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

• Find Toolbar and Searchbar Merger - use the power of the find Toolbar inside the searchbox to find and highlight the searchterms in the page(a bit like SearchWP does, but with quickfind added)
• Chronological Searchbox History - for recent searches in the builtin searchbox to be sorted in the order you searched for them (like Google Toolbar does), plus the ability to choose them from the dropdown list (using the now hidden dropmarker) without running the search automatically.
• Tab Scroller Everywhere - scroll between tabs in the tab bar even when hovering on other toolbars (like the navigation, address and menu bars) and so move quicker without the need to put the mouse pointer on it exactly.
• AllTabs - A clean and simple extension to view all tabs opened in Firefox in a single tab as thumbnail view, like the IE7 "Quick Tabs (Ctrl+Q)". Firefox currently has only hover-preview extensions like cooliris and tab preview. There is already foXpose which is actually where IE7 got the "Quick Tabs" Idea.
• ClearLens - A simple zoom-on-hover (mouse over) feature for images. Just mouse over a image for few seconds or simply shift+click to zoom-in, ctrl+click to zoom out, alt+click to reset to 100%. Image Zoom Look up
• AutoComplete - Like the spell check option, I was thinking of a good extension, that would work the same way, but as you start to type it would give you word suggestions. So it would suggest the right word before you misspell it.
• Like the spell check option, a grammar check would be just as helpful.
• The Bookmarks tool bar would be great to type in with my IGoogle page. is there any way someone could make it happen?
• Web Content Aggregator: an extension that retrieves several parts of pages on the Web, putting all of them on a single custom page (a kind of Netvibes in a more generic way).
• Tab Grouping Extension Ideas
• Jesse Ruderman's Extension Ideas
• Toolbar Switch - Switch between various tool bars by substituting one for another always using the same space. For example: by pressing a button it would substitute the bookmarks tool bar by the web developer tool bar putting it where bookmarks tool bar was. (note this already exists as Custom Buttons button - the toolbar Manipulator Button - User, however, has to insert toolbars directly into the code himself...)
• 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). Lockup.
  • Three sections: podcasts, a play list 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 applications), 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.
• Adobe Flash Action scripting search bar. It could search sites like dreamincode.com and the official adobe sites. i know this would save me hours (literally) if i had one. And please add a way to select your version of action scripting. (or at least in a later version)
• IE cloak. At my school, Firefox isn't really aloud. Maybe someone could make a button that when pressed it will hide all extra tool bars and icons as well as disguise the browser to look like IE 6.0 or 7.0.... so it would look exactly like IE. but after the press of a button or key combination it will bring it back.
• Developer extension to emulate different bandwidth speeds. Perhaps implemented as a Firebug extension
• Define rules for custom context menu items. Would have a little console to write little javascripts or define bookmarklets to execute. These are defined for different DOM elements so when I click an image, for example, give me the option to add it to my Photobucket account".
• Don't play sound coming from one tab when I'm viewing a different tab, especial with flash sounds

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.

• Lockup

Some 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 FF allows text search (forward-backward) in XML files too (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 (advertisements etc). I guess this idea is somewhat similar to Aardvark Add-On (?!)

• Cursor Style or Tool tip for JavaScript Links
  • Usually i right click to open links in a new tab (hope it is not only me!), but links using javascript (pop-up) opens a blank page instead. If there's a tool tip or change in cursor style denoting that, we can avoid opening the javascript links (pop-up) in a new tab.

• A nice option in IE, wish to see the same in FF too
  • When there are add-ons to be installed from a site, security options appear to enable installation form the site. As soon as the user enables it, IE automatically reloads the page again whereas FF does not do so. It is kind of confusing to new users, they kind of keep staring at the page. Probably not an idea for an Add-on but i guess FF must consider this.

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.

• • • By jmkovey***

My top add-on would be having a to-do list that could come up as a sidebar. It would be nice if this could have a form that you could automatically add an event to Google calendar. I would like the to-do list to be stored so that no matter what, it will be there when I start up. Obviously it'd be nice to be able to set priority or due date and be easy to add/delete entries.

• Stacked Tickers: Instead of having all your feeds scrolling in the same ticker space, have several tickers stacked at the bottom of the screen, with different feeds in each one. These could be arranged by themes, so that one displays "News", another for "Tech Updates" etc., according to the user's preferences. -Dimatrix

• Date awareness for news sites: When a news article is displayed, a small box could pop up in the bottom corner stating "This was published on {date}". My gripe is with the BBC on this one; their "Related Articles" list often links to OLD NEWS, but this isn't made apparent. You could click twice and be staring at years-old material: not ideal if you are searching for current information. -Dimatrix

• aamir_raza60@hotmail.com* 'Windows-Live plug in': Compact mode of Windows Media Player in status bar.

[Teet Eomäe] add-on ideas

• Software for Firefox and plugin-s settings - like "foxettings" :)
• Also is good to have "company rules for settings and plugins" on install
• "Send Page via email" is still missing - this is not new idea :)

• Windows Vista has not been the greatest performing OS but it had some good ideas. Anyone know how they do the window select where all your windows turn sideways and you can scroll through them? Is it possible to put that into an add-on for tabs?

• Opera web browser has a neat feature called speed dial. You can put your favorite websites into 9 boxes and when a blank tab is created or there are no tabs, the speed dial page shows up. Also if you are browsing and you don't want to open a new tab to access it you can type in the number of the web page you want to go to (1-9)into the address bar and it will take you there as well. Can something to that effect be put into add-on form?

-Roboticmayhem

[keen101's idea]

I think it'd be cool to have a "major news" add-on.

where when something major happens like 9-11, the add-on is connecting to multiple news sites, and when the same "title" or subject appears in all or multiple, it selects a video to automatically open and stream.

Therefore you get to see major news WHEN it happens.