[extropy-chat] Firefox time-saver tip

[Robert Bradbury]

This may be a bit offtopic for some but highly useful to others on these
lists.

For those of you who have made the transition to Firefox, you will notice
that after the common URL entry box at the top there is an additional entry
box to the right of it.  This box has a pulldown menu for search engines
(Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, etc.).  So rather than taking several clicks
to pull up an additional query page you can type in what you want to query
for (e.g. Rose MR) and select which search engine you want to use from the
pull down menu.  The interesting thing is that they have made this so it can
be user-extended.

So, if from the pull-down menu, I select "Add Engines" I go to [1] and can
add search engines like WebMD or Ask Jeeves.  But more importantly, I can
query a database [2] to see if someone has created an interface to databases
I often use.  And sure enough [3] points out that there are interfaces to
PubMed Central, NCBI PubMed and PubMed Books.  For the typical PubMed
interface one wants to add (click on) the "NCBI PubMed" (nlm.nih.gov) [4]
and it will show up in your personal search engine list.

I suspect if one wants you could easily do things like tailor this to
interfaces to search public lists (local newspapers, TV stations, etc.) and
private lists (e.g. organization memberships, patient lists, etc.)  Not a
breakthrough of monumental proportions but a clear time saver for those who
function under time constraints.

The above comments are with respect to Firefox 1.0.7 though I expect they
would apply to other versions, esp. 1.5.  They do not appear to apply to the
early versions (7.0) of Netscape  based on Mozilla.

Robert

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/search-engines.php
2. http://mycroft.mozdev.org/
3. http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=PubMed&submitform=Search
4. javascript:addEngine('pubmed','png','Health','0')
    -- note I suspect it only works if one has loaded the URL from [3]
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