Firefox and Opera have one function that, for all its usefulness, few people use. This function is the browser sidebar or in English sidebar. The main problem is the fact that most sites do not fit into the sidebar and look very shabby while there. However, if you often use Google services, then there is good news for you — most of the most popular services have an optimized version for working with sidebar.
To add any page to the sidebar, you need to...
- ...Firefox add a bookmark and tick "Load this bookmark in the sidebar"...
- ...Opera add a bookmark and tick "Show in panel".
And here are some optimized versions:
- Google Notebook — allows you to work with an online notebook, add and read notes. A particularly simple solution if you don't want to install an extra browser extension.
- Google Talk — Flash implementation of the most popular messenger specifically for sidebar.
- Google Search is a specially designed search for the Internet Explorer sidebar, but it also works fine in Opera and Firefox.
- Google Docs & Spreadsheets — the latest editable files in your account.
- Most of these pages were designed to be used on Google's home page. So some other gadgets can also be tried to "fasten" to the sidebar using this URL: http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url =[Gadget Source], where [Gadget Source] is the URL of the source gadget code, which can be found in the description of "About this gadget" For example: http://gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=
http://www.counttonine.com/google-sudoku.xml (Sudoku game).
Please note that most optimized web pages for viewing on mobile phones and PDAs are also wonderfully added to the sidebar.
This is how, for example, Yandex weather looks like:
But if you have a lot of targeted sidebars to place in the browser, then use the All-in-One Sidebar plugin in Firefox, which will help optimize work with them. Opera copes with this task perfectly by itself.
