I stumbled upon a blog written by a third-year law student where he outlines some top Firefox browser add-ons that grant him more efficient online researching. Reading through this list, I think you’ll find it’s not just relevant to academia, but to researching online as whole.
I’ve already been using the #16 add-on – Delicious bookmarks – for months and love how it allows me to instantly add and tag any Web site I’m looking at into DataJoe’s del.icio.us account (which you can access along the right-hand side of this blog). I think I’ll be trying out #10 – Read It Later and #19 Clipmarks soon.
Another Firefox feature that I’ve come across that’s not mentioned here is Ubiquity. While it’s currently a Mozilla labs experiment, it’s still a lot of fun to play with.
Essentially, in some hopefully non-techy terms, Ubiquity allows you to not just search the Web, but tell it what to do. If you come across an interesting article online and want to e-mail it to a friend, you can use a command on your keyboard (such as Ctrl+spacebar), open up a small Ubiquity window and type in “email to (name of contact)” Ubiquity will then open up your e-mail program and create that e-mail.
That is just one of the many examples of things Ubiquity can do. You can also instantly add maps and reviews to e-mails, translate languages on pages and more. Below is a video of all that it can do so far. And because it’s in Labs, that means they’re still working on it so now is a great time to check it out and offer suggestions for what more it can do.
Granted, it takes a little bit of learning to figure out exactly how to use the commands to tell Ubiquity what to do, but I think it’s a tool that could have great benefits for not only researchers, but web developers.
So, check these add-ons out and please leave some comments to let us know your thoughts – what works well for you and are there any other browser tools out there that grant you more efficient researching?
