New Extension Puts Wolfram Alpha's Peanut Butter in Google's Chocolate

Lifehacker links to an experimental Firefox extension which inserts answers from Wolfram Alpha into your Google searches. While Wolfram Alpha hasn't exactly set the Internet on fire, it does provide an interesting results when your questions have a mathematical slant. Because of this, Wolfram Alpha is less an alternative to an Internet search engine and more of a complement. That's the beauty of this extension. This add-on makes the Google page a bit too wide for my netbook's small screen but it should look nice on PCs with higher resolution screens. It should make a good addition to your search arsenal.

Tree Style Tab

Steve Gibson has been promoting some of his favorite software and utilities on his podcast and he's just uncovered a really nice one. Tree Style Tab is a new Firefox extension which allows you to change the position of the tab bar and customize it in various ways. It also makes you tabs hierarchical, when you open a links from one page in new tabs, their tabs are displayed under the original page's tab in a little tree-like structure (hence the name Tree Style Tab). This is great for organizing your open web pages. It also adds some nice features to your right-click menu like the ability to highlight several and open them all at the same time which is good for viewing image galleries or for those annoying websites break up their article pages into six or more parts to serve up more ads make them more "readable."

Another nice feature of Tree Style Tab is that it allows you take advantage of the recent trend of "wide screen" displays on laptop screens and desktop monitors. By moving the tab bar to the sides, this extension reclaims vertical space on your screen and replaces it with horizontal space which is more plentiful on most people's screens these days. This is especially true with netbooks which usually have 1024x600 screens. Finally, Tree Style Tab can be set to automatically shrink or even hide the tab bar which reclaims even more space on your screen.

Overall, Tree Style Tab is one of the best Firefox add-ons I've seen.

Update: After a couple days using Tree Style Tab, I've found that while it's a bit rough around the edges, it fits very nicely into my browsing style and really complements the way I use Firefox. For example, I use Google Reader to read blogs and it has a rather convenient "Popout" feature which allows me to open embedded videos in their own window. While this is a nice feature, Tree Style Tab can also force this new window to open as a tab which expands to the size of my existing browser window. This is good as it allows almost full screen video for older computers with flaky video drivers which sometimes gag on full-screen video. (I have an older laptop which resembles that remark. Tree Style Tab can also this for almost any kind of pop up window and I tend to find pop up tabs preferable to pop up windows.

Firefox Extensions: An Embarrassment of Riches

One of the great things about the Firefox web browser is the rich mosaic of extensions which are available for it. I recently excitedly installed an extension called Hyperwords which promises to pop up a wealth of references from any word which you highlight. It looked awesome but once I restarted Firefox and had a chance to play with it, I realized that I already have several extensions which already do much the same thing. CoolPreviews does the same thing on a smaller scale—it only pops up results from Google, Google Images, The Free Dictionary, and Wikipedia while the list of references is Hyperwords pops up is too long for me to list. But CoolPreviews also pops up a minimalist window on top of my current one with a preview of any url without opening seperate page. This is a huge time saver for me which allows me to go through web pages more quickly but it's still a duplication of functionality.

And it's not the only one. Ubiquity is also an extension which I installed enthusiastically and it too replicates a lot of the functionality of Hyperwords. But it is also one of the most ambitious extensions ever created for Firefox. Essentially a command line for the web, Ubiquity can bring up everything from maps to the weather and email, twitter, slice, and dice them in many different ways. It's tremendously fun to play with and useful and it promises to grow more sophisticated as it continues to develop.

But in the meantime, I have a growing list of extensions (twenty four in all) and Firefox no longer loads instantaneously as it did when I first installed it. In fact, it actually takes about thirty seconds to start which doesn't seem like a lot but it means that Chrome, which is Google's web browser, loads instantaneously but it lacks the powerful extensions to which I've become accustomed to on Firefox. It's an interesting conumdrum, speed versus power. It's compelling enough that I often run Firefox and Chrome side by side. But that's life on the modern Internet I guess, tons and tons of information and tons and tons of ways to use it and manipulate.