The fantastic five

Written by Narmad

The advantage of Mozilla Firefox is that it offers a choice of add-ons to customize my browsing experience on my Samsung NC20. However, installing too many add-ons eats up considerable space in my browsing Window. Since my notebook has a 12-inch display, I need to ensure that my browser looks simple without compromising on functionality. I found five add-ons that run fantastically on my browser. Check these out.

From a never-ending list of Firefox add-ons, I have hand-picked the ones below for my notebook.

Tree Style Tab

Here is a Firefox add-on that stands first in the list of essential add-ons for my Samsung NC20. We all know about the usefulness of tabbed browsing, which is indispensible in the latest browsers. Tree Style Tab gives a different expression to Firefox, especially in netbooks. When you open many tabs from a single window, it becomes difficult to identify the correct tab, which we intend to open since their headings get viciously dwarfed. This can be more confusing when you have opened different pages of the same website.

The functionality of Tree Style Tab is similar to that of Windows folder tree in Windows XP. The tabs are arranged vertically at the left hand side, rather than the usual horizontal direction. Tree Style Tab makes your tabs flexible. You can hide and collapse these tabs. Using the drag and drop option, you can rearrange the location of the tabs vertically. If you don’t want to use the touch pad to maneuver your tabs, you can use the Ctrl+Up/Down/Right/Left keys to play with the tabs.

Fission

Fission serves dual purposes to the netbook users. It merges your address bar and progress bar at the same location. Fission removes the progress bar from the bottom of your Firefox browser and makes it more visible to the user, thus adding more viewing space at the bottom of the browser. The visual effect of Fission adds style to your browser as it tries to emulate Apple Safari.

Personal Menu

Freeing up vertical browsing space is always useful on your netbook and Personal Menu does exactly the same. After you install Personal Menu on your Firefox, you can hide the standard Firefox ‘Menu Toolbar’. This useful add-on makes your Firefox function like Google Chrome as it creates a series of buttons at the right hand side of the tool bar.

Even if the standard, ‘Menu Toolbar’ is missing, you can access your ‘Bookmarks’ and ‘History’ by clicking these customizable buttons.

Febe

I would rate Febe as the smartest Firefox add-on. You can describe it as an add-on for the add-ons. The function of Febe revolves around creating back up and restoring all the Firefox extensions. Febe backs up themes, preferences, passwords and cookies of your Firefox. You just need to click the Febe button on the tool bar to initiate the back up. Febe allows you to configure a scheduled back up on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Febe even reminds you if the scheduled back-up is not completed. This feature lets you synchronize your home and office browser, provided you are sticking to Firefox as your browser.

Hide Caption Titlebar Plus

This add-on is my personal favorite among the five. I guess the creator of Hide Caption Title bar Plus was motivated by Google Chrome. Using Hide Caption Titlebar Plus, you can maximize the screen since it hides the 'Title bar' like Google Chrome. I guess Firefox won’t mind that.



Netbook users like me who wish to maximize their browsing screen can definitely benefit from these five add-ons.

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