When I first saw this extension over at Learn Firefox, I was thinking it was just a scaled down version of Linky. But I decided I would go ahead and give it go anyway, especially since I discovered I don’t have Linky on this machine. Further I also discovered Linky hasn’t been updated since March 2006 and maxes out on the Firefox 3.0 builds at Alpha 3 (Beta 2 is the current build).

So I installed it in both Firefox and Thunderbird and restarted the applications. First thing that happened when I restarted I was presented with dialog box telling me to check the Options and I would not see this box again. It is when I looked the options (more on these in a bit) that I discovered this extensions does more than just open plain text URLs. When you right-click on a plain text URL (http://ffextensionguru.com) you are presented with these options in your context menu:

If you highlight a partial link (no http:// or www) or text you are presented with these options in your context menu:

• Unaltered - Opens the highlighted text as-is
• With ‘www.*’ - adds www in front of the highlighted text/partial URL (*). Example highlighting ffextensionguru.com and selecting this option would open the link as www.ffextensionguru.com
• With ‘www.*.com’ or ‘www.*.net’ or ‘www.*.org’ - adds www in front of the highlighted text/partial URL (*) then .com, .net, or .org at the end. Example highlighting ffextensionguru and selecting the With ‘www.*.com’ option would also open the link as www.ffextensionguru.com
• With ‘ftp.*’ - adds ftp in front of the highlighted text/partial URL (*). Example highlighting ffextensionguru.com and selecting the option would open the link as ftp.ffextensionguru.com

The last options (under the -) are what makes this extension so much better than Linky. You can highlight some text and select to perform a search in Google (though this a default context menu item) or (even better) in Wikipedia. Now I mentioned earlier about options…you can customize the context menu by adding/removing/changing and even re-order the options:

To add a New entry is fairly simple once you understand the formating. The things to remember for any type of entry are ‘*’ is the highlighted text ‘&’ will be the hot-key (underlined) letter for that item. For specialty links (Google, Wikipedia, etc). You will start with the text for the menu item followed by ‘|’ (note this is SHIFT + \) then the URL. I added one for YouTube. So in the New entry box I typed:

In &YouTube|http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=*

Now I have an ‘In YouTube’ option in the context menu:

There appears to be a minor formating bug that will resolve itself once you add a New entry. Hard to explain but this earlier screen shot shows what the context menu looked like prior to adding the New entry for YouTube:

Click For Larger Image
URL Link works with Firefox 2 & 3 and is 96 KB.

Tip Source: Learn Firefox