Firefox, the latest offering from the Mozilla Foundation is one of the best web browsers in the market at the moment. In addition to built-in extras like popup-blocking, tabbed browsing, smart searching capabilities, the mozilla development platform offers more than 200 add-ons in the form of extensions.
According to the mozilla update site, the official download home for all extensions:
Extensions are small add-ons that add new functionality to your Mozilla program. They can add anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature.
Firefox offers the average biologist many advantages over Internet Explorer or Opera.
Warning:As the developer of one of the first bioinformatics extensions for Firefox, the case that I put forward below may be biased !!!
a) Bioinformatics Extensions: Search and Analysis
- biobar - A power-browsing toolbar for searching over 40 biological databases. The complete list of datbases than can be searched in given here. In addition, the toolbar offers a high degree of customizability, by allowing users to add their own databases to the toolbar. Biobar is available for the whole mozilla family of browsers including Firefox, Mozilla (1.4+) and Netscape 7+.
- bioFOX -Code bioFOX aims at implementing various bioinformatics tools as an extension on Firefox. Analysis of your favorite gene(s) usually require(s) retrieving it from a database like NCBI or Swiss-Prot and then performing one or more tasks including translation, blast search, property analysis like codon usage, molecular weight calculation etc. bioFOX is available as a sidebar only for Firefox and can be activated by pressing Ctrl-shift-F after installation. The bioFOX homepage has more documentation.
- BioMed Central Toolbar - BioMed Central has a toolbar available for both Mozilla/IE (Wonders!) which, much like biobar, allows a user to search BioMed Central, PubMed, Faculty of 1000 and Google. A similar search plugin is available for Firefox from the same site.
- NCBI Toolbar - A new offering from NCBI, provides a search toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox
- Athens Toolbar - This toolbar will be useful to people who use the Athens Authentication Service to access sites like Ingenta for full-text access to library subscription journals. Not very useful for people outside the UK.
- LSID - The lsid extension enables resolution of lsidres URIs. The lsidres protocol is used by IBM's LaunchPad for Life Sciencer Identifiers (LSIDs). At present, LauchPad is only available for Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows. This extension is a first step towards adding support for this protocol to other browsers.
b) Search Plugins: Quick Searches
Firefox comes built in with a search box at the top-right edge of the browser. by default, the search plugins supported for that box are Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Dictionary, E-bay. However, its just as easy to add other search engines for this box. I have listed a few for Life Sciences below:
- NCBI Global - Search NCBI
- NCBI PubMed - Search Entrez
- HubMed - Search HubMed
- SwissProt - Search SwissProt
These and many others can be installed by a single click from Mycroft.
Other fantastic general purpose extensions include AdBlock a must to block all those unwanted banner ads, flash iframes etc.
Please let me know if the list is incomplete so that I can maintain a uptodate list for future reference.
Comments
Hey Jawahar, I'm sorry tha
Hey Jawahar,
I'm sorry that this post got stuck in the queue over the weekend. I turned off automatic posting to the front page, due to some rather dubious posts (companies, advertising etc.). The down side of this policy is that excellent posts like this one some times get stuck in the queue. One possible way around this problem is to give some of the more frequent posters, such as yourself, admin access to the content module (i.e. posting, promoting, editing and deleting). Thoughts ?
I agree that Firefox is the best browser for bioinformatics, I have biobar and various custom search plugins for our internal lab databases constantly in use. However, even though the usefulness (utility ?) of Firefox over IE is far greater (tabbed browsing), I still have a hard time convincing local users to switch.
Another advantage of Firefox is native RSS support (aka "Live bookmarks).
Firefox promotion
Things move fast in the world of OSS - seems like Firefox has been with us for ages and we're almost blasé about it. It absolutely rocks as a browser and a great example of an OSS project.
I was in my boss's office last week. He had so many IE windows open that the Windows bottom toolbar was rendered useless. "I need a bigger screen", he sighed, gazing at his almost brand-new, shiny 19" LCD. I resisted the urge to smack him and gently pointed out that what he needed was a tabbed browser.
Firefox v IE
This post was something I wrote up for our internal pages here at the EBI, and then thought it would be good to share. There are all these IE-crazy people who will probably never move to any other browser, till such time *nix is the OS of choice...
I would be more than happy to help out in the maintainence of nodalpoint if you think it prudent. Would it also not be a good idea to get people to sign up before they can post ? Or do you think its too m uch hassle and goes against free access to information ?