I was very happy to run across updated versions of these two Firefox extensions:
- Live Writerfox allows you to highlight a snippet of text on a web page, right-click, and click a menu option to open Windows Live Writer with the text included in the draft post along with a link to the page. (In fact, that’s how I wrote this post.) It works with the recent technical preview of WLW and with Windows Vista x64.
- Send to OneNote allows you to send a web page or a selection to a OneNote page, using a right-click menu.
I still prefer Internet Explorer for some tasks, but the Mozilla folks have done an excellent job with this release and it’s hard not to like it.
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Is right-clocking related in any way to overclocking?
Oops. That’s the trouble with working in a mostly dark room on a notebook that doesn’t have a backlit keyboard. Typo fixed, thanks.
You can also drag text and images directly from Firefox into Live Writer… extremely convenient.
I finally fixed all my Firefox 3 problems by disabling the tablet input service. How weird is that?
Ed, thanks a LOT for the link to “Send to OneNote”. I’m using that program a lot, it’s one of the few programs i couldn’t live without.
The fact that IE7 has a built in “Send to OneNote” is the reason that i still had to use IE from time to time, although i like Firefox better.
The plugin still has some rough edges (for example, it’s not able to find the path to the OneNote Executable by itself, and it simply does nothing at all, not even give you an error, if you don’t specify that path manually), but it works well once you got it installed and configured.
Ed have you tried Glasser “experimental” extension which add a glass effect similar to IE 7/vista. The Glasser also allow user to add buttons in the Glass area. I was wondering if IE 8 will be doing the same customization or they already done that.
I thought this might be a topic we’d agree on, but alas no – I have found Firefox 3 to be buggy and slower and take up more resources than firefox 2. And I see firefox 3 incompatibility css/javascript hacks starting to appear – that hasn’t been needed before. I don’t think it was ready for release. I won’t be upgrading any time soon.
Jon, so far FF3 seems faster to me. I’ve switched over to it as default browser to give it a fair shake, but it certainly isn’t perfect, and I could easily imagine myself switching back to IE7 (definitely not FF2).
TJ, I haven’t tried Glasser and probably won’t. I’m very conservative with add-ons and this one looks like pure eye candy. I’ve also read at least one report that said it caused severe instability. That’s not definitive but it’s enough to put me off for now.
I have a friend or two who say it is faster, but they always used to complain about severe instability with FF2, so I am suspicious what add-ons they had installed. (oh that is another reason for not using FF3 – when I downloaded it the other day, a couple of my “must have” extensions weren’t available for ff3 yet. When those don’t work I can’t even give it a “fair shake”, since various features are “broken” to start with. There might be replacements by a different author, but I am too lazy to go look for a different add-on when I am happy with FF2.
I have one real estate site that requires IE, and sourceforge.net has some javascript that in combination with my ad-filter, makes the file upload page bog down, but other than that, I am happy with FF2.
I read the changelog, but didn’t really see anything compelling in version 3, but a friend always says that I don’t like anything new, so maybe that is my problem. I just recently changed from fvwm to gnome – it has some good things, though having the same desktop interface for the last ten years was a nice thing.
Ok now I’m kinda worried about the one severe instability report although Glasser is in different profiles which might help. I’ve been using Glasser since i first installed FF3 and never experience any severe instability. It does make FF3 visually better but it also made me want to use FF3.
Hrm. Debian just upgraded to FF3, I guess I’ll find out more about it now.
And note, that lest I seem hypocritical, I am not thrilled that debian upgraded to FF3 without me noticing, but I see it a little different than when I was upgraded to IE7, and I complained, though I think they are/were both in the same situation of not being supported that well out in the world.
For debian, I asked it to upgrade all software on my machine, and I was upgrading 4 machines at the same time, so went a little too fast to notice which software was being upgraded. On windows, I was asking it to upgrade the OS.
And I realize that you think the one extra dialog was enough to notify for IE7, but I disagree.
In both cases, I appreciate the seamless upgrade, ie. in debian’s case, it could have made a firefox3 (iceweasel3) package, and required a manual upgrade. I assume there was discussion on that, and the “old folks” lost.
Also, I am running the “testing” version of debian, so I am a little more tolerant of things breaking.
“realize that you think the one extra dialog was enough to notify for IE7, but I disagree”
One extra dialog? There are at least three LARGE dialog boxes that force you to make a decision where the default is no, and they allow you to back out at any point. You have to manually approve the update itself, then you have to agree to the installation, then you have to agree to the license agreement. The idea that this is being pushed on someone without their noticing it is impossible for me to imagine.
Yeah, I know you said that, and I noticed the extra dialog, but lots of updates have license agreements, and so I don’t count that as a dialog that the majority of the world even noticed, or definitely read.
Have you ever watched a reasonably non-techy person work on their computer – they click on all sorts of dialogs and popups without thinking about it. And if something strange happens, they start clicking like mad, without a clue what they are clicking on. I have no problem imagining people not noticing the extra dialog, just like people click on the vista security popups, and anti-virus warnings, ssl certificate warnings, and firewall unblock notices, EULAs, et al. without paying any attention to whether they are actually doing anything that would have required a notice.
I don’t count any of those dialogs as worth anything. Once people get used to clicking on dialogs they don’t understand, it doesn’t really matter what the text says, or how many you use. So, that is why I count it as one dialog for IE7 – the blue one is the only one that looks unique, and I’d expect at least some people to notice that, the rest are just like all the dialogs with lots of text they are used to not understanding.