Optimizing Firefox for Netscape.com

Surfing socially driven sites can be informative and entertaining at the same time, but sometimes it can also be a little cumbersome. To help you make the best of your socially driven experience, this three-part series will help you optimize Firefox for the best socially driven experience possible.

This is part 2 of this series and this time we will be taking a look at several extensions that can you make the most of the time you spend on Netscape.com. Before I discuss the must-have tools, I recommend that you visit the Netscape blog and check out the teasers that they have put up regarding the version 9 of the Netscape browser. Most of the tools I am mentioning here along with some others will be directly integrated into the browser and will improve the experience from bottom up.

The Netscape team actually made our lives a lot easier by releasing their own browser extensions rather than waiting for the community to whip something up. There are two Firefox Add-ons that they are currently serving, the Sitemail Notifier, and the Friends' Activity Sidebar. The Sitemail Notifier works by adding a button to the toolbar of your browser that indicates every time someone sends you a message on Netscape.com. This is a very easy way of checking if users are communicating with you, without having to visit the site. The second extension, the Friends' Activity Sidebar simply displays the most recent activities of your friends in your browser sidebar.

Netscape friends feature

The first two extensions that the team has released are focused purely on the social aspects of the site, i.e. communicating with your friends and keeping tabs on the content they are submitting and voting. In addition two these extensions, I find the submission bookmarklet to come in quite handy when submitting multiple stories in one sitting. Once you have dragged the bookmarklet to your browser, simply navigate to the page you want to submit, highlight the text you would like to use as a summary, and click 'Submit to Netscape' bookmarklet. Clicking on it will take you to the Netscape story submission page and will already have the story title and summary filled out for you. All you have to do then is fill in some relevant tags and chose a story category and you're all set.

The last tool that you absolutely must install (as I have mentioned before) is Wladimir Palant's Firefox Add-on AdBlock Plus. Netscape.com has some quite overbearing and larely untargetted advertisments and this extension allows you to block them not only on Netscape, but on all the outbound links as well. As a result, the sites become not only clutter-free, but also load relatively faster.

Please check out part 1 of this series here.

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