Firefox Addons to Make Meebo (Online Chat) Even Better

Meebo is one of the most fully-featured methods to access instant messaging networks from the web – offering multi-protocol IM, chat rooms, and more. A number of features and scripts will also allow you to customize and enhance your experience. This article is mainly for Mozilla Firefox users – as it covers an extension exclusively for Firefox and a couple of Greasemonkey scripts.

The Meebo Firefox Extension

The Meebo Firefox extension adds some nifty features to Meebo. Improvements include “toaster” style notifications, a sidebar to access your buddy list, and auto-login. Unfortunately, this extension requires the Meebo tab to still be present, meaning that your conversations don’t carry on in the sidebar, but the actual Meebo tab.

The main addition of the extension is the sidebar, which allows you to see your buddy list in that sidebar – with no need to switch tabs. However, when you want to IM someone, clicking their name in the sidebar will automatically switch your Firefox tab back to Meebo – where you can chat there. This means that you can’t browse and chat at the same time, which is often inconvenient.

The second main addition of the extension are the toaster-style notifications, which tells you about certain events (can be chosen in the options panel) without having to be focused on the Firefox window.

Meebo’s Mobile Interface As A Sidebar

The mobile interface – while sub par to the actual interface, is a convenient way of accessing Meebo from the Firefox sidebar.  It allows you to carry on conversations in the sidebar without switching tabs. However, the Firefox extension doesn’t work in tandem with this method – so you’re stuck between the Firefox addon that depends on the Meebo website interface, or the less than stellar meebo sidebar.

It displays recent messages from contacts (listed in order of recent messages), which you can click on to chat with, and also click back to the buddy list through an icon next to the input area. An apparent bug is the status picker, which makes it impossible to see the options without highlighting over them. Sound is absent.

To use this interface, create a Firefox bookmark for http://www.meebo.com/mobile/ and set it to load in the sidebar.

Greasemonkey Scripts

Change the Background Image

Meebo offers a selection of background images you can use (if you like product placements) through the preferences – appearance menu, but to use other images, you’ll need the customize meebo backgrounds Greasemonkey script. It allows you to choose a URL to grab a wallpaper from (sorry, no local options) and makes it the background for Meebo. Make sure you choose dark wallpaper (as link text appears in white for all themes) and the gray theme tends to look best with all images. (Note: I had to add http://www*.meebo.com/#* to the includes of the script to make it work).

Meebo Control Panel Script

This Greasemonkey script has a number of options that change Meebo features including hiding various elements of the page and adding the ability to sign on while invisible.

Unfortunately, it sticks an ugly blue link on top of the Meebo logo to access the “control panel” (presumably because it hasn’t been updated to keep up with Meebo’s design; the author states you can change line 91 of the script to reposition the link).

Do you use Meebo for IM? Maybe some other online instant messenger? If so, do you have any tips, tweaks, Greasemonkey scripts or any other hacks that you would like to share with the readers? Please share them in the comments!

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