We’ve known how FireFox changed the we browse the Internet today. Plugins, addons, themes and styles were not even in dreams of IE users until this revolutionary product was flagged off. Kudos to Firefox team!

The latest release of the powerful Internet browser was made available to the world on 17th of June’2008. If you missed out on getting a certificate for helping Firefox get hold of a Guinness world record, you may get a copy of yours here. Hurry!

Monika mentioned about the Firefox 3 final release which was scheduled on 17th of this month, in one of her previous posts. It was a candidate for – The Guinness World Record for the Most Software Downloaded in 24 Hours. As an update, to your surprise, the total download count crossed 11,000,000 mark! Look out for the screenshot which I took while writing this.

The new web browser proudly showcasts its superiority from the other browsers in terms of :

• New features
• Security
• Productivity
• Customization

A detailed list of all features in the above mentioned categories can be found here.

We have already heard and have dirtied our hands over a lot of available plugins which enhance the web browsing experience one has with Firefox. If you’ve missed out on some of our previous reviews about Firefox addons, you may check out the – must have Firefox extensions article. As an update, we have also described the marvellous support of Zemanta on Firefox.

So just incase you’ve missed out on the Firefox download bandwagon, you may do it now. I’ll be happy to see your feedback as comments to this article. Stay tuned!

Ease of use and better performance has always been a matter of concern for the internet users when it comes to choosing the right browser. Mozilla’s Firefox is a preferred browser thanks to the presence and development of numerous plugins and support by a great community. The statistics says it all,

Firefox has also helped bloggers to a great extent. The reason being is the availability of some really cool extensions. I would like to share a few extensions which may change the way you blog and maybe help you generate better content on your blog!

Taking different needs into account, we’ll explore some available firefox addons.

Scribefire – By far the most popular split-browser blog editor. It offers features like multiple blog management, tagging, categories, image support and source editing. It also supports FTP uploads. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.

Deepest Sender – It is pretty similar to ScribeFire, although it lacks features like image uploading, time-stamp editing and compatible tagging.

CoLT – Great addon for copying either a hyperlink text or both the link and the link’s text, in a user specified format. A not-to-miss extension for people who like referring web links in their posts.

Google Toolbar & Spellbound – Inline spell-checking capability, just like Microsoft Word. Both serve their purposes in an effective way. They are superseded by Firefox 2’s in built spell check feature.

Copy Plain Text – This is a must-have extension for hardcore bloggers who spend most of the time looking out for articles and news over Digg, techmeme, etc. While copying text, If you don’t want any of the original site’s formating, links or text-link-ads to be copied over as well, this is what you need.

Copy as HTML Link – It allows you to easily create HTML links for your posts. It creates an HTML link to the current page using the selected text, and then it copies it into the clipboard so you can past it into some other application. A handy tool indeed!

Resizable Text Area – For people who love to stick around with the regular blog editor, such as WordPress’s built-in WYSIWYG editor, this extension is indispensable. It helps to resize the text area quickly and freely.

Picnik – This is a cool plugin which lets you seamlessly capture and edit web page screen shots on the fly. It has an option to take a screen shot of just the visible web page, or of the entire web page! It is great for editing images, regardless of where they come from, be it – the web, your computer, your Flickr account, etc. The best thing is that it lets you edit images without having to download anything to your computer. A recommended addon for all bloggers who believe in “A picture speaks a thousand words“.

Alexa Sparky- Analyzing traffic for frequent bloggers is an inevitable need. This extension is brought to you by Alexa, Amazon’s traffic ranking service. It displays the trend graph at the bottom right corner of your browser window, along with several helpful features, such as determining websites which are similar to yours.

FireFTP – I’m sure there would be times when you need to upload files as in images, PDFs, etc. to your host, while writing a post. FireFTP helps you do that without the need to minimize the firefox browser. It is a simple an FTP client built into the Firefox browser. It’s free, simple and reliable. You can flip to FireFTP just like any other tab on the browser!

DocuFarm – Another cool extension that prevents you from leaving your firefox browser. It previews files like – word, PDF, etc within Firefox. It also has a handy search, which allows you to search even the PDFs!

StumbleUpon – Irrespective of how others stumble on your posts, I’m sure you would be the first one to submit your own articles to StumbleUpon. The reason being – StumbleUpon review is crucial to get the correct demographic to view your site, since the categorization of the “stumble” occurs during the first review instance. It’s better that you being the author of the post, write the first review and categorize it accordingly, rather than putting it in the hands of someone else. Also, StumbleUpon sends more users to your site on average than Digg does according to ProBlogger.

Speak It – Having the pleasure of listening to blogs while you lie down is something we all might think of, sometime or other. This extension uses Microsoft Text-To-Speech Engine and gives you the same pleasure.

coComment – This nifty extension keeps track of comments you’ve left on other websites. It is an indispensable addon for the posts where the comment section is providing more information than the actual post content.

Being a blogger, these were some of the extensions I strongly recommend! Happy blogging!

Well almost anyway. This cool new Firefox Plugin works with several platforms to provide you with an ingenious way of posting your blog content. Not only will it supplement your post with related images, links and more. Ideal for you guys who read Easy WordPress to play around with while posting your blog posts.

Zemanta was only just launched on 26 March this year and is already making waves. The Plugin supports the following platforms:

• WordPress Dot com
• Blogger
• Self hosted WordPress (upwards of version 2.0)
• Typepad

It creates a semantic platform that tries to think while you write and provides you with relevant data that you could use to support your posts.

The guys on Zemanta are also working on adding a function that will allow you to integrate your own links using their Firefox Plugin.

Where are the articles pulled from?

The articles are from over 300 indexed top media sources as well as several blogs within the network.

What about copyright issues?

The content which is provide by Zemanta is cleared by copyright or listed clearly as creative commons material. The images are suggested by sources like Flickr and Wikimedia commons.

Presently the Plugin is only supported for the English speaking community.

The idea behind this software is that it will save you time in trolling the web while looking for relevant links and pictures to add to your blog post. I have yet to test this as I just came across the news now and thought to give you a heads up so you can go and check it out yourself.

Just remember, you’ll need to have Firefox installed on your computer as this is a Firefox Plugin.

Firefox is a great browser. It is relatively safe from bugs and has the bonus of giving us tons of added functionality if we choose to want it. Since doing the switch from IE7 last year to Firefox I have not regretted this and love it with a passion.

Since there are so many addons we can choose,it is easy to get confused on what to choose and what not.

Therefore I wrote this post to show you my very own favourite Firefox addon.

The reason being that I can learn more and more about stylesheets and coding and tamper with my own WordPress blogs while learning without stuffing up the code.

Firebug gives me a ton of features which allow me to see code on any website I’m currently browsing. If I want to know how a certain image is pulled from the stylesheet I can open Firebug by going to the tools section in Firefox, then Firebug and Inspect Element. You can see this in the screen shot above.

How to inspect an element

Now to inspect an actual element on a website I navigate to this and click on the “Inspect Element” line as shown while the actual site is open.

Below is a screenshot on what will happen if look at this website Easy WordPress and try to see the size of the header image.

Not only will I be able to see which reference in the stylesheet is pointing to the header, but I’ll also have the information on HTML which would be found in the actual header.php file in your WordPress admin.

To actually see this result you will have to click on the actual element you are trying to inspect. It is kind of like hovering until you see the red floating border appear and then clicking your mouse which will set it at that position.

Don’t worry, you won’t be changing any code on the actual website!

Here is the actual reference from the stylesheet again found in the bottom right corner of the image above.

The code on here tells us that the header image is 960px wide and 110px high. Naturally this is only a small example and could actually also be found out by right clicking on it and then looking at properties.

Non coders (those who haven’t formally learned coding) often get confused on what code needs to be changed in order to add a certain function. Using Firebug will allow you to learn in your own time as you can actually click on this section of Firebug (the stylesheet) and change code.

Doing this will change the layout of the blog (again only in theory not actually). Once you know exactly what to do to make it right, you simply log into your own blog and change the code accordingly.

But don’t forget – always make a backup before you tamper with any code!