Upon installing it, Fast Dial then lives in your blank Firefox tabs. You can insert any of your favourite sites inside each of the boxes (there is space for up to 100 sites if you fiddle around with the customization options) and when you insert the URL, a thumbnail picture of the site then appears. Any of the boxes are easily editable if you want to change the URL later or update the thumbnail picture.

You can also change the background colour to anything you want. The default colour of the home screen is white but I changed mine to black. You can also change the size of the boxes, the number of the boxes….everything is customizable.

Another very nice feature is a right-click option on each Firefox tab which says “add to Fast Dial”. So if you are on a website and you decide that this should go into your Fast Dial, just right-click on the tab and choose “add to Fast Dial”. The next time you go to your Fast Dial page, you’ll see the page there.

I absolutely love this extension because I have been able to get all my frequently used webpages all in the same place in a nice easy-to-view arrangement. I have found my productivity much higher as a result because no longer do I need to go searching through bookmark folders looking for links and no longer do I have to sit there and tediously type out URL’s. Now all I have to do is open a new tab and click on the thumbnail for the page I am looking for.

It works perfectly. This extension should be built into Firefox as a default feature and everyone should use it! There’s no better time-saver! Plus it looks very cool on the screen – I’ve lost count of the number of people who have stopped to gaze in awe at it – “where did you get that screen?!”

Install it and try it! Right-click on the Fast Dial window, go into the options and customize it to just the way you want it! I guarantee you won’t want to let it go afterwards!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Feedly – A New Firefox Start Page Addon You Can’t Afford To Miss (12)
• Welcome to My Firefox: Extensions, Themes, Setup (14)
• Watch Videos In The Firefox Sidebar With YouPlayer (16)
• Ubiquity – Extend Firefox and Improve your Browsing Experience (9)
• The Winners of ‘Extend Firefox’ – Best Firefox Addons (14)

First and most awkwardly indigestible: it’s by AT&T, yes the telecom company. There are however a lot of other differences too as you will see shortly. I was able to try the limited beta and here is my experience with Pogo.

The System Requirements

Despite having no video card I decided to try it, the screen shots looked amazing and I just had to try! For those of you interested in a little background Pogo is based on the Mozilla project and uses technology by Vizible.

Here is a quick run down of Pogo :

No Tabs

Fire up Pogo and Pogo has no tabs. What? No Tabs? What am I supposed to do with such a browser? But wait lets not get ahead of ourselves here because tabs in Pogo are called “Cells” and live towards the bottom of the browser. The cells are one ahead on the tab as they contain visual clues to the websites that’s open in that cell. Kind of like a thumbnail preview – in fact it is a thumbnail preview!

The Pogo Dock

The tab bar of your browser becomes the Pogo Dock – true to its name it “docks” all the cells. You can resize the dock to increase/decrease the size of the cell thumbnails, rearrange thumbnails or set it to auto hide.

Bookmarks

Just like most modern browsers Pogo allows you to bookmark pages you like and additionally you can tag them. However, what’s unlike other browsers is the way you can access the bookmarks when you need them. When you access your bookmarks you don’t get a menu list but you get visual representations of actual pages dancing around on your screen at your command! This is what I am talking about:

Collections

Collections lets you organize and tag your bookmarks so that you can easily find them later when you need them. Collections are accessible via an interface similar to bookmarks. Click on a collection and all the web pages in that collection are presented on the main springboard from where you can view/edit them.

Visual History

Looking for a page you visited last week? Thinking to use the History? Well hit it and you will be overwhelmed at what you see. The history is shown as a sort of iTunes Cover flow animation but only it’s a little better. You can search for a page you are looking for or can browse the history with your mouse or keyboard. It also provides textual clues to the pages that are down the line on either side of the currently selected front page.

Spring Board

The spring board is like the Opera speed dial, but again with lots of extras and eye candy. It’s like a home page where you can keep the pages you like to visit often for “1-Click Access”. You can add as many pages to the Spring Board as you like and you will get a thumbnail preview of all of them.

Search

The default search is using Google and Ask. Once you click on a result for a search it gets stored as “click From the search” and then you can access it later with Visited Pages. The browser also displays sponsored results for the search term!

Pogo Search

This is a nice feature which allows you to search through everything from within “Your Pogo”. In other words you can search the “Collections”, “Bookmarks”, “History” and the “Search History” using this neat feature.

All in all, my take is that Pogo needs a system that is more than what a majority of people on the internet have. I for one wanted to create a screencast instead of screenshots but it won’t just happen alongside Pogo running (so the video from the Pogo Site! ). I have 1 GB of RAM if that’s the reference you would like to take. They need to get down those requirements to make Pogo a success. They actually have done it in past when then released this version.

Its still in limited beta so you would have to give your details and willingness to participate in the beta to get an invite. We tried to get invites for the Make Use Of readers but Pogo didn’t answer our requests unfortunately.

Have you used Pogo? Would you like to? What do you think about Pogo’s take on browsing?

By Varun Kashyap – Programmer, Blogger and Tech enthusiast, who likes to maintain and keep his system working nice! He blogs about tips, tricks, tutorials, latest on the web on his TechCrazy Blog

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• SpaceTime 3D Browsing: Gimmick or Innovation? (4)
• Yo Frankie! – Free Open Source Platform Game (16)
• Wyzo Beta – The Web Browser for Downloaders (12)
• What the Flock – the Social Browser Revolution (12)
• View A Multi-Page Article On One Single Page With PageZipper (14)

If you’ve used the web-based version of Gmail on your mobile browser you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Like when you open an e-mail, read its contents, then decide you want to archive or delete it; you usually have to scroll nearly all the way down to the bottom and click on the appropriate link or whatever other link you were trying to click. This can be quite awkward if you’re reading an e-mail that your sister sent you that’s 45 pages long and you’re just trying to easily delete or archive it. In last month’s Gmail podcast, Chuck Tomasi talked about a feature he calls “Speed Dialing”.

Instead of scrolling all the way to the bottom of the screen to click one of the common links, think of them as an ordered list and assign numbers to them in your head.

1. Reply
2. Reply to all
3. Forward
4. Archive
5. Marked unread
6. Add Star
7. Delete

So now when whizzing through your e-mail there’s no need to aggravate yourself by having to scroll all the way the bottom to perform one of these common actions. Simply press the number, and your browser will do the rest.

Remember: these numbered options are not the same in the very popular Gmail Java applet… except delete.

(By) Travis is a husband, engineer, entrepreneur, technology swami, visual communicator, WordPress lover and writer in his spare time. You can check out his personal blog at TQuizzle.com.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Mobilize any Website with Mowser (13)
• Browsing Web on your Mobile Phone (5)
• Access Your Websites Quickly With Firefox’s Fast Dial (15)
• Access Gmail Mobile on the iPhone and iPod Touch (5)
• 5 Useful Bookmarklets for Your Web Browser (4)