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Browser Add-Ins for Business Users

By Lynn Greiner

May 15, 2007 — CIO —

Ah, the Web is a wonderful place. It's so full of interesting distractions that claim to streamline the life of a busy person that it's sometimes difficult to get any real work done. Browsers seem optimized for entertainment, with so many fun add-ins that give us games to play and tunes to hear and video to watch. But there are, indeed, business tools that can help us do our jobs.

Authors of add-ins for Firefox (and increasingly, Internet Explorer) have come up with a myriad of ways to enhance the browser. Here's a peek at a baker's dozen, mainly for Firefox, that are at home in the office as well as on our personal computers.

TinyURL Creator: Anyone who sends Web links to others via e-mail needs TinyURL Creator. This cunning bit of code takes that monster multiline address you need to paste into an e-mail to the boss (and that you know perfectly well will not work properly when he clicks it), and turns it into an easily clickable one-liner. For example, should the president summon, the full URL for a map to the White House is:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?latlongtype=internal&addtohistory=
&latitude=MkaWM4DdI0yZ19CZM7UU2A%3d%3d&longitude=PeDXJ%2f1fkjuqcSjHfBfY2Q%3d%3d&name=White%20House&country=US&address=1600%20Pennsylvania%20Ave%20NW&city=Washington&state=
DC&zipcode=20500&phone=202%2d456%2d1111&spurl=0&&q=white%20house&qc=Government%20Offices%2dUs

The TinyURL for that monstrosity is http://tinyurl.com/3dkyf8.

Which would you rather send?

TinyURL Creator is available as an add-in for Firefox, or as a toolbar button for virtually any other browser by adding the following to the Links toolbar:

(javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url='+location.href))

FoxClocks: Today's increasingly multinational corporate world means that you may be in Los Angeles, but your colleagues are in New York or Paris or Rome. Without a ticking lineup on your desk, it can be a struggle to figure out what time the meeting called for 3 p.m. London, England time will be for you in L.A.

FoxClocks lets you create a watchlist of locations and displays the time at each, either in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, in a tooltip, or in a toolbar. As its name suggests, it's a Firefox add-in.

Oh, and that 3 p.m., London time, meeting? I hope you're an early bird—it's at 7 a.m. in Los Angeles!

Change: Continuing the multinational theme, are you left wondering when your London cohort quotes prices in British pounds, or Sergio in Rome talks euros? You might want to add Change to your add-in collection.

Change pulls in currency conversions daily from the Central European Bank. It displays a toolbar for manual entries, and also activates if you double-click on an amount on a webpage, converting it to your currency of choice.

 

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