Your browser of choice may have changed a lot in the past year, but luckily the best extensions for making your browser better have kept up with all the most popular browsers. Here are our cross-platform, must-have favorites. More »

The Safari 5 feature that’s caught the web’s attention is the Reader button, which strips down articles and blog posts into an ad-free, highly readable format. Two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome do a good job of recreating that convenience. More »









Safari – Browser – Firefox – Apple – Clients

Dear Lifehacker
I frequently download big files to my computer and walk away. How do I stop my computer from going into standby while downloading something from the internet? I’m using Firefox on Windows 7. More »

Once you install the add-on for Firefox or its mobile version Fennec, FireFound uses geolocation to track where you are every time you open your browser, sending that information to a secure server (or your own server, if you prefer.) If your laptop is ever lost or stolen, log into FireFound's web site from any computer and find out where your laptop's being used—handy information to pass on to the cops, though not necessarily info that'll get your laptop back. You can also choose to nuke the personal data in your browser, including history and saved passwords, to protect if from prying eyes until you get your computer back.

FireFound lets you tweak several settings according to what level of security you desire, including the option to receive email notifications if your computer is used more than a certain number of miles from its last location. The data protection feature instantly annihilates some or all of the personal information contained in your browser if someone can’t provide a password to use it.

We’ve seen a fair amount of similar tools for Windows users on a whole in the past (see our laptop thief-proofing guide for more details), but FireFound is the first Firefox-specific version we’ve seen, and it’s got some solid features of its own.

Keep in mind that none of these tools are guaranteed to keep your data safe or recover your hardware, and remember that your best bet to safeguarding your data is encrypting your data. What other steps do you take to protect your laptop’s data besides securing your browser? Talk about it in the comments.

Ed. note: Incidentally, FireFound also just won the Extend Firefox contest, for which both Gina and Adam served as judges.

After installing the script (which works with Greasemonkey for Firefox and should in theory work with the dev build of Chrome, Opera, Safari with GreaseKit, and IE with IE7Pro), it will convert any link pointing directly to a download of PDF, PPT, and TIFF files to a link to view those files in the Google Doc Viewer. If the idea sounds familiar, we highlighted a bookmarklet that could do the same thing on a case-by-case basis, but this user script will do the trick every time.

(Click the image above for a closer look.)

Helvetimail is a logical—if obvious—step in the latest craze of applying minimal designs using the Helvetica font to popular web applications (see previously mentioned Helvetical, Helvetireader, and Helvetwitter). To use the script, you’ll need to enable the Minimalist theme in Gmail’s themes settings. Then, depending on what browser you’re using, you’ll have to install the user script. (Firefox users, if you’ve installed Greasemonkey, just click the user script link on the Helvetimail page to install. For the rest of you, the script’s author has instructions for various browsers.)

Helvetimail is probably the least attractive of the Helveti-bunch of user scripts we’ve seen (I love the look of Helvetical), but if you’re a big fan of the user-contributed, minimal Helvetica designs, it’s worth a look.

All three of the tweaks YouTube Auto Buffer makes can be toggled, so if you’d really like to get rid of in-video ads but don’t want to always watch videos in HD or prefer that videos play automatically, you can just disable the two unwanted features. Or at least they can be toggled in theory. I had trouble getting my preferences to stick, so your mileage may vary.

Either way, it’s a nice little script that aims to fix some users’ common YouTube annoyances. For some other YouTube-specific tweaks, check out our very own Better YouTube Firefox extension. (With any luck, maybe we can convince Gina to incorporate some of the YouTube Auto Buffer features into said add-on.)

YouTube Auto Buffer is a free download, works with Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

Our industrious Gina Trapani put Mozilla’s previously mentioned Collections feature to good use to pull together all of the necessary extensions for one quick and easy install. So just head over to the Icon-only PermaTabs collection, install the necessary extensions (they’re all really solid extensions in their own right, so you won’t necessarily only be installing them for this purpose), and head back to our original post if you need help setting it up from there.

That’s all FirefoxNotify does, really, but for Ubuntu users looking to give their desktop a more seamless look and feel, it’s a nice fix. The add-on itself is only 9K or so, and while it’s technically unofficial and not thoroughly tested by Mozilla’s team, it seems to work just fine for its single purpose. Until our tipster pointed it out, I was pretty happy to stick with Lifehacker favorite Download Statusbar, but this might just tempt me to switch. If you’re a Mac user looking for the same kind of Growl download notices, try the previously mentioned Growl Notifications add-on.

FirefoxNotify is a free download, works with Firefox on Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (or earlier, if you’ve enabled notifications). Thanks Leo!