My love for Firefox gets boosted every time when an extension like SmarterFox pops up in the huge directory of Firefox add-ons and even though I am sick of the fact that how much ram Firefox needs in order to perform better, I still don’t allow my self to switch to any other internet browser. SmarterFox as the name suggests, literally make your browsing experience smarter with many cool features. It is a mash-up of accelerators from Internet Explorer 8, Site Launcher, copy/past helper, Google search helper/enhancement and much more.
The first notable feature you would see is the IE8 like accelerators which provide instant search for a highlighted word in Google, OneRiot, Twitter (Real time search), Baidu and Wikipedia. The icons for these search website automatically pop up as a bubble (as shown above) when a text is highlighted in any webpage and from there you can click on any one of these 5 icons to search. The search results can be opened in the same windows or a new tab according to the setting you have chosen in the SmarterFox settings windows as shown below. The one thing you may miss is the ability to add more search engines here. Like Yahoo or the uprising bing.
Apart from the IE8 like accelerators there are further many browsing enhancements which you start to notice once you browse extensively after installing SmarterFox. The Google results automatically show up in the Awesomebar/URL bar as you type (faster than going to google.com)
Another great feature of SmarterFox is the built in quick site launcher (Key board control) which is loosely comparable to Site Launcher I reviewed here. Same as Site Launcher, the quick site launcher in SmarterFox can be activated by pressing ctrl and space bar at the same time. Configuring your favorite websites in quick launcher is as easy as adding/moving a bookmark to the qLauncher folder in your browser’s bookmarks.
In the search results window easily switch between search engines during a search with a single click.
Other than above there are few more very useful features which make SmarterFox a really smart add-on. You can convert text URLs into clickable links. You can automatically copy on select / paste on middle click / paste on right click. This options is not enabled by default but you can do it if you are ready to get yourself accustomed to new mouse gestures but once you are familiar with this you will start loving it.
All in all, I am finding SmarterFox much more useful in my daily internet browsing routines then I anticipated at first and now I would definitely recommend it to every Firefox user.
