ExtendFirefox2

Extend Firefox

Please feel free to add to this list if you have ideas for Firefox add-ons by clicking on the "edit" link. Developers interested in entering the Extend Firefox competition will be looking here for inspiration.

Some Ideas for Firefox Add-ons

• Tab Grouping Extension Ideas
• Jesse Ruderman's Extension Ideas
• Toolbar Switch - Switch between various toolbars by substituting one for another always using the same space. For example: by pressing a button it would substitute the bookmarks toolbar by the web developer toolbar putting it where bookmarks toolbar was. (note this already exists as custom button button - the toolbar manipulator button)
• Shared Tab - implement a web service and extension that allows you to open a tab that is followed and changed by all the people granted access to it.
• Web spell checker - extends spell checker to work on the text of an HTML page. This would be useful as a development tool.
• Map helper. Extends existing mapping tools (Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, etc), allowing to create custom location and route sets, which can be stored locally or even shared remotely.
• Podcast player. Adds a sidebar where live bookmarks in a specific folder are displayed and considered as podcasts (a la Sage). Mockup.
  • Three sections: podcasts, a playlist area, play controls, and currently played episode tag, if available.
  • It could use the default media plugin (Windows Media Player, QuickTime, etc.) or embed an open source player like XSPF.
  • Episodes can be downloaded automatically.
  • The podcast list will show which episodes are being downloaded and which have completed if it's the case.
  • Bonus: export as m3u list.
• Unified wysiwyg text editing environment on popular web platforms (gmail, yahoo, mediawiki, wordpress, others?). When a user edits a wikipedia page or writes an email in gmail (i.e. on a supported web platform) he is:
  • presented with the same (pretty!) interface
  • preferable keyboard commands for bold, italic, underline are the same across sites
  • interface expands with the web platforms abilities. Wikipedia has a large set of tools (that we all know from text editing apps), others less so
  • Users can (relatively) easily script their own rule sets for new, unsupported platforms
• Drag to download. Ctrl-drag a link to a file system folder to download the target. Ctrl+drag a selection to download all targets.
• Audio recorder. Grabs any audio coming from the current tab to a .wav/.ogg/.mp3 file. If support for <audio>/<video> tags land, the necessary codecs may be already available.
• Add On Synchronizer:: We should have an add-on which besides synchronizing the bookmarks, cookies, passwords etc can also synchronize the add ons. This way a user will not have to configure the Firefox every time he installs it on a different machine.

Ken Saunders Extension Idea

• Scrolling Text Extension
• Fun for everyone but highly beneficial and useful to persons with poor eyesight, dyslexia, color blindness, and other visual impairments.
• Its purpose is to display and scroll web page text content at the top of a page with various customization options available to the user such as;
  • Scroll speed and direction
  • Font size
  • Text color and background color on the scroll bar
  • settings should always persist

This concept has been researched and it is has been determined to be doable due to the existing technology that lies within extensions like CliCk Speak and Accessibar.

• Mockup

Sridhar's Idea: [anala[dot]sridhar at gmail[dot]com]

• Timed Tab
  • Opens a website (configured) in a new tab at a configured time of the day/week. Basically, this is for absent-minded people like me who forget to enter their time-sheets :-( on a daily basis . Right now, Outlook (grrr..) is helping out but still would be a nice feature on firefox.

• multiple proxy server settings
  • Though there are many extensions providing similar features, this add_on could have proxy server settings assigned for a group of websites.

• Fully Functional Search on XML or WSDL files
  • Like Text Based Search, It would be nice if firefox allows text search (forward-backword) in XML files (XQuery included?)

• Print View
  • Provide a Print View option of every page viewed, by stripping out contents not directly linked (from the same host?) to the page under purview (advertizements etc). I guess this idea is somewhat similar to Aardvark Add-On (?!)

My idea for Firefox would be to have some kind of internal demon to do ram garbage collection to prevent the thing from gobbling memory, and also to monitor cpu usage, so it stops locking up my machine if I leave it open for too many hours. [W2Ksp4] The little demon might also note whether the system is running Thunderbird concurrently, and keep an eye on him, too. Both products seem very intolerant to networking errors, locking up for long periods following channel errors. Any add-on that might turn the reliability knob up, or resource know down, or both, would be a winner in my view.

My idea is for Thunderbird (not sure if it counts here). THe idea is to be able to add an individual note to each recipient of an e-mail. This would be especially useful if BCC-ing an e-mail, then you are able to place a footnote to further explain why they have been included on the e-mail.