This week I installed a few nifty Firefox Add-Ons, All-In-One-Gestures and IE Tab.

I tried All-In-One-Gestures after watching how fast a co-worker was able to navigate on the web by using this Add-On. It allows you to right-click anywhere on a web page and move the mouse left to go backward or right to go for forward.

Navigating this way is definitely much faster than using the browser toolbar buttons and helps me stay in a better flow when trying to quickly scan oodles of google results.

For some reason I also really like the little red line affect that shows up on the page, but I’m easily impressed like that.

The other Add-On, IE Tab, lets you view how a web page will be displayed in Internet Explorer by simply clicking on a button at the bottom of the page. This came in handy when I was trying to figure out why a Cruise Control report generated by FxCop was not working. On a hunch, I toggled to IE and realized that the XSL had browser compatibility issues because it worked fine in IE. It was nice to be able to verify this by simply toggling view modes rather than having to start a different browser and then navigate to the page.

The moral of the story: Always pay attention to how your co-workers do things. I don’t think I ever met somebody who didn’t have at least one time saving tool or trick up their sleeves that I could steal to my great benefit. I like to think of every productivity enhancing tool or technique as a little investment. It may take a little “seed money” in terms of time and effort, but it is amazing how quickly the dividends begin to pay off so that my overall time savings quickly surpasses my initial investment.

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