Review: TwitterFox, a Firefox Add-on

One of my new favorite Firefox add-ons is TwitterFox, a small plug-in that lets you use the social networking site Twitter from your Firefox browser. The latest version as of this writing, 1.7, was released earlier this month, and since it was first released it has been downloaded more than 375,000 times, according to the Firefox Add-on site.

First, an explanation for those who are not familiar with Twitter: it's a site that lets you "micro-blog," or post updates of 140 characters or less. You can follow other people's updates and gain a following of your own. There are a number of Twitter programs and widgets that let you put your updates - called "tweets" - in your blog, your Facebook profile and a number of other places. You can check it out here.

TwitterFox is an add-on for Mozilla's Firefox browser. Once installed, it puts a small blue Twitter icon in the status bar at the bottom of your Firefox window. You give it your Twitter username and password and it automatically pulls in all of your updates and your friends' updates for you.

The biggest benefit of this is that you do not ever have to actually go to Twitter's Web site to check for your latest updates. This is especially great if you want to use Twitter on the sly at the office, without everyone around you seeing your updates.

Simply clicking the TwitterFox icon in Firefox will pull up your latest updates. You can update your own tweets as well as reply to others' and send messages directly to other users.

When new tweets come in, TwitterFox will pop up a small box at the bottom of your Firefox window.

TwitterFox is very customizable. You can change how often it checks for tweets (from every three minutes to every 30 minutes), you can use it to manage multiple Twitter accounts (swapping between them with only a couple of clicks), you can make it a play a sound with new updates and you can control how long the new-updates box stays up

There is, I think, one significant drawback - you can't customize the color scheme. That's certainly not a dealbreaker, but the electric blue wears on the eyes after a while, and it would be nice to change it.

Other than that, I recommend TwitterFox for anyone using Firefox and Twitter.