Split Firefox

Wants to write a Firefox extension to make reading Gmails even easier (now there are Gmail Conversation Preview, Gmail Macros and many more) by seeing emails and reply at the same time. This needs to split the view the tab so that one views the email received and another views the reply to that email currently being composed. Scrolling any view must not affect the position of another. This way, the questions in the email can be answered one by one easily.

The first splitting ability I came across was found in popTart, but it only works for Digg. Then, I noticed Tricky Frames and Split Pannel (deliberate typo?!). The most promising extension available is Content Holder from lots of extensions unlisted on the official Mozilla Add-ons.

They are not very suitable for the Gmail reading purpose and are not quite well developed. All but Split Pannel supports only up to FF1.5. They all load separate pages in each view, but maybe splitting only the view of the same page, like Word of Acrobat, is a better idea.

Microsummary in Firefox 2.0

Live Titles: When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a "Live Title". Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.

One significant innovation in FF2 is microsummary proposed by Myk Melez. Unlike email or RSS aggregator, it can track a specific thing and be displayed as a headline. The default update interval in 30 min, but just add "browser.microsummary.updateInterval" to be 1 in about:config and all live titles will refresh as soon as possible (still 1 min). can be specified for each generator's xml in the profile folder. Currently, there is no built in method to remove the generators, but to delete the xml in the profile.

Now, only some sites have microsummary embedded, so microsummary generators are needed for other sites. A good way is to use this Microsummary Generator Builder to "generate a microsummary generator", install it, and bookmark the live title to Bookmarks Toolbar.

With live title, the specific info like CNN headline will really be the "head line" in FF2. It is suitable when the past info is not as important (otherwise, use an aggregator). The missing piece may be sound notification once any of the live titles is updated.