Cool Firefox Add-On

I bumped into a cool extension/add-on for the Firefox browser the other day.

If you are like me you like your favicons. You know, those icons you see next to the URL in the browser and then in your favorites or bookmarks. I love these things because I can find a link in my favorites much faster by looking for the little icon than I can by reading the text. Right now I'm looking at the orange Blogger.com "B" and I would not mistake it for anything else.

A lot of websites don't have favicons or don't have good ones, or use the same ones for the whole site when I tend to bookmark different areas of larger sites like adobe.com.

The utility I found is Favicon Picker 2 by Robert LaFont, Jr. and can be found in the firefox add-ons list at Mozilla.com or by going directly to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3176

Once you install this add-on and restart firefox, changing your favicons is incredibly easy. Just go to your bookmarks, right-click on the bookmark you want to change and go to properties. In properties you see a new set of controls allowing you to Erase the favicon or Browse for a new one. Simply choose a 16x16 px gif, jpg, or png file and you now have a new icon for it everywhere your bookmark appears.

Here's one example of how I have used it.

I spend a lot of time going to http://www.adobe.com/devnet which is the Adobe Developer Connection (formerly the Adobe Developer Center formerly the Macromedia Developer's Network, thus devnet). This portion of Adobe's web site has TONS of information on using Dreamweaver, Flash, Flex, ColdFusion and so on, and so on.

Rather than just bookmark the home page and navigate to the particular product or technology I'm interested in, I have bookmarks for each of the product or technology centers. While Adobe has their logo as the favicon for each portion of their site. This does nothing to speed up getting to the topics I want.

I noticed that the Adobe home page now has little icons for many of their products in a list on the left. I used Firefox's Page Info... option found in the Tools menu to grab each of these images. They were all just a little too big, so I fired up Adobe Fireworks CS3 and reduced them the appropriate 16x16px and saved them as nice little Fireworks PNG files.

Now not only can I find my topics faster, My bookmark lists are a lot prettier too. What can I say... I'm a graphics geek.

--Rich