OStatic

Pidgin is a great GTK2-based instant messenger application that supports a bevy of protocols, including ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, and AIM. It's a terrific app in its own right, but when you add some of these power tools, Pidgin is even better.

pidgin-hotkeys - Use this plugin to assign global hotkeys to quickly perform regular tasks like fetching messages, toggling the buddy list, or opening the preferences pane. Also available in German and Swedish.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you know that microblogging is all the rage. Web sites like Twitter, Identi.ca, and Laconica are incredibly popular for exchanging snippets of information, chatting with others, and quickly sharing links to interesting online content. It's really a pain to jump from site to site to read your friends updates or provide your own, so here are five microblogging extensions for Firefox to help you out.

ShortenURL - Microbloggers don't want to waste precious characters on long URLs so it's customary to shorten links you display in status updates. Pasting a Web site location into URL shortening service homepage is so last week now that you can do it right from your browser's toolbar. ShortenURL makes quick work of this repetitive task by letting you crop Web addresses right from the toolbar. It supports over 100 URL shortening services already but if that's not enough, you can request more.

I love the tabbed browsing feature in Firefox so much that it's not uncommon for me to have upwards of 20 open at a time. Unfortunately, several of them are often blank pages because I've forgotten where I was planning to go once I open them.

I've always wished that Firefox would intuitively know that if I highlight an address on a Web page and open a new tab, it's probably because I want to map it. Apparently, I'm not the only one longing for that feature. Mozilla is developing an extension that takes its best guesses about why you've opened a new tab in your Firefox browser.

Even though Firefox 3 is fantastic in its own right, tossing a few add-ons in the mix makes it that much more fabulous. In fact, so many people use add-ons, Firefox now features a way to get new ones right from the Add-ons Manager. Now that the dust has settled following Firefox's latest release, many of the most beloved add-ons have been tweaked to work with it. Everyone has their favorites, but let's take a look at a few of the most popular.