PriceBlink Does Automatic Price Comparison for Items You’re About to Buy

This article was written on November 29, 2011 by CyberNet.

Price comparison extension

With the holidays right around the corner it is important to make sure you’re getting the best deal for the gifts you are picking up. There are all kinds of browser extensions out there that can help you save a few dollars, but PriceBlink is one I always use.

PriceBlink is available for Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari and does price comparison shopping as you browse around some online stores. If it sees that someone else is selling the item cheaper or that there is a coupon available the extension will display a popup bar along the top of the webpage just like in the screenshot above. In my demonstration Newegg is selling a pair of headphones that I can get for half the price somewhere else. That is a pretty big savings.

By my count the service supports upwards of about 5,000 online merchants which means it should work with most of the retailers you shop. If you tend to shop around yourself then you may not need something like this, but if you’re more of an impulse buyer this can save a lot of dough.

PriceBlink Homepage (Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Safari Extension Available)

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Real-Time Tab Previews in Firefox

This article was written on September 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tab Scope Firefox Extension I just came across a Firefox extension that is one of the coolest I’ve seen in quite awhile. It’s called Tab Scope and it brings real-time tab previews to the Firefox browser. Well, it’s actually a step beyond just a preview because you can fully interact with the page (click links, scroll, etc…).

After using this for just 10-minutes I feel that it has made me more productive, and I now consider it to be a must-have extension. Here are the features that Tab Scope brings to the table:

  • Real-time tab previews of the page contents — you can watch the page load right from the preview!
  • Navigate (Back/Forward/Reload/Stop) directly through the tab preview
  • Scroll pages or frames in preview with mouse wheel
  • Use the magnifying glass to enlarge the tab preview for easier navigation
  • Click links or buttons directly in preview

In the options you can configure things such as the size for the tab preview for both before and after you click the magnifying glass. Depending on the preview size that you choose this can drastically keep you from switching back and forth between tabs! Throw on the ReloadEvery extension and you’ve got a killer combination!

Tab Scope Homepage

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Foxmarks Coming to Internet Explorer

This article was written on July 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

ie foxmarks-1.pngFoxmarks has rightfully become an outrageously popular Firefox extension. I love it because I’m able to sync/backup my bookmarks with multiple computers. What makes it really nice, however, is that it integrates right into Firefox’s bookmark system. That essentially means you won’t even have to think about the extension once you’ve got it setup.

Just last week the Foxmarks team introduced a profile synchronization feature so that you could control which bookmarks get synced with each individual computer. Once they got that out of the way they began working on their next project, which happens to be Internet Explorer support.

They are currently accepting Alpha/Beta tester registrations for those of you who feel brave enough to run a pre-release version, but there are some caveats. For starters it doesn’t work with Internet Explorer 8 Beta, and it has troubles remembering the order of your bookmarks due to the way IE handles the reordering. They are currently looking for some IE experts that can help them work around the problems.

If you have User Account Control (UAC) enabled under Vista then you might run into some additional problems. This stems from the fact that Internet Explorer runs in a protected mode when UAC is enabled, and prevents things such as Foxmarks from accessing necessary information on your PC.

As of right now other advanced features like profile support and synchronizing with your own servers aren’t even available. Taking all of this into consideration it’s probably not a good idea to jump on the “Foxmarks for IE” bandwagon quite yet. That being said I’m sure there are a lot of you who are excited for this to reach the final form, because there will finally be a good solution to sync your bookmarks between the two browsers.

Sign-up for the Foxmarks IE Alpha/Beta Program

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Why the CyberSearch Extension has been Discontinued

This article was written on March 22, 2011 by CyberNet.

cybersearch_fulllogo.png

I’ve been getting at least a dozen emails a day asking when the CyberSearch extension would be getting updated for Firefox 4, but I have some bad news for everyone. Our extension was made possible thanks to Google’s Web Search API, but they deprecated it back in November 2010 in favor of a new JSON Custom Search API. From a developer’s point of view this kind of thing happens all the time… old technologies are replaced with new technologies. Generally these improvements are for the better, but in this case they put some restrictions in place for anyone using the new API:

Usage is free for all users, up to 100 queries per day. […] Any usage beyond the free usage quota will fail if you are not signed up for billing. Once you have enabled billing, you will be billed for all requests at the rate of $5 per 1000 queries, for up to 10,000 queries per day. If you need additional quota, please request additional quota from the console.

The CyberSearch extension basically performs a query every time you pause for a second while typing in the Firefox address bar. I’d estimate that the 100-query limit they are imposing will be hit by our extension every second given that there are over 80k daily users. So it would likely cost us thousands of dollars a day to keep this running… assuming Google would even approve a rate limit as high as what we’d need. Since we don’t make any money off the extension you can see how that isn’t really feasible.

So why is CyberSearch still (intermittently) working for some people? Google’s blog post from last November says that they are in the process of phasing out the older APIs, and as a result they are “tightening up the enforcement of the rate limits” as time goes on. Unfortunately that means you will likely see the extension inconsistently working, and that has been the root cause of 99% of bug reports being submitted to us. In my tests about half of all requests being made would return an error saying the extension exceeded the rate limit quota.

Thanks to everyone who provided support and troubleshooting during the development of CyberSearch! It was a fun ride, but unless Google changes their policy this will have to be the end of the road.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

CyberSearch 0.9.9: Better Icon Management, “Smart” Keywords, and More

This article was written on July 10, 2008 by CyberNet.

cybersearch 099.pngHere you thought that the only big announcements today were going to be from Apple. Looks like you were wrong! We’ve got another new version of our CyberSearch Firefox extension, and this time it packs more than just bug fixes.

P.S. I apologize for releasing these updates so frequently, but I’m trying to make the extension the best it can be.

–Keyword Icons–

The new CyberSearch 0.9.9 has two main features that are accompanied by a handful of bug fixes. The first thing that we’ve added is a slightly intelligent system that will try to guess what icon to use when you’re creating a new keyword. Basically what it does is grab the first URL you specify in the “Website URL” field, attach “favicon.ico” onto the end, and then paste it into the Icon URL field:

cybersearch icon.png

To have the icon URL regenerated you can click the “auto” link at any time. We also wanted to show a preview of what the icon looks like, and CyberSearch now does that by replacing the “help” image located next to the URL field. If the field is blank you’ll still see the question mark icon, and you’ll still be able to get help for that field by hovering over the icon even after it’s been replaced.

–Smart Keywords–

I know that we all love the keyword system that CyberSearch offers, but sometimes it can be difficult to remember all of your keywords once you have more than a handful. That’s why we came up with what we like to call “smart” keywords.

How do they work? Well, there isn’t really anything that you have to setup in order to start using them (they are enabled for everyone by default). That’s why they are so great. Just type a URL, followed by a space, and then the text you want to search for. You will instantly see results from only that site:

cybersearch smart domain.png

We, however, wanted to minimize the amount of work you needed to do in order to take advantage of this feature. Thats why you can also just press the spacebar after a full URL in the address bar to immediately search the contents of the site you’re currently on. Here’s an example where I was viewing the Firefox add-ons homepage, and all I had to do was press the spacebar followed by the extension name I was looking for:

cybersearch full url keyword.png

Notice how all of the results are from the Mozilla add-ons site? Cool, huh? You don’t have to spend time setting up an extensive list of keywords that you’ll never remember, and yet you can still search your favorite sites!

Keywords take precedence over the domain searching, and so any keywords you have setup will override this functionality. If you want to disable the setting all together you can do so in the General tab, and then uncheck the Automatically search domains option.

–And More–

We also threw in a couple of more minor fixes in this release:

  • When configuring keywords CyberSearch will truncate long URL’s that may appear in the drop-down menu.
  • HTML characters that appeared in the titles of results (ampersands, quotes, etc…) should show up as expected.

We’d very much appreciate it if you can kick around the new release to see if there are any bugs. The smart keywords won’t work with sites that have some special characters in them, such as question marks, and the reason we did that was because Google doesn’t like searching those kind of sites. Other than that anything should be fair game.

If you get a spare second don’t forget to leave a review for our extension. We’re currently sitting at 4.00 out of 5 stars, and we wouldn’t mind seeing it go up a little more. 😉

Get CyberSearch Extension for Firefox

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Amazing: Add an XGL-Like Effect to Firefox Tabs with this Extension

This article was written on January 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tab Effects

If you are just the slightest bit familiar with Linux then I am sure that you have heard of XGL. It is what adds all of the realistic 3D effects to the windows that you drag around and the virtual desktops that you switch between. Of course, one of the most popular features is probably the 3D cube for switching between your virtual desktops.

There is a new Firefox extension in town and it is called Tab Effect (the screenshot above is from the extension, not XGL). With the assistance of a little DirectX 8 (and beyond) it is able to provide transitional effects when switching between your tabs. Now it isn’t exactly like XGL where you can manually rotate a cube for switching between tabs, but the animation makes it look like you are rotating a cube each time you switch tabs. Honestly, this is the most amazing visual effect that I have ever seen in Firefox. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like a little extra “eye candy” then this extension won’t be for you…it doesn’t make you more productive or add any useful features.

So now for the downside. I’m not sure if this will happen for everyone, but whenever I tried to create a new blank tab Firefox would crash if I was running this extension. If I was just opening a link to a site in a new tab it would be fine, but that is still quite a huge drawback for me. The extension was just released yesterday so there are a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out (and reading through the comments confirms that), but I’m sure it will continue to be developed since it is a new extension. Not to mention that this could put Firefox ahead of other browsers in terms of visual effects.

Once it stabilizes I will definitely be adding this to my small collection of extensions!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Automatically Save Files to Specific Folders in Firefox

This article was written on April 21, 2009 by CyberNet.

automatic save folder.jpgI’ve seen extensions before that let you designate specific directories on your computer for files to be saved based upon the extension of file. The thing that I normally hate about this is that it’s tough to say where I want all the ZIP files I download to be stored. There’s a new extension that has gotten the hint though.

Automatic Save Folder will not only let you filter according to filename, but also by domain. That way you can say that every file from, for example, Gmail gets placed in an attachment directory. Or you can go a little further and say that this only applies to ZIP files from Gmail.

Setting it all up might be a little time consuming if you do a thorough job, but the end result can be a very organized folder structure for your downloads. I’m kinda an organization freak so this is right up my alley. 🙂

Get Automatic Save Folder for Firefox [via Lifehacker]

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Live Bookmarks in Your Firefox Sidebar

This article was written on March 19, 2010 by CyberNet.

rss feed sidebar.pngLive Bookmarks are a feature that have been included in Firefox for ages, and have provided a simple way for you to subscribe to RSS feeds. They essentially act like dynamic bookmarks that are able to update as websites offer new content, and the Feed Sidebar extension makes it even navigate through the news they bring to you.

Once installed you’ll notice an RSS button in your Address Bar, and when pressed a sidebar will appear. From there you not only get a nice interface for glancing through your Live Bookmarks, but you also get some additional features. You can perform instant searches on news items, mark items as read, change the update interval, or see a brief preview (a few sentences) by single clicking on an item. All of this contained within your browser’s sidebar.

There are obviously feed readers that do all of this stuff and a lot more, but I know quite a few people who use Live bookmarks merely because of their simplicity. This extension retains that simplicity while making reading new items a tad easier. If you’re already using a dedicated RSS reader my guess is that Live Bookmarks (even with this extension) will seem underwhelming, otherwise it’s worth giving a try.

Get Feed Sidebar for Firefox

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Browser extension enables SkyDrive attachments within Gmail

Browser extension enables SkyDrive attachments within Gmail

Gmail users who envy Outlook’s SkyDrive integration will find that the proverbial grass is now a little greener on their side, thanks to fresh features in Attachments.me’s Chrome and Firefox browser extensions. With the plugin installed, files residing in Microsoft’s cloud service can be attached to emails from within Gmail. Also included in the update is support for user-created rules that can direct attachments to SkyDrive as they flood into inboxes. Can’t wait for Gmail to gain similar support with Google Drive, or just prefer Redmond’s storage solution? Hit the source link below to infuse Mountain View’s web mail with some of Microsoft’s storage locker mojo.

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Browser extension enables SkyDrive attachments within Gmail originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Sep 2012 03:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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