Why wait for IE 8?
IE 8 was made available as a preview download earlier this week. In it is a concept called Activities. Getting this functionality into your daily browsing now isn’t hard if you’re using Firefox. As the kind folk over at Lifehacker put it:
Activities isn’t new to Firefox at all, since to a large extent it’s just contextual search fancied up a little.
Contextual search in Firefox provides the ability (out of the box) to select text, right click, and click “Search Google for…” Activities in IE 8 takes that farther and adds several services to the list, so you’re not limited to Google. But a new Firefox add-on mimics this behavior as well, so there’s no need to wait. And, like the large majority of Firefox add-ons (perhaps all), it’s freely available. It even works with the Microsoft created Activity Providers page.
If you’re not using Firefox, perhaps this can be added to your list of incentives. If not, perhaps one of these extensions could be:
- ColorZilla - pick a color from any web page.
- DownThemAll - a brilliant download manager that’s much better than the Firefox default.
- Adblock Plus - stop the ad madness and get some productive browsing done.
- IE Tab - stay in Firefox on those sad occasions when a site’s behind the times.