Mozilla Firefox is gaining popularity amongst browsers for a secure, convenient and feature-
rich browsing. One of the main reasons for its popularity is the availability of a very large number of about 5000 add-ons which allow you to customize Firefox and extend its functionality in a substantial way. Many of these add-ons have amazing 
features which are not heard of in a usual browser. At the time of writing these lines, about 1.5 billion copies of various Firefox add-ons have been downloaded and about 200 million add-ons are actually in use. I hope it will show as to how Firefox is becoming a popular browser and how useful its add-ons are. One such wonderful add-on is SmarterFox which adds several good features to your Firefox browser and moreover it speeds up your browsing and makes many tasks easier and convenient.
SmarterFox will extend the functionality of Firefox in the following tasks:
- Download all links, images, or media on a web-page by a single click from the context menu. To activate the context menu, click anywhere in the current web-page open in Firefox (see figure below). These links are downloaded in parallel which means the download will be faster thereby saving your bandwidth. For example, in the figure below, I downloaded all of about 30 images in a web page by a single click; and downloaded about 100+ links in another click.
- Save the media files on the current web-page such as Flash videos, Flash games, and Shockwave movies on YouTube site or a similar site. You can save these media files to your hard disk easily by clicking from the context menu.
- The moment you select or highlight any text on the current web-page, a popup bubble will be displayed automatically (see the following image). You can click on this popup bubble and search this selected text using Google Search, Bing Search or Twitter, etc., by a single click.
- The moment you start typing in the address-bar (URL-bar) in Firefox, Google results on the text typed by you will instantaneously and automatically show up and these Google results will keep changing faster than you type depending upon what text you have typed by that time. See the following figure, as soon as I typed password in the address-bar, Google results on this word appeared on the screen; now, if one wants – one simply click on the relevant link would display that page instead of having to type the whole phrase or site address.
- When you search some phrase in Firefox, it will display the results using your default search engine. But, the interesting thing is, on the search-results page, you’ll notice a smart bar (see image below) that will show links to other search-engines which can easily be activated by a single click on the image/name of these alternative search-engines (for example, if you are searching on Google, the alternative search would be on Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, etc.). So, you can easily switch between different search engines while searching a phrase, just with a single mouse-click.
- If the current web-page displayed in Firefox has several follow-up pages (in a multi-page article or search-result), these subsequent pages will automatically load one-by-one the moment you go towards the end of the currently displayed page, without there being any need for you to click on the link for the next page (see the adjoining image showing how the next page is automatically loaded by SmarterFox). This saves a lot of your time and is quite convenient too. For example, I searched password word in Google search in
Firefox; the Google search showed 883 million web-pages (!!!) which are displayed in the form of 10 results on each page. The moment I go towards the end of the first result-page, I don’t have to click on the next-page link or the link for the second-page. It will be automatically detected and will be loaded by SmarterFox add-on at the right time when reaching the end of the first page. It is really smart! It automatically detects when I am coming nearer the next page which is then automatically loaded. Moreover, the second page (and the next pages) will be displayed just below the first page instead of showing different page(s); this makes it possible to view several pages together in one window or one tab without there being any need to keep clicking on back-and-forward links for viewing these individual pages. This allows you to have several pages of the same article or search-result on the same page; it is nothing but convenience browsing. For example, with my above search, see in the following image, as to how SmarterFox has shown second-page just below the first page (further next pages are also down below, but not shown here):
- Automatically copy on select / paste on middle click / paste on right click (however, you’ll have to enable it in the options of SmarterFox, as it not enabled by default).
- Visit bookmarks quickly with keyboard shortcuts using qLauncher which is a part of SmarterFox. You have the flexibility of setting up your own shortcuts for your selected bookmarks. It is a powerful feature, which perhaps may require a separate article to explain. Explore the feature in detail.
- Convert text URLs into clickable links. For example, suppose in the currently displayed web-page, there is an expression which is a link to another web page, but the link is not inserted there and it is only in the form of a text. SmarterFox will convert this text into a clickable link automatically so that you can click even on this text and then go the web page concerned.
Thus, it may be seen that SmarterFox is really smart. It adds many functionalities to Firefox. However, in case you want to disable a particular feature made available by SmarterFox, it gives you options to disable it by going to Tools > SmarterFox in FireFox.
I am sure you’ll like SmarterFox. One good thing about it is its speed. It does not slow down Firefox inspite of several added features; in fact, it makes the operations faster.
Last but not the least, SmarterFox add-on is totally free, like other add-ons!
Did you like this article? To get all such articles from Tech Superb directly:
Share / bookmark this article:
Related Articles:
