One of the enhancements has been released as a prototype add-on for Firefox. It is called Mozilla Labs: Prospector – Snaporama, a restartless add-on that integrates nicely into the browser.

The add-on adds two buttons to the Firefox status bar. Users who do not work with the start bar can move the buttons to another location of the browser. A click on the camera button opens a menu that lists all bookmarks folders and an option to create a new snapshot.

All you need to do is to select an existing folder for the snapshot, or a new folder. Achtung: Please note that all bookmarks of that folder will be overwritten if you select an existing bookmarks folder. All the add-on does is to add a bookmark for each tab to the selected folder.

The Snapshot Gallery button offers to restore a previously saved set of tabs into a Panorama group. This did not work as advertised on the Firefox 7 Aurora test system here. While it was possible to restore all saved tabs in the browser immediately with a click on the Snapshot Gallery button and the selection of the snapshot, it did not display the group your tabs Panorama menu as shown on the Mozilla Labs website.

Snaporama’s feature is not entirely new. Firefox users can use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-D or a right-click on the tabbar and the selection of Bookmark All Tabs to add all open tabs to a specific bookmarks folder. A middle-click on that folder at a later time opens all the tabs at once.

There are also add-ons available to save and load browsing sessions.

The add-on only makes sense in conjunction with the Tab Groups feature.

Firefox users who would like to try the Snaporama add-on can download and install it from the official Mozilla Add-Ons repository.

Mozilla recently published a new Mozilla Labs add-on called Recall Monkey (what’s with all those silly names?) that improves Firefox’s History by a lot.

The add-on taps into Firefox’s history database to provide the user with better search options.

The restartless add-on places a single icon into the Firefox status bar. A click on that icon launches the search interface in a new tab.

It consists of a search bar at top that powers the auto-updating search results. If you enter Firefox for instance you get all Firefox related history items on one page.

The real strength of the program comes from the preferences and options on the left. Here it is possible to change the time range from all time to last 24 hours, week, month or year for instance. This can reduce the number of results greatly.

Sites can be prioritized or excluded from the results. Say you want to find a specific add-on that you know is hosted on the Mozilla website. You could prioritize the Mozilla domain to give it some extra weight in the search results. This basically pushes Mozilla based results to the top of the list. Excluding sites on the other hand filters history items from those domains from the results automatically.

The last available option is to prioritize bookmarks, which can be very handy for users like me who use bookmarks extensively.

The one thing that I’m not really happy with is that Recall Monkey forgets about the prioritized and excluded sites when you close the history window. An option to remember those settings (per search or globally) would be really handy. Another handy option would be to add filters to distinct between local and remote files.

Mozilla Labs’s Recall Monkey is available for direct installation over at the Mozilla Firefox website. The add-on is compatible with all versions of Firefox from version 4 on.

Internet Explorer finally displays a list of popular sites and options to reopen the last session or recently open tabs.

The problem with static contents on the new tab page is that some may lose their value to the user. They are also never related to another open website in the browser.

Predictive Newtab is a new Mozilla Labs project that adds dynamic site suggestions to the new tab page of the Firefox web browser. Dynamic means that the add-on calculates possible matches by searching a user’s bookmarks and history.

If you are on YouTube for instance and press the new tab button, you may get suggestions to visit Gametrailers, Hulu or Dailymotion, while a visit on Ghacks might suggest Lifehacker, Neowin or Makeuseof instead.

The plugin displays information about each link, tags, a computed score and whether the site has been bookmarked on the new tab page. It is likely that the interface will get polished up before its release to a wider audience.

The developer notes that Predictive Newtab works best on systems with a large number of well tagged bookmarks, but that it will work even on systems without any bookmarks. All computations are done in the browser, and stay on the local system.

The basic idea behind the add-on is that users who open a tab on a specific type of site are more likely to visit another site of the same type. I’m not sure if that assumption is correct. It would probably be better if the developer would add suggestions plus a compilation of the most visited sites or a custom selection of sites on the new tab page, to give the user the best of both worlds.

Firefox users who would like to test the experimental add-on can download it at the official Firefox add-on repository. The add-on is compatible with all versions of the browser from version 4 onwards. (via)

Firefox did not have a comparable built-in feature until now. Users who wanted to install experimental features had to go to the Mozilla Labs website or the Firefox add-on repository to do so.

This changes with the introduction of Mozilla Labs’ Lab Kit, a new Firefox 4 add-on that pushes new experimental features right to the user’s web browser.

For now, only three experimental add-ons are available: Test Pilot, collecting “structured user feedback through Firefox”, Speak Words, an add-on that we have reviewed earlier and Contacts, which we did review earlier this year as well.

Users who install Lab Kit will automatically install all add-ons that it contains. For this initial release it means that all three add-ons are pushed to the browser. Test Pilot and Contacts require a restart of the browser, while Speak Words functions right away without restart.

The way this is implemented is not the most user friendly in my opinion. Pushing all add-ons of the Lab Kit to the browser without offering an option to customize the selection may turn away many users who otherwise would be interested in trying out those experimental features.

It is however possible to uninstall the add-ons individually after installation of the Lab Kit, but it is not clear at this moment how this will affect future add-on updates.

Major updates to contents of the Lab Kit are shown to the user in form of a notification, Lab Kit surely is an experimental feature as well, and it is likely that the developers will add options to customize it in future versions. The most pressing feature that is currently missing is a selection menu to only install and monitor selected experimental add-ons. (via)

The Firefox add-on Prospector Speak Words adds that feature to Firefox. But more about that later. More interesting than that probably is the fact that it can be installed, disabled and removed without browser restart. That’s a first, at least for me.

Back to the add-on’s functionality. Prospector Speak Words adds Google Chrome’s auto-suggestion feature to Firefox. Just enter a few letters of a website’s name and the add-on will suggest the first matching Internet address by filling out the rest to complete the word.

The add-on is word-based, not url-based which means that it will only suggest words and names and not urls. Still, those words and names have to be part of a website’s title or Internet address to be suggested in first place.

The add-on abides by the rules set for the Firefox address bar. I have for instance set it to only suggest bookmarks when typing in the first words. This add-on in this case uses only bookmarks to auto-suggest a word or name.

The default setting IIRC is to search in the browser’s history and bookmarks.

Prospector Speak Words speeds up opening known websites in the web browser. The best case scenario is that you only need to enter the first letter and the enter key to load a website.

The add-on is an official Mozilla Labs add-on, which means that it may find its way into the core browser eventually. The add-on is only compatible with Firefox 4.0b4 – 4.0b8pre, and available for download at the official add-on site.

Enter Mozilla Contacts, a prototype add-on that aims to achieve just that for the web browser. The add-on basically provides Firefox users with an option to manage and access their contacts in the web browser.

Contacts uses a browser based database that “stays in sync with your address books”. It currently supports Gmail, Twitter and the Mac OS address bar with additional address books to be included in the future. A generic importer for computer address books is also provided.

All contacts can be viewed directly in the web browser. More interesting than this feature are the two following ones that have been implemented into the add-on.

The add-on offers an email auto-completion option whenever an email address needs to be entered into a web form. Suggestions will be displays on screen that the user can use to speed up the process.

Security conscious users will like the ability to restrict website access to contacts. Think of the “invite your contacts to our service” options on sites like Facebook. Instead of letting the service retrieve all contacts it is now possible to select the contacts from a list that the service should have access to.

Check out the announcement post over at the Mozilla Labs website for additional information about the add-on and a download link to install it in your Firefox web browser.

Ubiquity is a Firefox prototype add-on that is similar to Launchy but located in the browser. Launchy is a Windows launcher that makes things much easier. Ubiquity takes that concept to the web. The interface is loaded with CTRL SPace. A black transparent block is opened just below the header bars of Firefox waiting for input.

Now the interesting aspect of this is that everything happens in that black area. A basic example would be if you want to write a message about something that you discovered to Twitter. With Ubiquity you press CTRL Space and enter Twitter This is a cool thing that I discovered. Enter sends the mail to Twitter. That’s it. No more leaving a page, no widgets in the background that you need to open.

Lots of commands are available by default. I would say about 50 are available. This reaches from normal web searches, map searches, translations, adding events to the calendar, emailing, calculating or digging. Lots of stuff to explore and it is pretty exciting that users can create their own commands.

This requires some programming skills but I’m confident that we will see many user created commands that can be integrated into the own version of Ubiquity easily.

A wonderful feature is the Google Maps integration. If you got a list of addresses Ubiquity can map all of them on a Google Map and it is possible to add the map to the current page, for example an email or web form.

There is so much possibility. What can I say. Go get it right now, it is a killer app. Thanks again Amos, your tip was wonderful.

The first question that obviously comes to mind is how Snowl is any different from current RSS News Feed Readers and the honest answer at this point has to be not much. Twitter is offering RSS News Feeds as well which means that any RSS Reader can currently display the same information that Mozilla Snowl can.

The only difference currently lies in the interface which provides two different view modes. The first reminds of desktop email clients like Thunderbird. It is divided into three different panes, on the left the RSS News Feeds, in the upper half the messages of the selected RSS News Feed and at the bottom half the selected message.

The second view mode is called River of Messages which looks pretty much like a newspaper when the messages are expanded. That mode looks pretty fine to receive a quick overview of new items that have been added.

Snowl does have a few of the problems that I experienced with the Live Bookmarks setting in Firefox. Importing RSS News Feeds virtually slows down the system to a halt. That’s extremely frustrating if you import hundreds of feeds from an OPML file. The same happens if you update the feeds, something that you will never experience in external applications or online services like Google Reader.

That alone is reason enough for me to not use Mozilla Snowl on a regular basis. The developers have some interesting plans for Snowl. They want to add true two-way communication capabilities, for example reading and writing Twitter messages.