CLibra’s Blog

I have to be honest – I was impressed by some of the new features showed by Google Chrome and IE8. There I said it! Yup, I was wowed by a Micro$oft product, don’t laugh. However, I swear by Firefox, and was in two minds about switching – why leave the browser I love just for some features, wait, do I choose Chrome or IE8?

After some digging, I found I didn’t have to. Here’s a roundup of the best extensions to have features from IE8 & Chrome in Firefox:

• Accelerators in IE8, those little shortcuts to web services, can be exactly replicated by IE8 Activities for Firefox – remember to install accelerators here afterwards! For the more technical minded, have a look at Operator, which focuses on Microformats to provide a similar – but more advanced – experience; as with the activities, check here to find Operator user scripts. I much prefer Operator and would recommend it, but for simple accelerators, IE8 Activities for Firefox will do fine.
• Webslices manifests as Webchunks in Firefox. How d’ya use it? Just install it, and when you land on a Webslice enabled page, Webchunks will alert you and let you subscribe to it in a special toolbar. That’s all you gotta do! You can easily keep an eye on your ’slices with a click, and the toolbar will change to visually alert you when there’s an update. Have a look at eBay’s Webslice search portal, and StumbleUpon’s Buzz Webslice.
  UPDATE: Webchunks has been updated, with a function now better than the original. You can now subscribe to any part of a webpage, regardless if it’s a coded Webslice or not. Get the latest version here.
• You may think that Chrome’s new tab interface is cool, but the original idea was actually stolen from Opera! To put it into FireFox, check out Speed Dial and Auto Dial, two extensions that work in different ways to fill blank tabs with something useful.
• The smart location bar is better known as the Awesome Bar to us Firefoxians. To add domain highlighting, install Locationbar², and site-specific browsing from Chrome can be put in a more workable form in Firefox courtesy of YubNub LocationBar (read more about how to use YubNub here), or manually add Quick Searches for your favourite sites.
• Incognito/InPrivate mode isn’t exactly reproduced for Firefox (yet), but for now we have Stealthier, an extension that disables certain browser features that leave tracks; it ain’t pretty but it works, for even more protection combine it with Tor and TorButton.
• Whilst individual tab isolation isn’t available yet, we can remove permissions from certain tabs. Tab Permissions will let you selectively remove access to Images, JavaScript, MetaRedirects, Plug-ins and Subframes, so you can take away things that will crash a tab until we get the power to separate tabs.
• Application Shortcuts, a cool feature from Chrome, sounds a lot like Prism, a project from Mozilla Labs which lets users run Webapps right from the desktop. For that streamlined creation in-browser, install Prism on your system, then add the Prism extension (Windows only) or the Spectrum Bookmarklet (cross platform). These webapps don’t get automatic offline functionality like Chrome’s unfortunately, but with Gears you can get offline access to some apps in the browser.
• Like the SmartScreen feature of IE8, which is called Safe Browsing in Chrome? This one’s baked into Firefox! Just pop open the Security Tab in Firefox’s options and make sure the options to tell you if a site is an attack site and forgery are checked. Easy as.
• Finally, Firefox’s download window can be moved into the status bar with the Download Statusbar extension. It’s not as aesthetically pleasing as Chrome’s implementation, but it does the job.

It’s surprising how fast the Firefox developer community has responded to the features from the latest browsers, although some of these features were around before Chrome and Internet Explorer hard coded them in.

Is it possible that Firefox will be able to pull of these features better? How will it affect the browser shares? Stick around to find out.