Cooliris detects when you are browsing a page containing photos or videos, such as Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, or Facebook. It then highlights a browser button that lets you switch from viewing the media on that page to a true full-screen view with a solid black background. You can browse an entire Flickr gallery as a 3D wall of images.

Mozilla Firefox is the second most-popular browser on PC and Mac platforms (after their respective default browsers, Internet Explorer and Safari) for a few reasons. First, it is secure and blocks pop-ups. It is also free and open source, so a large community is always working to improve it.

My personal favorite reason is its extensibility: The open source code lets users develop extensions (or add-ons) that add new functionality to the browser. [In this article], we'll take a look at two useful Firefox extensions. If you don't use Firefox and these features sound good to you, maybe it's time to switch.

Read It Later

(https://addons.mozilla.org/ en-US/firefox/addon/7661)

What is it? A Firefox add-on that simplifies bookmarking Web pages to read later.

Who cares? Overwhelmed info addicts and anyone using Firefox.

How does it work? Read It Later adds a checkmark icon to the end of the browser's address bar that can be clicked to add a page to your To Read list. It also adds a button to the toolbar that can be configured to open the To Read list or to simply load the next unread page. If you right click on a link, a context menu item called Read This Link Later lets you add the target Web page to your list. When you're finished reading a page, click on the checkmark icon again for a list of options, including Mark as Read & Add to Delicious, Mark as Read & Digg, and just Mark as Read.

What makes Read It Later most useful is that To Read lists can sync across multiple computers. So when you are at work and glance at the news, you can add the stories to your To Read list and then read them in their entirety at home when you have more time.

I've found using Read It Later is more convenient and simple than using a general online bookmarking service and a "to read" tag. It requires less maintenance on the user's part than other methods, and by setting the icon to autoload the oldest item on the list, I find that I never leave something in the "to be read" file for so long that it is no longer relevant. This was a problem I had when I simply filed articles to be read using Delicious.

Any bugs? Read It Later does not handle marking multipage articles read well. Once you've moved past the first page, it no longer recognizes that you are reading the same item, and if you click on a link to get back to the first page, it still doesn't recognize it. In this case, you have to load the page from your To Read list again before you can mark it read.

Cooliris

(https://addons.mozilla.org/ en-US/firefox/addon/5579)

What is it? A Firefox add-on that enables full-screen media browsing and viewing.

Who cares? Photo fans and YouTube addicts.

How does it work? Cooliris detects when you are browsing a page containing photos or videos, such as Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, or Facebook and MySpace, among others. It then highlights a browser button (and embeds a mouse-over icon into the media itself) that lets you switch from viewing the media on that page to a true full-screen view with a solid black background. You can browse an entire Flickr gallery as a 3D wall of images.

When you are not on a page of media, you can still launch Cooliris and use it to browse and search for media across the sites covered.

The extension also features a sharing option that lets you drag and drop a group of pictures into an album that you can email without leaving Cooliris.

Any bugs? There seem to be none. Early incarnations of the add-on had a tendency to reset the layout and options settings on other Firefox add-ons, but that problem has been eliminated.