Shortcuts for commonly performed functions are beautiful things and we just found a great Firefox extension that’s going to save us a lot of time. It’s called UrlbarExt and it puts six little gray icons on the right side of your address bar. What do those buttons do? They perform in one click some common functions that would otherwise take several keystrokes.
Adam Pash over at Lifehacker unearthed this extension for a post about three as-yet unapproved (“experimental”) Firefox plug-ins. We didn’t find the other two Pash highlighted especially inspiring, but UrlbarExt rocks. Here’s what it does.
- Copy the URL you’re on to the clip board. A whole lot faster than click, drag to highlight, right click, select “copy link to clipboard.” A lot faster.
- Create an instant TinyURL link in the address bar. Super fast and smooth. We do wish this button used our favorite URL shortening service, the semantic-web lovin’ Bit.ly. We also wish we didn’t have to click on the copy link to keyboard button after creating the TinyURL – what else are we going to do with that shortcut if not paste it somewhere?
- Perform a Google site: search inside the domain you’re on. Awesome, we do this all day long and this is a big time saver.
- Go up one level in a page’s URL, or double click to go to the root URL. How often do you find a page on a site through search or a link and want to visit the home page? You can usually click on the logo or a home link, but why mess around looking when you can just double click? We’re not sure how much we’ll use this one, but we’ll see.
- Add a tag. Ads tags to the local bookmarking in your browser. Seems kinda silly.
- Anonymous surfing. Reloads a page you’re on and subsequent pages, through a proxy server. Pretty cool idea. We’d like to know more details about which service this is using before we trust it too much.
We’re not able to access any settings options for this browser extension but the plug-in page indicates that future iterations will include more user control. It’s a simple tool, but simple is good and this will make many of the things we do every day on the web faster and easier – meaning that we can focus on something else.
You’ll have to create a Mozilla account in order to access UrlbarExt, because it’s still in the “experimental” section of the plug-in site – but we think it’s well worth it to do so.
