There is a great variety of mouse gesturing extensions available for Firefox that you can choose from to suite your needs. Here I am listing the five most useful extensions that will come handy for all the Firefox users that want to control everything with the little magic of a mouse and impress their friends or colleagues with the control they have got over that little input device called a “mouse”. As usual, I will highlight the pros and cons of each of the extensions, but the final decision of course rests with you to pick the one’s that best suite you needs.

1. All-in-One Gestures

This is a very popular choice among Firefox users. Supports standard mouse gestures (inherits code from the Mouse Gesture extension listed below but probably from an older version of it), rocker gestures, mouse wheel gestures, scroll wheel navigation and auto scrolling. It do not supports defining gestures with diagonal mouse movements. Development seems to be ceased on this one for quite some time now.

2. Mouse Gestures

All-in-One Gesture and this one Mouse Gestures are probably the most popular Firefox extensions for gesture support. It is similar in many ways to All-in-One Gestures and this is no surprise because that extension inherits code from Mouse Gestures. However there are two key features here that are missing in the All-in-One Gestures. First is the permission of diagonal mouse movements when defining a mouse gesture and second is the assignment of a custom code snippet action to a newly defined mouse gesture. Second advantage is very important from an extensibility point of view as it will allow to define actions that are not already provided to assign to a mouse gesture.

3. Fire Gestures

This extension is one of my new favorites and why not? because it is  provided by Gomita the person behind the Scrapbook and Tab Scope extensions. This is newest of all the extensions listed here. In many ways it is similar to Mouse Gestures in that you can define regular mouse gestures, Rocker Gestures, Wheel Gestures and Tab Wheel Gestures. Also supports diagonal mouse movements when defining mouse gestures. As with the Mouse Gestures a user can assign custom java script snippet to a mouse gesture. However, one thing that stands out is it’s support of Keypress gestures that allows to execute a gesture while holding a keyboard key (Ctrl, Shift).

For example take a look at an example below as I have Ctrl key pressed and then I have hovered over all the image links that I want to save in the Google image search(note the red trail) , when I will release Ctrl key , the associated action will executed and all the images that I have hovered over will be saved. Of course you can hover over any number of images links (or any other kind of link) that you want to save. There is another similar Keypress gesture provided to open all hovered links in new tabs and is executed in a similar fashion, for that you will have to press the Shift key instead of Ctrl key. Using Keypress gestures to save links is a unique feature, and I have not seen it in any other extension so far. I hope that in the future author will provide further keys to define more Keypress gestures or allow to customize them.

*** Please note that in the above example I am using a tweak that links the thumbnails in the Google Image search directly to the original images. By default image thumbnails are not pointing directly to the original images.

4. Drag de Go

Drag De Go is unique among all the listed extension in the sense that it allows to execute context sensitive Drag&Drop gestures, for example you want to search selected text in the current tab, no problem just drag and drop the mouse in the upward direction(or in any other direction that you have configured in preferences) and search results through Google will open in new tab. In my opinion, D&D gestures are easier to learn, memorize and more intuitive for new users.

Also supports a number of other features such as setting up predefined folders for gestures to save images and text snippets. For example, I have setup a downward D&D mouse gesture to save the current image in a predefined folder and another upward D&D gesture to save the selected text snippet in current Firefox tab to a folder. You can read more details about this extension in one of my previous articles.

5. Easy Gestures

Easy Gestures takes yet another route to provide mouse gesturing support in Firefox, that is in the form of a pie-menu. Pie menu pops up in the current browser tab when a defined button is pressed for example the middle mouse button. To perform a gesture to execute an action just guide the mouse through the visible pie menu and release the mouse when you are at the desired action that you want to perform. Main advantage of these kind of gestures is that no memorization effort on the user side to perform a gesture because of the visual aid.

This is a large extension and supports a wide variety of features. Some of the more important features of the Easy Gestures are listed below:

• 3 main pie menu views extended with 3 extra views, each with a different set of actions fully customizable
• Customizable pie menu layout with many built-in actions
• Possibility to launch external applications and execute scripts
• Direct URL typing within the pie menu in its integrated location bar
• Possibility to open your favorite bookmarks from the pie menu
• Contextual pie menu behavior fully customizable

That’s all folks, if you think that I missed on some important mouse gestures related extension, then let me know. If you are curious, I am personally using the 3rd and 4th from this list in my own Firefox profile.

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But one of the problems of installing many extensions to extend the Firefox functionality is that browser will start to slowdown after you have installed too many extensions. So I thought an idea to bring you the some tiny extensions that will have minimal impact on the performance of the Firefox after installation but still provide some very useful functionality that is not available originally in Firefox. I have used the term tiny because all of the extensions I have listed here are about 20 KB or even less in size and mostly they are created with a specific task in mind rather than to cover an entire array of features(remember TabMixPlus?).

This list is sorted on the extension sizes(as of the current latest version till this writing). Please note that exact extension sizes can vary version to version so take them as just an approximate measure. It is also worth mentioning that all of the extension are personally tested and used by myself on more or less regular basis. Not all extension will work by-default in Firefox 3.0 nightlys but to force compatibility you can always use Nightly Tester Tools.

Lest start the countdown…

1. Oldbar 

In Firefox 3.0 Mozilla has changed the style of URL bar from displaying single-line(or row) addresses and other information for each entry to two-lines to display each entry. Now first-line shows the icon and title of the website in question and the second line displays website address. But not everyone is pleased with this move because this new styling of URL bar consumes more space to show the same number of addresses. In case you don’t like the new look of URL bar you can easily revert to the Firefox 2.0 style of consuming a single line/row to show a single website addresses, it’s title and icon.

2. ColoUnREaDTabs

This is also a very simple extension that colors the newly opened tabs that have loaded but still unread. Red color and italic font style is used to differentiate these tabs from the normal read tabs.

3. FileTitle

By default in Firefox when a webpage is saved by using the Save Page as option in the File menu, Firefox will save it as “index.htm” unless user changes the name to same meaningful name in the context of the current page. This is very annoying if you want to save a lot of pages this way because each time you will have to fill-out the proper html name manually. FileTitle saves the day by pre-filling the file name field using the HTML Title tag of the currently loaded page. Now you will just have to press the Save button in the Save dialog without the need to fill-out a proper name for the page you are going to save. This behavior is by default already there in Internet Explorer though.

4. Extended Statusbar

Displays some useful statistics related to the currently loading page such as Image Count , Webpage Size(loaded so far), Average Speed and Page Loading Time. This is similar to how opera displays stats in the URL bar.

5. Context Search

Allows to search for currently selected text from the Firefox main context-menu. It will automatically load all the installed search engines in the current Firefox installation and populate the context-menu.

6. Highlighter

Highlight any word or phrase in the current webpage using any of the five pre-configured colors in the extension. Highlighting colors can customized. Access is easy through a toolbar button or you can access the highlighting feature from the context-menu.

7. External Application Buttons Mod

This extension allows to launch external windows application from with-in the Firefox by allowing to create customized buttons that are created specifically to launch an application. I have already written in detail about the use and features of this extension in a previous article.

8. Ctrl-Tab

Ctrl-Tab allows to pimp-up the Ctrl+Tab switching feature by providing a visual preview of all the opened tabs in the current Firefox window. Also adds a button to the right-side of the tabbar to access the tab catalogue. When accessed by using the button on the tabbar, a user can also dynamically filter the tabs in the catalogue based on the currently opened webpage’s titles in the current Firefox window.

9. BugMeNot

This is a very useful extension if you regularly visit a lot of password protected websites that will not allow you to access any contents without a compulsory registration process. You can bypass this annoying registration process on most of these kind of websites by using the BugMeNot Firefox extension. You can also manually acquire login and password information for these websites from the BugMeNot website but this extension automates the whole process and is faster and more convenient to use.

10. Bazzacuda Image Saver

This is somewhat a unique extension that allows to automatically save all the open/loaded images in tabs of the current Firefox window to a user specified folder and will optionally close all those image tabs as well after-words. I can imagine that some people will really love it to quickly save a lot of images that they have opened in different tabs.

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1. CloseMany

This utility allows to close/kill multiple process in one go. Just select all the processes in the list-box that you want to close and press the Close or the Kill button. A user can also restart a process if desired. Process related controls are available in the first tab. You can also control the system services installed in the Windows system from the second tab. All usual windows services related options are available(start, stop, restart, auto, manual, Demand). Advantage is the same that you can select multiple services and perform the desired operation rather than to select each service one by one and enable/disable it(as you do in the services applet in the Windows Control Panel).

2. GoneIn60s

Allows to recover the closed programs when running in the background. To recover right-click the tray icon and choose an application to recover that, double-click the tray icon to recover all the closed applications. Very useful if you unintentionally closed a running application.

3. IdleRun

Run a program or show a message when the CPU is in idle-state. You can set the Idle Duration and CPU Threshold. This utility may be useful if you want to run some housekeeping tasks but they are processor intensive for example to run a virus scanner to scan the local hard-drives, system de-fragmentation software, content indexing or some other computation intensive tasks when there is no CPU activity.

4. Desktop!

Give the desktop it’s own taskbar button! You can Click it, Alt-Tab to it, or drag files to it to show or hide the desktop. I am sure it will be useful if we get used to it.

5. RunSaver

This is a special screensaver that will run a command when run. If you can figure-out its use?

6. ShortCutter

It makes auto-updating collection of shortcuts of chosen file types from a folder. It is very configurable and you have to define some rules before it properly works. Rules can be defined in the Rules tab of the interface. In each rule you define you will specify the following:

- Source – Where files are located for which you want to create shortcuts to

- Target – Where auto-updating shortcuts will be placed

- Files – Which files types you want to create shortcuts for (wild-cards supported)

- Ignore – What sub-strings (parts of the filename) to ignore

- Recurse – If it should recurse subdirectories?

From the Rules tab each defined rule can be enabled or disabled. A timer option is also available to specify the amount of time after it will check for new eligible files in the source folder to have a shortcuts in the target folder. ShortCutter can be globally enabled/disabled from the traybar menu as well.

7. MoveOut

MoveOut can be used to move files from  one folder on your hard-drive to another automatically based on the rules you define as in the case of ShortCutter. You can define new rules in the Rules tab of the Settings. For each rule defined you will specify the following:

- Source – Source where the files are located now

- Target – Destination folder where files will be moved

- Files – Which files types you want to move(wild-cards supported)

- Ignore – What sub-strings (parts of the filename) to ignore

- Replace – What to do if a file already exists at the destination?

All the created rules can be disabled/enabled on individual basis. An interval can be specified in the settings which governs that how often the files will checked to be moved from the source to the destination. Moving feature can also be enabled/disabled on global basis from the traybar menu.

This utility can be useful in couple of scenarios I think for example, consider you are downloading some files from the Internet on to your desktop. By using this utility you can define rules to copy all video files to your video collection and all the software to the software collection directory. 

8. BlockInput

BlockInput will block all the input devices (keyboard, mouse etc.) when you press a defined hotkey(default is Ctr+Q) for a specified amount of time. Time interval can be specified in the settings and after that time-period has elapsed, all the input devices will be unlocked.

9. URLHistory

Watches the clipboard for web addresses and saves them with a comment(optional). Whenever a URL will be copied to the clipboard a dialog box will appear that will allow to enter a comment for the current URL to be saved with it. These URLs along with the comments are saved in the ‘URLHistory.htm’ file. You can also access the URL’s copied so far from the traybar menu. A URL can also be manually entered from the traybar menu.

This one may come handy when you need to copy a lot of URL addresses but from different websites that are not at one place and as a bonus will you will be able to enter descriptive comments.

10. ReRun

Allows to run a startup program that is not running now. This is very useful in some situations where you have a lot of programs specified in the windows startup but you want to play a resource/memory intensive game. Then you can simply close those heavy-duty programs from the traybar(to free up system resources) and play your game. After you are finished simply execute the ReRun to restart all the startup programs that you had closed. I personally use it sometimes for a similar purpose.

11. WinWarden

Automatically control how to display a window. Can control the following attributes of a window:
- Move, maximize, minimize, restore, enable, disable, hide, show, ontop, bottom, alwaysontop, clip, transparent, transparent color, move relative to another window, stick to the edge of the screen, center, run a program.
- Double-click trayicon to center the active window.

12. DeskLock

Prevents the moving of desktop icons. Double-Click the tray icon to Disable/Enable. Also has an option to disable left drag and right mouse button.

13. NoClose

Disable the Close button (X) of selected windows. Maybe useful to prevent an important application from an accidental close.

14. RandomScreenSaver

Well this one is a screensaver of screensavers! I mean it allows to automatically change the current screensaver after every X minutes of time. Installation is simple as any other screensaver, select Install from the Windows explorer context-menu and configure it like any other screensaver using Start – Settings – Control Panel – Screen – ScreenSaver.

In the options you can set the change interval, Running order (random, alphabetical) etc. All the currently installed screensavers are enumerated in the Screensavers tab and you can checkmark the screensavers incase you want to ignore some of these from inclusion. This one will really save you from getting bored to watch the same screensaver run again and again or manually change it each time you want to.

15. CacheSort

Automatically moves files from Internet Explorer’s cache into folders based on a file’s extension. It is very handy for extracting movies, songs(mp3), flash and other files from the Internet Explorer cache. Features include:

- Can be used to watch other folders.
- Only move files bigger than a given value.
- Run a program when a new file is found.
- Move or copy files.

By default it extracts multimedia and graphics files from the Internet Explorer cache and copies them in to sub-folders created in a folder named CacheSort in the root of C drive.

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10. MyAvatars

This plugins fetches those colorful avatars of users commenting on your blog from their MyBlogLog profile and displays them along with the comments from the users. Even if a user is not registered this plugin will display a generic avatar. When clicked on a commenter’s avatar it will take directly to his profile on the MyBLogLog. It may not be vital but it sure will bring liveliness to your blog and make it much more interesting to read comments along with the distinct gravatar for a commenter that virtually may be portraying his personality.

9. Subscribe to Comments

I am sure that some commenters will thank you a lot after you install this plugin because not every one wants the burden to continuously peek in the comments section of a post that interests him on your blog just to see that if a new comment is posted. Using this plugin they will be able to subscribe to the new comments on a post/story via their email address. Whenever a new comment is posted they will be notified through email. It may be particularly useful for popular posts which have lots of comments and users are posting comments on that story for a longer period of time.

8. Full Text Feed

You can use the more directive in your post to split the post and user then have to click on the more link to read the rest of the story . But a side effect to it is that your post is also split in the feed that is generated from your blog even if you want it or not! This may not be the desired behavior for some bloggers as they just want to split posts in their actual blog not in the feed generated from it. There is no easy way in WordPress to disable this behavior unless you use the Full Text Feed plugin. Actually the use of this plugin depends upon the preference of an individual blogger that if he/she wants to show the full contents of the blog in the feed or want to force the user to click on the more link in the feed to view the full contents on his actual blog. I use this plugin on my site, because I feel that RSS subscribers to my blog deserve the full contents. It is a just a matter of opinion however. Please note that some bloggers may be forced to use partial feeds to avoid the nasty web scrapping sites that are so prevalent these days.

7. Simple Tags

This plugin has a large feature set but every thing it does has to do something with the tags as implied from the name. Its utility might have decreased a bit after the introduction of native tagging support in the newer WordPress 2.3 version. But still it has a lot to offer and it builds its advanced features on the buit-in tagging support of newer WordPress. Some of the features are:

- Auto tags

- Auto link tags in post content

- Importer for embedded tags

- Type-ahead input tags / Auto completion

- Click tags

- Edit mass tags (more than 50 posts once)

- Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors with Widgets (random order, etc)

- Possibility to add related posts inside RSS

It may cause performance hit on some blogs because of the large feature set but the latest version does have some performance improvements.

6. wp-cache

wp-cahce builds static pages from the contents of your blog and serve a cached static page if it is available to improve performance rather than to process the PHP code and compile the whole page again by fetching the contents from the linked My SQL database. This can reduce load on the database as well and more importantly it will be able to serve hundreds of more pages than without the wp-cache, because it will be able to serve static cached pages in many cases rather than to build the pages from scratch dynamically. If your site attracts a lot of traffic on the daily basis or you are expecting a Digg effect then this plugin will ensure that your blog is not collapsed under the massive load from a large spike in traffic directed to your site.

5. WordPress Database Backup

It cannot be over emphasized that you must backup your WordPress installation on regular basis. To some people this apparently may seem a chore to waste time on the backup when there is no apparent need. But I can tell you that you never know that when something worse happens and then you will badly regret why you have not backed up when it was time. There are two phases to the complete WordPress installation backup, first is the backup of all the website installation files and the second aspect is the backup of the MySQL database. You can backup site’s files locally using an FTP client. For the database you can use the WordPress Database Backup plugin. Although you can use the PhpMyAdmin interface to do this as well but I think for many people this plugin may be much more convenient to use. Particularly because it provides some useful additional features such as scheduling for the database backup task and emailing the backup to your provided email address. By default it only selects the core WordPress MySQL database tables for backup but you can add additional tables for example tables added by the installed plugins in  your WordPress installation.

4. All in one SEO Pack

If you want to monetize your site than SEO is critical and this where All in one SEO Pack comes in. For many users this may be the only plugin that they need to optimize their site for the SEO and hence increase the traffic and boost their earning potential. It will automatically optimize your site’s page/post titles , home title, home description, category titles , search title and many more for the SEO. No need to do these things manually as before. An important point is that it can automatically set noindex attribute for the categories, archive and optionally for tag archives that may be useful to instruct goolge bots to not index them, this way google bots will not detect duplicate content on your site and hence index your site properly.

3. FeedBurner FeedSmith

The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.inspiredgeek.com/feed/ or http://www.inspiredgeek.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track every possible subscriber to your blog. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well. So this way you know the actual amount of your FeedBurner subscribers.

2. Google XML Sitmaps

This plugin generates an XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog and automatically submits this to major search engines. This sitemap will help the search engines in spidering your site and hence ensure that your website is properly indexed by these search engines. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. Many aspect of the sitemap generation can be customized from the options panel.

1. Akismet

Well this plugin needs no introduction and the fact that it comes packaged with the WordPress installation files speaks volumes for its importance. This plugin actually uses Akismat online webservice against which it checks all the comments made on your blog to evaluate that if they exhibit characteristics of a spam comment and if yes marks them as spam. Millions of blogs around the world are relying on to it fight the evil spirit of spam. As I said it comes packaged with the WordPress installation you only need to give it your blog’s API key to properly activate it.

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5. Studio Press

This is a new theme released by Daily Blog Tips and has three AdSense units already integrated in to the theme. So you will only need to paste the AdSense code in to the respective php files. It is based on the three column layout and is widget ready. Welcome section on the sidebar can be customized from the theme options. This theme also supports alternate color styling for the comments to make it easy to follow the conversation. Visually theme has a clean look to it and is easy on the eyes.

4. WP Premium

Another great theme comes bundled with three color schemes(black,brown,red) and this is a distinguishing factor from all others themes mentioned here. You can easily change to the required color style from “style.css” file by changing the style name. This is also a three column theme with the support of widgets(you will see the trend here,I really like the themes with the three columns with double right sidebars). Three 100×100 pixel ad blocks are already present in the sidebar. It is W3C valid and SEO optimized. Supports multiple search options with the tabber functionality in the sidebar. With all of these options this is really a premium theme as its name implies but without any cost!

3. WP-Polaroid

This is a three column widgetized WordPress theme. It has a very catchy and professional look. In fact this is the same theme that the author is using on his own website. Polaroid in the header can be easily replaced with your own image and hence the theme’s name. Three Ad spots for the 125×125 sized Ads are pre built in the theme sidebar.My only complain with the theme is that contents area is a bit too small other than that it is a great looking theme. This theme requires the following two plugins.

- FlickRSS

- Recent Posts

2. My April Reloaded

This is a three column widget ready WordPress theme as well. Both the sidebars are on the right side.Square shaped Ad blocks can be added easily. Supports about text on the front page that can be changed via the admin profile and works on the WordPress 2.1 to 2.3. This theme also requires the popularity contest and Get Recent Comments plugins. So you should download those plugins as well if you are going to use this theme. A logo Kit is available if you want to make your own logo on the author’s website. Support for Square shaped block Ads is already there.

1. More Than Multiple Widgets

This theme apparently may look like any other WordPress theme with 2 columns layout but in fact it is unique in many ways. First of all you can customize the sidebar, header and footer using the widgets, so you no longer need to mess around with the theme files to add something in the header or the footer. There is one widget in the sidebar, two in the header and three in the footer available for the customization. That’s a lot of customization if you ask me particularly considering that in most WordPress themes you can only customize the sidebars using widgets. You can also change the fonts,colors and the background from the presentation tab in the WordPress backend GUI. AdSense can also be turned on/off from that tab. If that is not enough for you then this theme is already setup for the following WordPress plugins:

• Landing Sites
• Pagenavi
• Gravatars in Comments
• Related Posts
• Math Comment Spam Protection
• Extended Live Archives

If you are starting out a new blog and looking for a highly customizable theme then I highly recommend that you take a look at one of these. It may save you a lot of time and frustration associated with finding a perfect new theme for your blog.

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