LostInTechnology

Interview with Yongqian Li of FastestFox

Posted on 19. Oct, 2009 by srikanth in Miscellaneous

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FastestFox is one of the more popular and quickly uprising Firefox Add-ons with over 3,346,783 downloads so far. I got an opportunity to get in touch with the developer behind FastestFox to answer a few questions about the extension.

Briefly, FastestFox is a Firefox extension which helps you browse faster by speeding up common tasks such as searching Wikipedia, Google, visiting your bookmarked sites and more. It saves you time and accelerates your browsing experience. It provides you with parallelized downloads and a convenient way to open your favorite bookmarks with customizable shortcuts (qlauncher).

Key Features

Enhanced Awesomebar

SmarterFox extends the URL bar (Awesomeabar) in Firefox so that Google search results automatically appear as you type. This is surely a time saver, as you do not have to click though to Google in order to search.

qLauncher

qLauncher is another interesting feature of this addon. It enables you to open your favorite sites/bookmarks with customizable keyboard shortcuts.  It’s easy to edit and add further sites via qLauncher.

Popup Bubble

Earlier, if you came across a phrase or a keyword of interest on a web page and you wanted to know more information about it, you had to copy and paste that onto clipboard, open Google and search for the keyword.  To handle this task faster, Fastestfox provides you with a ‘popup bubble’ which appears when you select some text on a web page.

Clicking on it will take you to the most relevant Wikipedia article for that term or if no such article exists, a Google search for that term. You might want to check out the other intriguing features of FastestFox here.

The Q&A

Q) What is the motivation behind building Smarterfox?

I spend most of the time on my computer in Firefox, so I thought it would be really cool if I could modify Firefox’s behavior to suit my habits better. It started out as having very few features — in the beginning all it would do was to add a box to Wikipedia. I gradually added features that I thought would be useful and it steadily grew more and more popular as I did that.

Q) What all have you done in development for building this Firefox extension?

Firefox extensions are mostly Javascript and XML, so in many ways it was quite similar to normal web development only without the headache of dealing with Internet Explorer.

Q) Can we expect any further features on the add-on?

Yes. I am currently working on a feature that shows results from other, more specialized, search engines when you are on Google. Since I think of FastestFox as a collection of helpful shortcuts, in many ways it will never be feature complete.

Q) Are there any other interesting projects you are working on?

Not at the moment. Since FastestFox has become so popular I have decided to focus all of my energies on improving it. It’s possible that I might write a few more Firefox extensions however — we’ll have to see.

The LosInTechnology Team thanks Yongqian Li for his valuable time and sharing his thoughts about FastestFox, Firefox Add-on.

By Srikanth AD,  see his Blog or follow him on Twitter for more information.

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Tags: application launcher, bookmarks, fastestfox, firefox addon, interview, qlauncher, smarterfox