While I’m not 100% sure, I believe that the Liquid Information add-on is the successor of the Hyperwords extension created by the same company.

The add-on has seen impressive reviews on the Mozilla add-on repository with an average rating of 5/5 stars in more than 200 reviews.

The add-on has improved a lot in past years. When you first install it you get a small introduction window that explains some of the core concepts. Here you can open the program’s settings which I highly recommend to make configuration changes (you can access the settings by entering about:addons in the Firefox address bar and clicking on the options button in the Liquid Information row).

You can select how the Liquid Information menu appears in the Firefox browser under General. Options are to make it appear automatically when selecting text, to move the mouse pointer over an icon after selecting text or on right-click. All options work reasonably well in day to day use.

The layout tab defines how the context menu appears in the browser. Some categories, like translate, are not selected by default. Users can select all or some reference sites under each category, New sites and categories can be added easily to the extension. Categories are added right from the layout menu, new sites from their search form on the actual website (with a right-click and selecting Add to Liquid Information).

The Other tab finally offers access to many different settings, from the default search engine over the way urls are copied and shared to how results are opened in the Firefox web browser.

It needs to be mentioned that the extension will use its own Google search engine by default and not the standard Google search in order to make money to fund the development. Users can upgrade to Liquid Information Pro in the add-on options to use the standard Google search layout instead. The developers are asking for a donation but are not enforcing it.

An alternative would be to add the Google search homepage a second time to the add-on’s context menu to bypass this limitation.

The add-on can speed up research in Firefox noticeably, especially since it can add nearly any search engine out there to the add-on’s context menu.

Interested users can download and install the Liquid Information add-on from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

Update: The Firefox add-on has been discontinued. It is no longer available. We are not aware of any comparable add-ons at this time.

Mashlogic will load its contents after the page has been loaded fully. It has been designed this way to avoid delays or lags while loading the website. The links are displayed as dotted light blue links which can be easily distinguished to the normal links that are displayed on websites. It is even possible to remove the original links on a website and replace them with only those provided by the add-on.

Hovering over a link will open a popup window right next to the text link that displays information from the sources selected during configuration of the web browser add-on.

There are two major problems that become obvious after using Mashlogic for a while. The first is that a lot of links will be added to websites if the user selects a lot of different information providers. Selecting many service providers results in dozens of additional links on websites which can really turn out to be confusing.

The second problem becomes only obvious if the NoScript add-on is installed in the web browser. The Mashlogic add-on will only work if scripts are allowed to run on the active website which can really reduce the usefulness of the add-on.

Mashlogic offers an interesting concept that works if only a few information providers are selected. Users who prefer a less active approach and those with the NoScript add-on installed might want to check out Hyperwords instead.

Hyperwords is giving you access to commands and searches that are able to interact with words on every page that can be accessed with Firefox. Just mark text on a website and the Hyperwords menu pops up automatically with a lot of choices such as translating the text, looking it up at various sites and maps, converting numbers or emailing it.

It is possible to change the default action that is required to make the Hyperwords menu appear which I would recommend. I sometimes mark text for others reasons which is why I changed it to appear only when I mark text and press F2 as well.

This extension is a great asset for everyone who is working with Firefox. It does not really matter if you are a blogger, researching information for the University or a working on sites that are in a language that you do not speak fluently. Should be useful for almost everyone out there.