Monday, June 11, 2007

Linkwad

One of the things I love about using the Firefox web browser is that there are hundreds of ways to customize it by using what are called Extensions. An extension is a small bit of software that makes Firefox do something interesting or handy - something that it originally was not designed to do. I have lots of extensions already installed, but I found a new one this week that is wonderful.

The new extension I just discovered is called Linkwad. If you use a lot of tabbed browser windows in Firefox, you might like it too.

If you use Firefox, you know that one of its great features is tabbed browsing. You can have 2 or 3 or 10 different websites open in one window, each one with its own tab. My problem is that I have too many tabs - I have a bunch of websites that open up automatically when I start Firefox, and even on high speed it can seem to drag a bit while all those sites are loading at the same time.

With Linkwad, you can have different groups of tabs. For example, you could have one group that opens automatically when Firefox starts. Then you could have another group of sites that are all political blogs. Then you could have a different set of tabs that are all news or entertainment sites. Another group could be a set of different pre-set eBay searches. There really is no limit! All you do is create a set of tabbed sites, then save that set (each set is called a "wad") by giving it a name.

Linkwad always resides at the top of the Firefox window, and you have the command to Open a set of tabs you have already saved, Save a set of tabs you just created, or Close the current set of tabs. And of course, it is completely free.

You can read about Linkwad and download it here.

By the way - I had a lot of people respond to last week's post about the early days of video games and the new program called Joost. I gave out about 70 or so free invitations. I am glad you are enjoying it. Here is what my 9 year old nephew had to say about that post:

I love this post! It's sorta like a History lesson on the internet. And you can actually imagine what happened at that time. I'd be excited too if I was around that time. I mean, the FIRST video game. How exciting was THAT! I give your latest post a A++ (aka 100 A+).

Thanks Adam! Glad you enjoyed that history lesson!

This week's video is a news reporter, doing a report on a new roller coaster ride somewhere over in Europe. I don't know why they chose her for this report - she doesn't seem to be a big fan of roller coasters.