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Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user-created Add-Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add-ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add-ons you pile on, the more sluggishly your (formerly fast) browser becomes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a few different copies of Firefox– each optimized for your various tasks? Sadly, you can only run one instance of Firefox at a time. Or at least– one instance of Firefox NAMED “Firefox”. Over the years, some enterprising upstarts have taken the Firefox codebase and built new browsers on top of it.

Flock browser is geared for Web 2.0 addicts. It automatically logs into your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail– the list is enormous and ever-growing. Suffice it to say that if there ever was a browser meant for fun (not work), Flock is it.

Another Firefox-powered browser, Wyzo, is optimized for the rabid BitTorrent downloader. It has BitTorrent built in, along with an enhanced download manager, CoolIris, and some other nice updates to the original Firefox recipe.

While each browser has its own intended strengths out of the box, you can also outfit each one with the Firefox add-ons that help you get all your tasks done quickly and easily. What I’ve done is just one way to approach this, but it shows you what can be done.

Firefox

Firefox itself has become my work browser. I have to manage my (Google Apps for your Domain) email, calendars, school blog sites, to-dos, and plan lesson presentations (which for me, involves scanning through lots of photos online so I can illustrate what I want to say). My Firefox is optimized for this task with a few plugins which support these tasks:

• Xoopit for Gmail– shows you a list of all of the files, photos, videos, and attachments in your Gmail, visually
• Greasemonkey– enables me to run Better Gmail 2, Better GCal, and Better GReader from the geniuses at Lifehacker
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see photos in a beautiful 3D interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs
• Google Gears- so I can access all these online services even when I’m offline
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services

On a final note, another great reason to have several different browser is that logging into a Google service as one user basically dominates your whole browser. When I log into Firefox with my work Google Apps account, it gets very confused and buggy when I try to use my personal Gmail for online services. Better to have one browser for work, and one for play. Speaking of play…

Flock

Flock has become the official browser of my personal life. I love its sidebar which gives me at-a-glance views of my Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube peeps while I browse. I log in with my own personal Gmail and Yahoo email accounts so I can access Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and GoogleEverything easily. It’s the browser I turn on when I want to do my own thing.

• Xoopit for Gmail– especially good here for scanning through videos, photos, and files people have sent me– serves as a photo album
• Feedly- A beautiful new front-end redesign for Google Reader that allows you to catch up on all your RSS news while easily sharing it with your peeps
• Greasemonkey– I love Facebook Fixer, AutoPoke, and Remove All Facebook Ads
• Mozilla Ubiquity: This gives me access to my Ping.fm status updater, rememberthemilk tasks, and any bookmarklet that I can dream up with a quick key combination
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see video and photos in a beautiful 3D interface– here it’s a great way to scan through YouTube in a very pleasing interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers

Wyzo

I just added Wyzo to become my dedicated web design/ developer browser. Not necessarily because of anything inherent in Wyzo’s makeup, just because I needed another iteration of Firefox to fill up with all the great tools people have developed to make Firefox an awesome WYSIWYG code editor. This way, I can open up Wyzo the way someone else might open DreamWeaver.

• Firebug: huge tool for seeing the code behind websites, editing the XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and debugging
• Web Developer ToolBar: seems similar to Firebug but with TONS of features. It’s new to me– will learn more.
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services
• ColorZilla- a little dropper tool that allows you to pick up a color and see its hex code.
• FireFTP- Free FTP in your browser. Goodbye, Dreamweaver!
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs

So this is just one geek’s idea about how to transform the various flavors of Firefox into useful tools for your many web browsing needs. As more and more of our computing moves from the desktop onto the interwebs, we will need to have different tools to suit the different tasks we do online. Another way to do this is to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) with Fluid or Prism– creating little “single use” apps that do one thing really well. But that’s a lesson for another day.

I have spent my whole teaching career in small, high tech charter schools, and I have seen educational technology grow symbiotically alongside Web 2.0 advances. I have embraced blogs for their power to tackle a variety of classroom teachers’ challenges.

At our schools, there has always been the expectation that teachers will maintain an informative website so students can access homework, handouts, calendars, and other class information. My first school was using RapidWeaver, a desktop program where teachers designed websites whole and then uploaded them to the school servers. As the school year progressed, the upload times got longer and longer as teachers’ sites got more complex. As a result, busy teachers gradually fall off, leaving their websites as a wasteland of outdated and useless material.

I have discovered that blogs are the ideal way to provide information to your students. Why? Because:

• the most up to date information (like tonight’s homework or today’s assignment) is always at the top
• old posts are saved and can be organized in whatever ways you can imagine
• blogs are free and easy to operate
• teachers who don’t want the extra hassle of “updating a web page” can even post to blogs by email!
• Students can “follow” or “subscribe to” your blog posts so they never miss an assignment
• Blog feeds can be combined so, for example, assignments from all the school’s teachers can appear on the same page.
• Your blog feed can even be embedded in your school’s main web page.
• You can maintain various blogs for separate purposes. I even have a private blog that nobody can see that I use to  take notes on confidential student situations.

The beauty of them is that they are so flexible that you will continue to find new and interesting ways to use them. Blogs are a powerful technology that can be used in a variety of ways to make your classroom management more efficient.

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