Speed Dial - Gallery
One of the things I liked about Google's new browser, Chrome, is the way it displays thumbnails of my most frequently visited pages when I open a new tab. But there was a lot to dislike about Chrome, as well. First, Chrome displayed 9 thumbnails only. Second, it didn't ever seem to update them. Third, I had no control over what thumbnails were displayed. And I should add, fourth, Chrome doesn't support add-ons.
Which is why I still use Firefox 3 for 90% of my browsing. One of Firefox's biggest advantages is that it supports add-ons. Among my favorite add-ons are FireFTP (a full-featured ftp client built right into Firefox), Deng Google Bookmarks, Tiny Menu and Scribefire. Scribefire is a blog editor: I'm using it right now to write this post, because it's a better editor than the one built into Blogger. Anyway, my newest favorite add-on for Firefox is Speed Dial.
Speed Dial displays thumbnails of web sites, much as Google Chrome does. You can load the thumbnails any time you want - or you can configure Speed Dial so the thumbnails are loaded when you create new tabs and/or windows. Click a Speed Dial thumbnail, the page loads, just as in Chrome.
But with Speed Dial, I can have more than nine thumbnails. I can assign pages to any location in the thumbnail list. Note in the screen shot that I've configured Speed Dial to display 16 locations, and some of the locations are, at the moment, unassigned. Better still, I can have more than one list. Note above the thumb nails that I've configured two different lists, my A list, and a B list with less important sites. Finally, with Speed Dial, I don't have to view the thumbnails at all, because Speed Dial allows me to type a site's location number to load the site. In other words, to get to my Gmail account, I just type cntl-3. To get to The Online Photographer blog (one of my favorites), I type cntl-1-5, that is, I hold down the cntl key and type a 1 and then a 5. Brilliant.
One of the things I liked about Google's new browser, Chrome, is the way it displays thumbnails of my most frequently visited pages when I open a new tab. But there was a lot to dislike about Chrome, as well. First, Chrome displayed 9 thumbnails only. Second, it didn't ever seem to update them. Third, I had no control over what thumbnails were displayed. And I should add, fourth, Chrome doesn't support add-ons.
Which is why I still use Firefox 3 for 90% of my browsing. One of Firefox's biggest advantages is that it supports add-ons. Among my favorite add-ons are FireFTP (a full-featured ftp client built right into Firefox), Deng Google Bookmarks, Tiny Menu and Scribefire. Scribefire is a blog editor: I'm using it right now to write this post, because it's a better editor than the one built into Blogger. Anyway, my newest favorite add-on for Firefox is Speed Dial.
Speed Dial displays thumbnails of web sites, much as Google Chrome does. You can load the thumbnails any time you want - or you can configure Speed Dial so the thumbnails are loaded when you create new tabs and/or windows. Click a Speed Dial thumbnail, the page loads, just as in Chrome.
But with Speed Dial, I can have more than nine thumbnails. I can assign pages to any location in the thumbnail list. Note in the screen shot that I've configured Speed Dial to display 16 locations, and some of the locations are, at the moment, unassigned. Better still, I can have more than one list. Note above the thumb nails that I've configured two different lists, my A list, and a B list with less important sites. Finally, with Speed Dial, I don't have to view the thumbnails at all, because Speed Dial allows me to type a site's location number to load the site. In other words, to get to my Gmail account, I just type cntl-3. To get to The Online Photographer blog (one of my favorites), I type cntl-1-5, that is, I hold down the cntl key and type a 1 and then a 5. Brilliant.
