A Mandatory Firefox Extension

By Daniel Miessler on March 6th, 2005: Tagged as Firefox | Productivity

As many of you may know, extensions are available for Firefox that, well….extend its functionality. If you haven’t yet dabbled, let the auto-copy extension be your first.

Essentially, it takes one complete step out of selecting a piece of text and copying it to somewhere else. In other words, rather than this taking four (4) steps, it becomes three (3). This may seem like a minor gain in speed, but for anyone doing a lot of this activity it’s potentially quite major.

It’s worth trying for a bit to see if it grows on you.

** Thanks to Ken Swain for this tip.

By the way, once it’s installed, you’ll have a little “Auto Copy ENABLED” text piece in the bottom right portion of your browser. That text serves as a toggle; if you click it the feature is disabled until you click it again.

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Comments

  • I always thought the X windows way of copying and pasting was the easiest to use... Highlight and then just middle click the mouse button. No keystrokes/menu's involved.

    <!-- X-spaminator-strike: whitelist, -3 --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: IP check --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: email check --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: author url --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: comment body -->
  • In my opinion the absolut must have extension is AdBlock. Blocks all anoying ads and is configurable by the end user. By default it doesn't block anything until you tell it so it's worth reading all about it on my site here: Firefox Help, Tips and Tricks<!-- X-spaminator-passed: IP check --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: email check --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: author check --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: author url --><!-- X-spaminator-passed: comment body -->
  • Just thought I'd leave a few comments:

    1) You'd be suprised how much time you waste either going to the Edit menu or right-clicking for a contextual menu. Even hitting ctrl-c wastes some time because most people do it in such a way that it takes your hands away from the home keys. Auto-copy saves you from taking that step.

    2) Here are a few other FF Extensions that I think every geek needs:
    User Agent Switcher -- Useful for those IE or Netslave specific sites. It's also possible to use the UAS with a few other FF extensions so you can use it with windowsupdate -- though it requires installing Active X, which is kinda anti-firefox.
    Tabbrowser Preferences -- allows you to use tabs more efficiently... also allows you to bind middle mouse click to load a url from the clipboard (in a new tab if you so desire).

    3) I just want to say (for all you linux geeks that are forced to use windows for some reason or other) that auto-copy brings us a little closer to home. I know several times when I'm using windows I paste the wrong thing because I've forgotten to copy it from the source. I really think there should be a "clipboard options" control panel or something in windows so it can be customized.

    Anyway, that's just my $0.02
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