Speed Dial – Firefox extension to access bookmarks and favorites quickly

Posted on March 18, 2008 at 6:22 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Firefox Addons series!

Wish you could access your favorite websites and bookmarks quickly by just clicking on an icon or a snapshot of the actual webpage? That would probably be much easier than trying to find a bookmark from a huge scrolling list in the Firefox Bookmarks menu! Earlier I had written about a cool website that allows you to access your bookmarks in only two clicks, called ironically, Only2Clicks.

I really liked Only2Clicks and still use it for accessing my favorites very quickly. However, there is also a very cool and well-thought out Firefox extension that does something very similar to Only2Clicks, but has some distinct advantages since it’s an extension.

Speed Dial is a Firefox add-on that is designed to give you super fast access to your favorite websites. Now it does this in three different ways, which is definitely more than the number of ways you can access your bookmarks using Only2Clicks.

Firstly, you can access your bookmarks via the Speed Dial Tab, which is a tab that will load up with your bookmarks in a grid format whenever you open a new Firefox window or a new Firefox tab. The thing I love about this is that you can open a NEW Firefox window with your speed dial there instead of just a BLANK page! I have always wondered how it was possible to get something to load up into the page when I opened a new blank window in Firefox.

Now as you can see this is very similar to Only2Clicks so far, except that Only2Clicks allows you to add as many snapshots to each page as you want. However, the other ways to access the bookmarks is what makes Speed Dial better I think.

The second way you can get to your bookmarks, and which the keyboard people will love, is via keyboard shortcuts. Once you assign your websites to a number on the grid, you can simply press CNTRL and the number and that page will instantly open in a new tab. So if my hands are on the keyboard and I don’t feel like reaching for my mouse, then I can just press the shortcut key combo to load up the site! Nice! Only2Clicks can’t do that (yet).

Thirdly, you can use the Speed Dial Button, which can be added to the toolbar and will give you a dropdown list of your favorite web sites. (Read all the way down on how to add the button to your toolbar)

It’s also a cinch to add web sites to the speed dial! Once you have it installed, you can go to the speed dial tab by simply clicking on the purple icon at the far right. You can now click on any of the unassigned number and you’ll get the Add Dial box:

The amazing thing about this extension are the number of things you can tweak! For each dial, you can choose the image you want to represent that dial (default is the actual website), the refresh rate for the page, the layout and the cropping.

Now that’s the manual way to do it! You can also go to the Bookmarks menu and choose the “Set as Speed Dial” option.

You can also set the options so that the option for setting as Speed Dial will show up when you right-click on the tab or right-click anywhere on the page. You can do this by clicking on the arrow next to the Speed Dial icon and choosing Speed Dial Options.

Here you can now set the number of rows and columns for your speed dial, so if you have a higher resolution or simply want to have more than 9 choices, just increase your grid by rows or by columns. You can also set it to load in blank window or in blank tabs and you can set the options for where the “Set as Speed Dial” option comes up including the bookmarks menu, tab context menu, and browsing area context menu.

Like I mentioned before there are lots of things you can configure in this add-on, including the thumbnail sizes, the buttons on each thumbnail, the keyboard shortcut keys, and lots more!

You can also add the toolbar button to your Firefox toolbar by following these instructions:

First, right-click on the Firefox toolbar
On the contextual menu, choose “Customize“
Locate the new Speed Dial buttons (purple grids) on the “Customize Toolbar” window
Drag the button you want to use, and drop it onto Firefox’s toolbar
Once you’re finished, click on the “Done” button, which is at the bottom right

So if you’re an avid user of Firefox, I would certainly recommend trying out this program in addition to web-based sites like Only2Clicks because of the more granular control and tweaking abilities you are given. I would still keep Only2Clicks as it’s a great way to access your favorites from any browser on any computer in the world! Enjoy! Source: DemoGirl

[tags]firefox addons, firefox extension, speed dial firefox addon, speed dial, access bookmarks[/tags]

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Comments

2 Responses to “Speed Dial – Firefox extension to access bookmarks and favorites quickly”

mark said on : July 20th, 2008 at 3:13 am

i used to use this extension on firefox, then fire fox got crowed with extensions so i stopped using it. yesterday i uninstalled most things and started using it again. i found a much better extension called…….FASTDIAL! seriousley it is a lot better heres the link. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5721

Free favorites and bookmarks manager - Tidy Favorites Says:

[...] previously written about several tools to manage your bookmarks, including Only2Clicks, a cool service that lets you access your bookmarks quickly by using [...]
January 16th, 2009 at 5:13 am