SmarterFox Makes You More Productive In FireFox
Have you ever wanted to make your FireFox smarter?
I am talking about adding functionality to our favorite browser that well, should have been there from the get go. Well now, here is an awesome download called SmarterFox. It adds a bunch of new options to your already pretty awesome browser. First off, it allows you to search different search engines with text that you highlight via a pop-up bubble.
It adds functionality to Wikipedia by adding a related-articles box, among other things. One of my favorite features is its ability to change a plain text link into a working URL. The plug-in was created by Yongq.
To start, you would visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825 and install the add-on to your FireFox browser.
After you have successfully installed it and restarted FireFox, you should try it out. We can start by highlighting a chunk of text and checking out the pop-up bubble as you can see below:
Each of those icons represents a search you can perform on the highlighted text. This is a godsend for research!
To try it out, I highlighted some text from the add-on’s page and hit the Google icon. It instantly returned the following Google Search page:
Not to shabby! Next up, we will take a look at its control panel that lives in your FireFox’s Tools menu. Simply click Tools and then SmarterFox to see your options.
Here are the options below. Linkify text URLs is what I was talking about earlier. It will look for www.xyz.com that is not underlined or hyperlinked and actually make it clickable. This is very handy, so you don’t ever have to copy and paste the link. The “add related articles to Wikipedia” feature will be shown a little further down and the enhancements to the AwesomeBar we did not try out because we do not use the AwesomeBar. But, according to the documentation, it will automagically add your search terms to the AwesomeBar as well as speed it up.
The copy and paste section hosts a lot of great features. By checking the “Auto copy selected” box, you can copy text automatically by selecting it and pasting it with another key. Wow, this is out of control.
The qLauncher can be activated by hitting Control and Space. It can be configured to open in a new tab. What the qLauncher does is give you a new search window with lots of choices for your search engine. You can see a shot of the qLauncher below its options.
The qLauncher
And the last option page lets us choose which search engines should show up on the bubble. You might also want to take notice of the “Display as a single row” button – this makes it easier to use with multiple options.
And as promised, here is the related-articles feature on Wikipedia. It is such a great idea – now why didn’t the Wikipedia people think of that?
