Firefox Morning Coffee, Opera Saved Sessions and Speed Dial

I installed a new Firefox extension last week that's really helped me get things done. It's called Morning Coffee and what it does is add a button to your toolbar that lets you load a bunch of websites in different tabs all at once. The idea is if you have 5 sites that you want to read every day, you add them to Morning Coffee and load them all up with a single click. You can even have different sites for different days. Or different sites on weekdays and weekends. And the developer says he's working on adding times of the day, so that you can have one group of sites for mornings, another group for afternoons, and another for evenings, or whatever. Sounds great.

Users of the Opera browser have had a similar feature for a long time now -- saved sessions -- but now they've got a new feature as well. It's called Speed Dial. You can read more about it at the Opera Desktop Team's blog. It's not customizable by day like Morning Coffee, but it creates a page with thumbnails of up to 9 of your favourite sites, which is pretty cool.

I've been an Opera user for years, although it's no longer my main browser any more. It has a lot of great features --

• tabbed browsing - Opera had them first!
• built-in content and pop-up blockers - including the option of blocking on a site-by-site basis
• mouse gestures - like keyboard shortcuts, but they work just by moving your mouse in certain ways
• notes (- highlight and save text, and Opera automatically remembers the URL where you got it -- very handy
• and the trash can - if you accidentally close a tab, you can get it back by taking it out of the trash!

Whether you use Firefox, Opera, or some other browser, most of them have lots of advanced features, either built right in or available as plug-ins, extensions, widgets, or whatever, that can really help you work better. Morning Coffee does that for me. It helps me remember to visit websites that I might otherwise forget. If you've got sites that you want or need to visit regularly, give MC a try and see if it helps you.