I’ve always loved fooling around with Firefox add-ons. It’s a huge amount of fun – if you have the time for it. Well, with the upgrade to Firefox 3.1, I lost a whole lot of my favorite add-ons. I suppose they have to be updated before they come back. Meanwhile, I also discovered some new ones and have been having no end of fun with one of them. An add-on called Piclens (sister to Cooliris) makes your computer screen look like this:

Is that cool, or what? This 3D wall of pictures happens when you go to a Piclens-enabled website. Most aren’t yet, of course, but a few biggies are. Google, Youtube, Amazon, Discover, Flikr and a few more. If you’ve installed the add-on, the PiclLens icon on the top right of your toolbar goes blue. Click on it and you get a beautiful, flowing panoramic wall of pictures. You can move the wall along or take it back or stop it to take a look wt what you have. Click on a picture and it enlarges. You get the title and URL as well. What use is it? Well, I don’t know: it just looks great and is a nice way to browse pictures fast. Somehow the pictures look better too, though that defies logic. If you use PicLens with Youtube, a clicked video will also enlarge and play.

Currently it has given me one or two Firefox crashes and even one abrupt shut down, but hey, I can handle a few of those. It must have to do with the graphics card or some such.