Google Services Shortcuts For Firefox

One Google account can be used for all services that Google offers. Users can use Gmail for emailing, Google Reader for RSS feeds, Adwords and Adsense for web marketing and monetization, YouTube to upload videos or Google Search to search the web.

The Firefox add-on Google Shortcuts ships with icons for many different Google services that you can place in one of the browser's toolbars to access the selected services with just the click of a button.

Advanced users might say that this can also be done with bookmarks and they are right but Google Shortcuts is a very convenient way of adding links to Google services in the web browser.

It may also be useful if you don't display the bookmarks bar all the time or at all in Firefox.

The add-on places the icons that lead to the different services in the navigation toolbar. The icons can be moved to other toolbars easily by right-clicking a blank space on a toolbar and selecting customize.

The add-on's options provide you with a list of Google service that the extension makes available currently. There you can add or remove service shortcuts so that only those that you are interested in are displayed in the firefox interface.

This is done by selecting a service and clicking on the left or right icons in the middle to move them to the list of services that are displayed in Firefox and those that are not.

The addresses used by these services are listed on the page as well and there is an option to edit the urls which can be useful if you want to access a localized version of a service for instance using the icons.

The majority of services offered are Google web services but there are also some from Microsoft and a few dummy entries that can be customized by the user.

The options hold display settings as well to change the toolbar layout to a dropdown menu which saves space in the Firefox interface and lists all Google services in the context menu once you click on the icon.

Google Apps users can enter their apps domain to make use of that as well.

The links behave the same way as standard links in Firefox. A left-click will open the website in the active tab, a middle-click in a new tab while left-click plus Ctrl-Alt opens the service in a sidebar which is helpful for some services such as Google Contacts.

Google Shortcuts can be downloaded from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Advertisement