Brain Assassin

Why should you upgrade? Let’s see. They claim to have improved tabbed brows­ing which is true. Most of the new fea­tures were already avail­able to Tab Mix Plus users. How­ever, it’s a step in the right direc­tion which is always wel­comed. You’ll also find a built-​​in spell check­ing sim­i­lar to the spell check­ing in MS prod­ucts and inte­grated phish­ing pro­tec­tion. There’s an improved Add-​​ons Man­ager uni­fy­ing exten­sions and themes into one inter­face and a brand new Search Engine Man­ager. Finally, there’s a ses­sion restore fea­ture as well as Live Titles and it uses less mem­ory than its pre­de­ces­sor. Over­all the browser has changed its look and feel but remains still prac­ti­cal for every­day use.

If you don’t mind that some of your exten­sions may not be com­pat­i­ble this time get a copy and see for your­self. You’ll find exten­sions and plug-​​ins at the usual place – that is to say right over here. If you’re look­ing for a build for the Win­dows x64 plat­form this is the place to go. A 64-​​bit enabled build with the final release should be avail­able soon. I have already posted some infor­ma­tion on good exten­sions so have a look at them first. Luck­ily, Tab Mix Plus, which is my favorite exten­sion, is already avail­able for Fire­fox 2, among oth­ers, of course. Well, it’s only a dev-​​build but I don’t mind since it still works like a charm.

Just yes­ter­day a friend of mine told me – after some words on browser wars – that he doesn’t have a clue about what exactly exten­sions are. After I told him he wanted to know whether there are some note­wor­thy exten­sions avail­able. After refer­ring him to the offi­cial Add-​​ons site and to the Exten­sion Mir­ror I thought I could list my own per­sonal favorites here. And here we go (they’re in no par­tic­u­lar order, though):

• I absolutely love Adblock PlusFilterset.G Updater. With all the huge amounts of annoy­ing ads I don’t want to live with­out this par­tic­u­lar extension.
• Con­t­role de Scripts enables me to place restric­tions on JavaScripts. This exten­sion is a must-​​have!
• The next one, Cus­tomize­Google, ist quite attrac­tive if you use Google as your main search engine. It allows you to block ads and spam and adds extra information.
• Dic­tio­nary Search has proven use­ful many times. Sim­ply select a word you want to trans­late and, et voila, via the con­text menu you got a trans­la­tion. One of the most handy exten­sion ever to have been written.
• The Down­load Sta­tus­bar exten­sion allows the user to keep track of ongo­ing and com­pleted down­loads in an addi­tional sta­tus­bar or in the form of an icon dis­played in the nor­mal sta­tus­bar. Very use­ful, indeed. I don’t like the imple­mented down­load man­ager one bit.
• I always liked Opera’s sta­tus­bar dis­play­ing lots of infor­ma­tion. With the Extended Sta­tus­bar I get exactly what I want (speed, per­cent­age, time and loaded size).
• Here’s one of the first exten­sions I have employed – the very pop­u­lar Mouse Ges­tures. This exten­sion makes key­board, menus and tool­bars almost use­less by let­ting the user exe­cute com­mands by draw­ing ges­tures with the mouse.
• With the help of the Slim Exten­sion List the items on my exten­sion list are shorter and sorted.
  The Stop-​​or-​​Reload But­ton is on the very same site. This one makes the Stop and Relaod but­tons behave like a sin­gle one.
• The Tab Mix Plus exten­sion greatly enhances Firefox’s tab brows­ing capa­bil­i­ties. There are more set­tings to change than you might have dreamed of. Once con­fig­ured, your set­tings can be saved away.
• You want to know where this hyper­link is going? Tar­get Alert is the right exten­sion for you. It shows visual cues for the des­ti­na­tion of links.
• At long last, there’s the Update Noti­fier. This one noti­fies you when updates are avail­able for your exten­sions and themes.