My Favourite Firefox Add Ons

This is a review on six of my favourite Addons.

Wanted to write this one for a long time now. Mozilla Firefox has been an eternal part of my computer system for the past 5-6 years now.What makes it more powerful and  better than the others are the cool Add-Ons it offers.

Here are my personal favourites and the ones that I cannot imagine my firefox without:

1) Stumbleupon: This ones the big Daddy of all the add ons.This is something more than an Add On.The concept of Stumbleupon is one of the most well thought ones.It fetches out at random the best of the web with respect to the set of interest enlistedby you during sign-up. Its very convenient to use, just download the add on and sign up on its site, thats it.Now all you need to do is click on the stumble button and it throws up a never before(99% of the time) web page.

2)RSS Ticker: This one is my personal favourite.It may not be of everyone’s interest. This ones for those who like to stay updated with RSS feeds.It creates a ticker which constantly ticks the feeds from your subscribed links.Can be customised to suite your requirements right from the speed the feeds will tick to the number of feeds per RSS link.


3) Adblock Plus: This is one of the add ons that work behind the scene.Bloacks a lot of ads can be customised to suite your needs. Can be turned On and turned Off at will(This comes in handy when you need to view sites which use a lot of flash stuff.

4)DownloadHelper: There are many tools lately available to download videos directly from the web but since this is my blog,I will write about the one I use,the DownloadHelper, its a very important tool in your kit, Downloads almost all types of media that you may come across in your day to day surfing.Saves video’s in either ‘.flv’ or ‘.mp4′ format.

5)Apture highlights: This is a new one I have just come across,seems really promising. The concept behind this is to get the user all the info he may require on a particular word or sentence that is selected by him in the webpage. For example if you select ‘India’ in a particular web page and click on the apture button or the ‘Learn More’ balloon that pops up on selection of the word,you will get info on India from various sources,info is in the form of wikipedia link or youtube link to videos with the selections reference,etc.I tried using it on various website but it didn’t work on all the sites.

6)FoxTab: This is quite an innovative add on,it displays tabs of your favourite pages for quick access to them.Gives your browser an extremely attractive look.

Thunderbolt ,USB 3.0 And Firewire

The release of a new line of Macbook pro’s (Released on 24th February 2011) has triggered a new round of technolgical competiton with the introduction of intel’s Thunderbolt. The Thunderbolt is in direct competition with the like’s of USB 3.0 and Firewire 800. With all the three technology fighting for user acceptance, the competion promises to become much more intense in the near future. Lets try understanding all the three technologies one by one.

Beginning with Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt had been a technology intel had been working at for a couple of years now,and with data transfer speed of the order 10Gbps(Speed that will enable you to copy a Blu Ray Print Movie i.e 1.5 GB in less than 30 seconds) both way (that is like two friends copying 2 movies simultaneously from each other in 30 seconds) it seems to be a well worked technology.It has the Mini DisplayPort connector which is a patented Apple product which it licences for free,it supports HDMI,VGA and DVI over this port.Thunderbolt is also said to be compatible with USB devices using adapters.Thunderbolt devices share a common connector, allowing users to daisy chain devices one after another with interoperable cables.

Moving onto USB 3.0,it has been in the talks for a lot of time now, but hasn’t exactly penetrated into the market yet. It offers a data tranfer speed of close to 5Gbps.This means one half the speed of Thunderbolt but still fast enough to copy a HD movie print to and from a user in less than a minute (Just as Thunderbolt, it has the ability to send data bi-directionally due to introduction of two new channels). As opposed to previous version of USB(i.e USB 2.0) , it does not consume energy from non-active devices.But the most important feature of USB 3.0 is its backward compatibility(compatibility with older version of the same device) which will enable it to be in a ready to use condition with the millions of computers equipped with USB ports.Ofcourse the speed obtained by USB 2.0 devices will be 10 times lesser i.e around 480 Mbps(max).

The last in this series is Firewire 800.The Firewire technology was developed by Apple.The Firewire 800 is a IEEE standard 1394b which has a speed of about as high as twice as much as USB 2.0,this is still atleast 5 times slower than USB 3.0 and 12 times slower than Thunderbolt. The Firebolt uses minimum cpu memory as it does not require a bus master for functioning.Firewire devices are generally used where the latency required is higher (Example:Sound Card).

It still remains to be seen as to which of the technology will win this race but the competition is only going to get tougher with the likes of Wireless Usb still to enter the arena.