I don’t know why I hadn’t taken the time to look at it before but Mozilla’s Jetpack is really neat. (info:direct download) It’s a browser plug-in that you run little programs on top of that add functionality to your Firefox browser. It’s like a mix of Greasmonkey (see intro here if you’re unfamiliar, this is important) and browser plug-ins. It’s real easy to use but there aren’t a lot of Jetpacks that have been built yet.
Here’s one list of Jetpacks “in the wild.” There’s another on Userscripts that I’m going to go look at right now. I’ve been using this sidebar generator and this keystroke tab selector for a few days and love them a lot.
It doesn’t appear that this experiment has gotten much traction at all so far, but I’d love to be proven wrong about that. If you’ve got any thoughts about Jetpack, or any favorite ones, let me know.
Little things like this can make a very big difference in what you’re able to do efficiently on the web.