I’ve updated my Prevent Dupliate Tabs Firefox extension to allow for whitelisting of URLs that should be prevented from being opened in duplicate tabs.  You can grab latest version here.  Read the instructions about the new UI, checkout the changelog, and take a look at what I have planned next.

I created the extension to solve an annoyance that has always bugged me about Flex Builder, or more specifically any Eclipse based tool (ie. Aptana).  When you click the Run/Debug/Build button (or F11/ctrl-11) your project is always opened up in a new browser tab.  It doesn’t take long until you realize that you have 20 tabs open!

One thing that has always bugged me about Flex Builder (or more specifically Eclipse) is that when you click the Run/Debug/Build button (or F11/ctrl-11) your project is always opened up in a new browser tab.  It doesn’t take long until you realize that you have 20 tabs open – or at least in my workflow it happens!

So last night I built a Firefox extension that I have been wanting to make for a while.  It’s called Prevent Duplicate Tabs, and ensures that only the most recent tab of a given url is open at any one time.   After its installed, you will notice that there is a menu item in the Tools menu called “Prevent Duplicate Tabs”.  By default it is checked, and if you want to turn the extension off, you can simple toggle the menu item.

This is my first ever Firefox extension.  It was a bit of a pain to develop, and I now have even greater appreciation for the Flex documentation ;-)

Feedback is welcome – source is available by request.

Are you a serious Digg.com user?  The Smart Digg Button Firefox Extenstion is a neat tool that lives in your Firefox status bar notifying you how many Diggs the currently loaded page has.  A simple click takes you to the Digg page where you can give the page your own digg!

Yahoo! likes Joe Hewitt’s Firebug extension for Firefox so much that the YUI Team Is Hiring an Engineer To Work on Firebug.  This is great news and hopefully will help Joe make this tool totally kick ass!

Alessandro Crugnola has created a very useful Flash Switcher extension for Firefox that allows you to easily test their pages with different flash player versions.  The extension comes with all the currently published flash player plugins from the version 2 to the most recent and allows you to easily switch from one plugin to another.

One of my favorite Firefox extensions for quickly poking around the DOM is  Aardvark.  The extension ended up left behind with Firefox’s 1.5 and 2.0 upgrades, so this extension left my toolbox for a while.  Now it’s back and has been released to work with Firefox 2.0!  They have even added a couple of nice new features!

SearchLoad Options is one of my favorite Firefox extensions.  Quite simply it gives you an number of options for how the default search bar should behave.  For example you can have each search open up in a new tab and clear the search bar text after a specified number of seconds.

EC2UI is a Firefox extension that provides a great GUI to manage your Amazon EC2 instances, AMIs, instances, keypairs, security groups and permissions.. The extension is available here

S3 Firefox Organizer is a Firefox extension that will let you transfer files to and from your Amazon S3 account. The UI is pretty simple and works quite well. My only beef with is that the extension does a poor job of representing folders on your S3 account. Otherwise, the extension works as promised. For those of you not familiar with the Amazon S3 service, it is a great and cheap way to store/backup your data offsite.

Joe Hewitt has just released a Public Beta of Firebug 1.0. Firebug is a kick-ass tool that every web developer/designer must have in his or her toolbox. If you have used Firebug in the past you will absolutely love some of the new features like JavaScript profiling, live HTML and CSS editing, and CSS metrics visualiztion. My favorite new feature is the one that lets you open Firebug in a separate window (perfect for those of us with more than one monitor).