Last week, I said that I was going to try to do weekly reviews of different products and services that I found online.  Instead, a series of events (Passover, health problems that my wife experienced, etc), sidelined those reviews.  My initial plan was to do a flurry of reviews to make up for the ones I missed.  However, with a new baby coming onto the scene any day now (19 days until the due date and the doctors think that there’s no way we’re going to make it that far), I’ve realized that there’s no way that I’ll be able to make a weekly review schedule.  Instead, I’m going to make a series of monthly reviews.  If I find that I have more things to review than once per month permits, then maybe I’ll increase the frequency of the reviews.

Until then, here’s my review for the month of April.  A lot of you likely use FireFox as your browser of choice.  I long ago switched from Internet Explorer to FireFox (after a stop over with Maxthon).  I like FireFox as it is, but the extensions that are available just put it over the top.  Here are three of my favorites (in no particular order):

1.  SlimSearch

Ever find an address on a webpage and wonder how to get there?  Ever read about something online that you would like to read more about on Wikipedia?  Or maybe you just want to do a Google search to find more information about a topic?  SlimSearch can do all of those.  You just highlight a word (or phrase, or address), then right-click and select SlimSearch.  A sub-menu will then expand to show many options including Google Search, Google Maps Search, Froogle, Wikipedia, IMDB, and many more.  It makes searches much easier.

2.  repagination

I appreciate this one every time I’m searching for products online or am reading a multi-page article.  I simply right-click on the “Next Page” link and tell the repagination extension to retrieve all of the following pages.  Then FireFox automatically loads the next pages and appends them to the current page.  The result is one very long page that I can read through, search on, or print out.

3.     IE Tab

As a web developer, I try to tailor my web pages to work in both Internet Explorer and FireFox.  However, there are some websites out there that make their sites work only in Internet Explorer.  When you reach one of those sites and just have to use it, IE Tab will let you keep surfing from within FireFox even as you use Internet Explorer’s rendering engine.   Simply right-click on the tab and select Switch Rendering Engine.  The page will reload using Internet Explorer, but still in FireFox.  For you web developers out there, IE Tab can also be useful to quickly see just how well your page works in both FireFox and Internet Explorer.