Five Firefox Add-ons to Save You Time

One of the main appeals of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser is the huge library of add-ons you can use to customize your Web browsing. This article will go over five features I recommend to save time and effort. Four are add-ons, and one is the Google Toolbar.

Why should you care about tricks to save little bits of time here and there? It all adds up over the course of a day, or week, or year. In "The Pursuit of Happyness," Will Smith's character, Chris Gardner, realizes he can save eight minutes a day by not hanging up the phone during a series of cold calls to financial firms. He also avoids drinking water to cut down on bathroom breaks. I'm not advocating that you plan out every second of your day, but there's nothing wrong with saving time.

1. Signature
This little gem is one of my favorite Firefox extensions. It allows you to store snippets of text and access them by right-clicking in your browser window. If you find yourself often typing in the same bit of text over and over again, this is for you. You can store HTML code, several e-mail signatures, a favorite quote or any other bit of text you can think of.

2. Auto Copy
Auto Copy is simple. Anytime you select text in Firefox, it automatically copies it. No need for CTRL-C or, even worse, clicking "Copy" under the "Edit" menu. It also keeps a list of recently copied items in a menu available by right-clicking in your Firefox window.

3. Mouse gestures
Mouse gestures allow you to navigate among Web sites, open and close tabs, refresh pages and more, all with a flick of the wrist. If you've used the Opera Web browser before, you'll recognize this feature.

4. Google Toolbar
Google Toolbar gives you two great time-saving features in one. One is AutoFill. With AutoFill, you enter information that you would commonly be asked for in Web forms, such as your name, e-mail address, postal address and more. When you start using a Web form, clicking the AutoFill button will, as the name suggests, automatically fill in the form blanks for you. Blanks that AutoFill can fill in are marked in yellow on the Web page.

The second time-saving feature of Google Toolbar I'll mention here is the opportunity for synchronizing bookmarks. If you have the toolbar installed on both your home computer and your work computer, for example, you never have to bookmark anything twice, or e-mail yourself links from one place to the other.

5. DownThemAll
DownThemAll is a handy feature that lets you download all of the pictures and links on a Web page at once. See a cool page of photos and don't feel like right-clicking each one and choosing "Save image?" DownThemAll can do the dirty work for you. Also, it's a nice download manager, allowing you to resume downloads if your connection is interrupted before they finish.