Did some house cleaning this morning on firefox and came across some new (well new to me at least) add-ons and thought I’d share.

I had been using SAGE as my RSS reader and then migrated to Sage Too.  I haven’t come across too many RSS feeders that I like.   The RSS feeders I had previously tested all seem to operate as a tab of your browser.  But with Sage my list is an actual sidebar item not a browser tab.  This way my feed list stays viewable on the left no matter what tab I’m looking at.  It just seems easier for the way I browse.  Anyway… I haven’t been thrilled with sage – it does okay but has bugs.  The developer moved on from the project at the beginning of the year so no new updates/fixes.  Got tired of stray errors so I started searching for a new reader this morning… came across Wizz RSS and it works almost identical to sage (meaning integrated into firefox as a sidebar) but is much faster and seems cleaner to me.  It imported my sage feeds very quickly.  If you are looking for a RSS feeder that is integrated into firefox this one seems like a good improvement over Sage.  The only thing I would like is to be able to set the preview screens as a multiple column view like sage.  Maybe it can do that and I just can’t figure out where that setting would be.  At any rate, it seems to fit my needs at the moment so I’m happy.

Another add-on that I installed is Tab Mix Plus.  It allows extensive configuration of your tabs.  The feature in particular that caught my eye is the customization based on READ vs NOT READ.  A lot of times, I’ll open several tabs as I’m blog reading that have content I want to come back to and give a closer read or download.  This add-on will keep those tabs marked a different color until I click them so I’ll know if I missed any.  That’ll work very nicely for me.  I do have the “Read It Later” add-on that keeps a list of  URLs to read later but I don’t seem to use that very often.  I never seem to go back to sites in that list – it’s too out of sight out of mind for me.

I also installed Update Scanner.  This add-on notifies you of website updates from websites that don’t have an RSS feed.  I have come across a few (not many it seems these days) that put out regular content I’m interested in but do not have an RSS feed – galleries mostly. I’ll bookmark the sites, but find it a pain to go back through them regularly.  This add-on should help keep track of those types of sites and update me with any changes.  Haven’t tested it yet, but looks promising.

And lastly, I installed Update Notifier.  It checks for add-on/theme updates and gives you a visible notification in the upper right corner.  I never remember to check/install new add-on updates so this is great for me.