I can quite honestly say that I’ve always been a big fan of FireFox, it’s quick, easy to use and it has a massive amount of add-ons that you can use to help you out with many a situation from simply browsing the internet to helping you out with your blogging, yes you read that right, there are several FireFox Add-Ons, that I personally use that you can use to help with your blogging.

So here in this post I bring you a list of the FireFox Add-Ons that I find useful, some at first you may not think they will help out you out with your blogging, but you will see that there is a method in my madness
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So the other day I got that little box in my browser saying that the new version of FireFox (version 3.6) was ready to update on my computer, so I opted to get the update and start using the latest version of FireFox, my prefered browser

Suffice to say that FireFox 3.6 runs a lot faster than the earlier version and my browsing has become quicker, but not only that but I discovered a FireFox Plugin called “Personas for FireFox”

So I decided to check them out and find out what they were and to put it simply they allow you to simply and quickly change the look of your FireFox browser or in other words change your browser theme.

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Now recently on the advice from ExtremeJohn on his post about StumbleUpon I decided to join, downloaded the handy FireFox plugin and set on my merry way of Stumbling on sites, blogs etc that I was visiting and enjoying!

Then lo and behold the other day I had an email informing me that my account had been suspended, banned from Stumbleupon, don’t ask me why, I’ve no idea, I was clicking the “Thumbs Up”  in the Toolbar of sites I like, not doing anything wrong there surely!

I even sent StumbleUpon a message via their feedback option, as mentioned in their email, but nothing, no response at all! So if this is the way that they treat users, then as far as I’m concerned then they do indeed suck big time, I have surfed today and found several bloggers that have had similar problems, my advice to anyone wanting to use StumbleUpon is DON’T, use BlogEngage instead, where you get a response when needed, not just ignored

There you go, rant over!

So the other day I noticed that my FireFox was letting me know that V3.5 was ready to download and upgrade, great I thought the next version which had been promised to be faster that previous incarnations of the browser.

Without any hesitation I updated my Firefox to 3.5 and found several thing straight away!

For starters a few plugin that I use were not compatible with 3.5 and were disabled, not too much of a fuss as there were only two that wouldn’t work one was the Microsoft .NET framework assistant and the other was the EntreCard Toolbar, now the toolbar is something that I do use, so not been able to use it has caused a drop in my EC, but I’ve had to resort to the original method of dropping, for now anyway.

The other thing I noticed after running Firefox 3.5 for the first time is that it’s faster, not turbo fast, but as least twice as fast as the earlier version which has made my browsing that bit faster.

So here’s a run down from the Firefox site on what’s new:

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the earlier version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

So far everything is running great, I have noticed an increase in speed on sites that I used to visit and this is great, if your not too fussy about your plugin and can wait for the updates to arrive then I would recommend updating now, if you are concerned with your plugins, then just give it a little longer and then upgrade, by which time those plugin should have upgrade

I was going through my bookmarks recently on FireFox and noticed some handy sites that I would like to share with all my readers, you may already know about some of these already, but, for those that haven’t seen these sites then they are certainly worth checking out and may even help with your future endeavours with your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Firstly a great little website, but not to take to seriously is PageRank Prediction the title says it all really, it’s a simple pagerank checker, just enter your website address and the site will try to give you your pagerank on the next Google PageRank update, I’ve found it to be around 80% accurate though, so give it a whirl!

Next is the first in the “Graders” websites, the Website Grader measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

The second “Grader” is one which is quite fun and is the Twitter Grader, will give you a grade out of 100, show followers, following, Summary of the Twitter, history and tweet cloud, all good fun and useful tool to see what a new follow is really doing!

Finally a website tool for those of you trying to improve your websites keywords, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, is a must, just type in the keywords that you would like to improve on and Google will search through it’s database and try to give you a good selection of keywords that may help improve your keyword on your post or website, I do find this very useful for some posts and it has improved my posts in the past, it may even help you with Google Adsense, but it is trial and error, so give it a go.

Following on from previous posts about using Twitter, I would like to introduce you to some of the plugins for FireFox that I use or have used that I may think you will find useful when using Twitter.

Not only can you install a player that will enable you to control you music that you are listening to, but also, by installing TwittyTunes you can post to your twitter via a handle plugin than adds an icon n the bottom right of your FireFox browser where you can post text and text with a url of the page/site you are currently browsing, also if you do have FoxyTunes installed as well you can post the track that you are currently listening to.

PowerTwitter – Now this is a plugin that I personally like, it will improve the look of the pages at Twitter.com by giving them a helping hand by adding the following to the Twitter web interface:

-search and recent searches
-search scoped to a specific user
-status history peeking on mouseover
-Facebook status updates
-inline YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic, Google Maps, song.ly, and more
-url expansion
-url translation to page titles
-open web update (news feed) mapping
-custom settings
-@mentions
-photo uploading
-link shrinking
-#hashtags

Twitbin – This will add a sidebar on to FireFox showing your conversations, so you can keep on top of what’s going on, it enables you to send messages, receive messages, share links, and more all from your browser, simple to use.

Twitzer – Ever get fed up of only having 140 characters to tweet with? Well with Twitzer you can, you can post your tweets longer than that limited 140 characters, but isn’t only having 140 characters part of the fun

Please follow me on Twitter (I follow back)

After checking my Firefox add-ons for updates, I was told that the EntreCard toolbar had an update, cool, so I updated it!

Didn’t see much difference at first, but then, after clicking on an options box in the add-ons section I noticed that now you have several options.

After clicking the options box I was shown the options available:

As you can see from the options above you now have the ability to skip sites that you have already dropped on, this save a heck of a lot of time, as before all the sites would be shown, which was a real pain in the rear

Also you can now hide the toolbar on non EC sites as well as choose how many tabs to open, these small tweaks help the dropping of cards a lot more, so if you have Firefox and use EntreCard then download the new update of the toolbar as soon as you can..