Two cool extensions

After I installed the testing version of the new Firefox 2.0, some of the extensions I use obviously stopped working. This was a good moment to think about which of them are really indispensable. For now, let's describe two of them, which are, in a sense, generally useful (and not mostly “technical”).

The one I just have to mention is Work Offline (see its homepage /or on the add-ons site), because it almost seems to be a feature of Traction Control, and not a separate unrelated extension (only if it wasn't at the bottom ;-). This adds an icon to the status bar. The icon does the same as the menu command File/Work Offline: when clicked, it activates a mode in which pages are loaded from the browser's cache, and not downloaded over the network. This often makes browsing the history much more comfortable. Clicking an icon to turn the offline mode on or off is somehow less annoying than by mousing through the menu.

The other is FoxClocks (see its homepage /or on the add-ons site), which displays what time it is at different places on Earth. You can select or define the geographical locations, and choose between constantly visible or shown in a tooltip, and between the statusbar and the toolbars. Somehow it happens to be cool or even seems to be useful to know what part of the day it is on some relevant other continent and spam there blogs when there sleeping.

While this haven't occurred to me for quite some time but only now, suddenly—those two extensions selected for this post for other reasons are a bit like what my extension is about: memory of [my] own[ed] reading and measuring time of... others' writing; dispersed and misaligned others. I wonder if I'm weird, after all... ;-)

Update Nov 5 : Both extensions now work with Firefox 2.0. “Work Offline” now has an options dialog, in which you can choose among three icons, including a nice warm-feeling bulb. (My current choice, however closing a circuit by touching a bulb feels a bit surreal!) I'm planning to write a post about the Work Offline function in general.