« Reading List: Islamic Imperialism | Main | Reading List: The Jasons »

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Google PageRank Status Add-On for Firefox 2.0

I updated my development machine to Mozilla Firefox 2 a couple of days ago and have had nothing but an excellent experience so far—no crashes, no oddly rendered pages, and seamless transfer of settings from the earlier 1.5.0.7 release. The only downside was that one of my favourite add-ons, Stephane Queraud's Google PageRank extension, was uninstalled by Firefox 2.0 because the latest version posted on mozdev.org, 0.9.6, was deemed not compatible.

The PageRank extension is a marvelous little gizmo which appears at the bottom right of the browser window and shows the Google PageRank, from 0 to 10, of the page you're currently viewing. Whatever you think of Google's ranking algorithm, the PageRank they assign has a huge influence on how many people will see a given page in today's Google-dominated search-driven Web, so it's nice to know how influential the page you're viewing is according to the Sultan of Search.

Fortunately, for all of us deprived of this information since updating to Firefox 2.0, the author of this handy add-on has posted a 0.9.7 update on his Web site which is compatible with every release of Firefox from 0.9 through 2.0. I installed it yesterday with no problems, and it's great to be able once again have this information available for every page you view.

Posted at October 28, 2006 20:21