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