially during the Christmas season when you have a whole bunch of gifts to buy. It takes a lot of effort to first find the items you want and then to compare the price across various online merchants. Wouldn't you be glad if you could just highlight an item on a web page and your browser could list out the sites selling it along with their prices and user reviews?


Christina Laun has put together a wonderful list of 20 Essential Firefox Add-ons for Frugal Web Shoppers which does just that and much more! These Add-ons make online shopping experience a breeze.

Out of the twenty the ones which caught my fancy were:

1. Woot Watcher


2. Chartlet - Wouldn't that be helpful for recording and tracking stock prices too!


3. Send Tab URLs - Do you have to shift from working on one computer to another (Example: shuttling between work and home)? This Add-on can be useful to email the URLs you were working on before shifting so that you can open the same on the other computer without having to remember the long URLs or retyping them.

Do let me know what was your favorite. Do you know other cool Firefox Add-ons for web shoppers? » Continue reading

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Shuttling Favorites or Bookmarks between home, work and Hawaii

I have been traveling extensively since the last few months and it has not been very practical to carry my Laptop everywhere I traveled. So I uploaded all my Internet Explorer Favorites and Firefox Bookmarks to Google Bookmarks so that I can access them from anywhere in the world using just a computer with an Internet connection and any Web browser.

However, every time I needed to access these favorites/bookmarks from my Laptop, I had to sign in to Google Bookmarks as I did not maintain a separate list of bookmarks locally on my Laptop. This became too cumbersome and I began looking around for a plug-in or add-on for either Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 that would synchronize my Google Bookmarks with either Firefox Bookmarks or IE Favorites.

After a very extensive search, I found one Firefox add-on which did not synchronize Google Bookmarks with Firefox Bookmarks but displayed the Google Bookmarks right inside the Firefox Sidebar just like how Firefox Bookmarks are displayed. GMarks lets you add bookmarks to Google Bookmarks using the standard Firefox Bookmark window. You can add bookmarks to either Firefox Bookmarks or Google Bookmarks or both with just one click.

The bookmarks are displayed in a folder tree using the labels. You can have nested labels or sub-folders using a nested label separator of your choice. For example you want to have a folder named Extensions within a folder named Firefox and you have selected > symbol as your nested labels separator then all you have to do is enter Firefox>Extensions in the Labels field.

Other useful features include:

1. A search function that searches not only the bookmarks' details, but also the content of bookmarked pages.
   
2. Filters to apply labels or descriptions to bookmarks matching your query or to batch edit/delete bookmarks.
   
3. Hiding entire labels from view in the sidebar so you only find them while searching.
   
4. Shows not only your Google bookmarks, but optionally your starred Google Reader posts.
   
5. Import your Firefox bookmarks to Google Bookmarks.
   
6. Export your Google Bookmarks to a bookmarks.htm file.
   
7. Optional Bookmark Count for each label.

Another advantage of using Google Bookmarks with GMarks is that you can file one bookmark under several folders using just one entry.

Google Bookmarks with GMarks is also useful for people who need to access their Favorites or Bookmarks from Home and Work computers. There could be many more possible scenarios where it could be useful. Do let me know if you know one.

Download GMarks here.
You can learn to use GMarks and its features here.
If you don't already have a Google Account then create one now here. » Continue reading

Read more on Firefox, Internet, Internet Explorer, Web 2.0, Web Browsers