As of yesterday, I’m using Firefox 3.0 (currently beta 4) as my primary browser. I’m using the portable version, which can be installed separate from Firefox 2, without sharing configurations, but I haven’t needed to use the old version for anything so far — this beta is much more polished than the term “beta” suggests. Fast, stable (zero crashes so far), and with some very interesting features. Plus, the couple extensions I need (as opposed to “it’d be nice to have them) already support Firefox 3 officially (that is, no need to uncompress and edit the version requirements).

Try it — by using the portable version, it won’t affect your Firefox 2 installation in any way. You may find that soon you’ll be using it all the time, just like me.

I have yet to try it out, but, apparently, the new version of the Performancing Firefox extension is great. It allows you to blog directly from Firefox, without going into your blog’s administration pages.

I’m quite busy at work today, but I’ll try to install it later, and write some first impressions about it.

Meanwhile, here’s the new features list:

• More Technorati Support
• Delicious integration
• Trackback support (including auto-discovery)
• Draft support (and default to draft option)
• Ping support
• Statusbar Icon Enhancments (drag and drop)
• More Settings Options
• Full metaWeblog API implementation, now working in Roller, blogharbor, and many more
• Lots of Bug Fixes:
  • Logging in from account wizard now times out if connection fails
  • More informative Blogger.com error reporting
  • Hitting a tab twice no longer looses data.
  • Less confusing automatic technorati tag adding
  • Numerous metaWeblog API fixes
  • Edit post now conserves original dateCreated parameter
  • Issues with setting and editing categories (drupal still has issues).
  • New posts no longer created when editing a post (on WP)
  • Preview links now open in a new tab
  • Spaces are now possible in technorati tags
  • WordPress 2.0 support
  • Many more small bugs

Google has just released a new extension for Firefox, Blogger Web Comments, which shows a small (configurable) popup showing blog articles (which they get from Google Blog Search) that mention the page you’re currently viewing.

I’ve only been using it for 3 minutes or so, so I still haven’t thought about the implications of, basically, for each page you browse to, getting a list of blog articles talking about it. I think it could actually change the browsing habits of a lot of people. A reasonable way to put it might be: “what if every single page in the world had easily accessible comments – and not controlled by the page’s owner?”

It could become annoying, though – I’ll have to wait and see. It can be hidden or temporarily disabled, of course. Or uninstalled, naturally – this isn’t Internet Explorer.

(seen on ProBlogger)

I thought it might be interesting to compare which Red Panda extensions we use… we may learn about some we didn’t know existed.

Here are mine:

• SearchStatus: shows PageRank and Alexa ranks for the current site on the status bar; you can also right click on them to go several information pages on the respective sites.
• ForecastFox: weather information; highly customizable.
• BugMeNot: accesses a “throwaway” username/password database to enter stupid “registration required” sites (mostly news ones) quickly, without having to give them the most intimate details of your life.
• AdSense Notifier: gives almost real time stats for your AdSense earnings; also allows quick logon to the AdSense site
• CuteMenus: Crystal SVG: adds nice colorful icons to Firefox’s menus; becomes more user-friendly and pleasant to use
• SEOpen: adds many SEO options to the context menu, such as checking for backlinks in several search engines, and more
• del.icio.us: adds quick and comprehensive del.icio.us integration to the Fox

OK, your turn.

Link: CuteMenus Crystal SVG

As you can see from the image, it adds nice color icons to the Firefox menus. Useless… but many people care a lot about how “nice” their software looks, so you may be able to show off your browser and make other people green with envy. Or something.

SearchStatus is a small Firefox extension that shows the Google PageRank and Alexa rank for the site you are currently viewing.

Naturally, it’s most useful if you have a site (or sites) of your own, but it’s also interesting to see how popular, and well ranked, other sites are.

It’s also an easy way to check whether your site is in the Google Sandbox…

Note: if you’re using a recent Firefox beta and the extension says it’s not compatible, see here.

I’ve mentioned this in passing, a couple of days ago, but I think it deservers a short entry of its own:

The AdSense Notifier extension for Firefox does exactly what the image above shows: it displays your AdSense stats for the current day. In real time (well, mostly – by default, it updates every 20 minutes).

Easy to install, and, afterwards, you’ll always have something interesting to look at.