Mosey added a link to his comment that pointed to the Firefox add-on Quick Restart in my post about 10 Useful Firefox Add-ons That Don’t Get Glamorised. It’s more often than not the small changes that make a huge difference. I do test many Firefox extensions, tweaks and themes and one thing that bothered me a lot was that not every menu had a restart Firefox option. When you uninstall an extension in Firefox it tells you that you need to restart Firefox but it does not offer the option to do so.

So the only way to restart Firefox would be to close the browser manually and open it again. I never bothered to look for an extension that would automate the process until Mosey presented it to me on a golden platter.

Quick Restart basically adds the possibility to restart Firefox with a keyboard shortcut or by pressing a button. The keyboard shortcut CTRL ALT R does the job for me but you can also add a button to a toolbar by right-clicking a toolbar and selecting customize from the menu that pops up.

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Timetube is a Youtube mashup that creates a timeline of Youtube videos related to a keyword that the user is searching for. The time period can be altered from 1 day to 100 years which tells me that the developers have plans to offer this service for a very, very long time. While sorting the results by time is not something special, even the default search at Youtube can do that, the display of the results makes it special.

Results are sorted on a timeline and weighted by popularity. The most popular videos are displayed with big preview images, the lesser popular ones with smaller thumbnails and then there are the results without thumbnail. The title of the video and the day of it’s posting are always displayed as well so that it’s possible to understand what a video will be about even if no thumbnail is shown.

A click on a video loads that video on the same page with virtually no delay offering the usual Youtube controls.

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It is sometimes required to issue a ping or tracert command to identify the source for a slow Internet connection or no connection to a server at all. I usually use those commands when I notice that websites that I own run slow or are not responsive at all. This can also be useful if you are a gamer and want to test your ping to a game server or find out how your connection is routed to the server. Several companies, like Blizzard for instance, request a tracert and ping before they even look in the matter.

Most operating systems have those tools on board and it is normally not required to use an external tool. Many users however do not like to work with the command line in Windows and prefer a graphical user interface instead. Many also have difficulties issuing the correct commands, e.g. finding out how to save the result in a text document automatically.

eToolz is a collection of network and Internet tools that provides a graphical interface for several common commands. This includes ping and tracert but also DNS and whois lookups, mail checks, the retrieval of http headers, time synchronization, pagerank check and list with useful information (default ports, domain extensions).

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I’m slowly changing my view on several aspects of my “geeky” life. I used to jump on bandwagons as soon as someone started reporting about the latest evil scheme of a big cooperation or country. While it is definitely legit to call them out and make the issue public it is in no way justified to assume that what you know and are reporting is the real reason.

An article about MSN Messenger blocking links to sites like Youtube.com and probably several others. The user sending the link would receive the message “The following message could not be delivered to all recipients”. The outcry was heard loud and wide with stories appearing on Slashdot, Digg and probably a million other websites who were simply reiterating what one blog started.

The Internet loves conspiracy theories and some sites especially when they can fight against the root of all evil Microsoft. What I want to say is that no one but Microsoft (hopefully) knows the reason why those links have not been send to the recipient. It could be that they decided to filter some urls that belong to their competition, it could be a glitch, an error after server upgrades or a improperly configured spam filter.

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In the last days I have been looking for a Firefox extension that would make it possible to open multiple bookmarks (and History items) at once. What I mean with this is that I wanted something like the CTRL left-click in Windows Explorer that lets you pick several files at once. My main problem was that the bookmarks menu collapsed as soon as I picked on bookmark that I wanted to load.

I sometimes however would like to load several bookmarks at once, or in rapid succession, and the collapsing bookmarks menu was annoying for that purpose. I did ask the question at the Firefox Mastery website because I knew that some clever Firefox geeks would frequent it and if someone would know the answer they would.

My own research was not successful but a few hours after posting the question over at the website Alex answered and pointed me to two extensions that would prevent the menu from collapsing when middle-clicking items.

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