For those of you who don’t know, the Firefox throbber is the little icon you see on the upper right hand corner of your Firefox window (under the Close button on Windows). Basically, it sits there while a page is loading to let you know that Firefox is actually doing something. Not very useful nowadays with high-speed broadband connections, but if you’re still on dialup or ISDN, I guess it could provide some form of hypnotic entertainment while you wait for a page to finish loading. Did you know it is possible to make your own throbber? You probably already install new themes on Firefox anyway, so why not go ahead and customize it further! The whole process is very simple and is detailed in a post over at Zerosign.net. All you need is a tool to create graphics (like GIMP or Photoshop…Paint would work just as well) and a text editor to modify one file in your profile directory. Have fun with it!

Meetro is an interesting instant messaging client which is location-aware, meaning that you can find people within a certain distance from where you are (wherever you are) straight from the application and maybe make a few friends from your neighbors. Additionally, it supports a few other IM protocols like AIM, for example. Yesterday, Meetro launched a new service called MiniMeetro which uses your Meetro location to display a faceroll and map of people using Meetro near you. You can then place this map via the provided HTML code onto your blog or website. I’ve used Meetro in the past and loved it, so give it a try and if you enjoy it, definitely check out MiniMeetro for something new and innovative to add to your site and better communicate with your readers.

I’ve been using the latest Firefox betas and release candidates for some time now (I like to help where I can), and while it offers many improvements, one problem I’ve experienced is that many extensions have yet to be updated to work on the latest versions of the browser (1.5 if you were wondering). Fortunately, getting old extensions to work on the new Firefox isn’t very difficult at all, and you can do it yourself if you can’t go without SessionSaver, for example (and I can’t!).

A lot of websites embed audio and video files into their webpages to make it a little more difficult to download (though of course, it’s not). There are various ways to download an embedded file, but the easiest, at least if you use Firefox, is a little extension called Download Embedded (clever, huh?). Once installed, all you have to do is right-click on the Flash animation, movie, or any other file and select the proper option to have the extension download it automatically for you. Definitely much easier than the old way of looking through the source code, huh? Download Embedded is free, and will work on all versions of Firefox up to the 1.5 release candidates.

I know many of you who visit this site have found us through digg, the popular news and social bookmarking site, so if you have, you’ve probably already heard about this, but if you haven’t, it’s a pretty cool tool for the service called the digg Toolbar available free for Firefox. I’m not a big fan of toolbars myself, but if you are, this one allows you to read digg news items right from the toolbar, search functionality, and even lets you listen to podcasts. If you’re running one of the latest Firefox betas or release candidations, please read the notes on the project page as you will have to do some tweaking for it to work.

Everywhere you turn nowadays, you find a new social bookmarking looking to help you take your bookmarks wherever you go, but what about the bookmark’s forgotten little sibling, the bookmarklet? Bookmarklets are very useful pieces of JavaScript code which let you access certain functions of web services with a single click, for example, adding a site to your social bookmarking or Flickr page. But what if you’re on the go and don’t have access to your computer? Enter Blummy. Blummy is a free service which aims to do for bookmarklets what del.icio.us has done for bookmarking, giving you an easy to access tool which you can add to any browser and which contains all those little bookmarklets in a little dropdown menu. If you’ve become used to using bookmarklets, Blummy is definitely a cool tool to have, if only to save space on your browser toolbar.

I know most of you that visit our site (about 55-60%) use Firefox, but for the rest of you, here is a quick and dirty guide to making Firefox look just like Internet Explorer, if that’s what is holding you back. Let me first say that Internet Explorer is full of holes and exploits, and if you really care about making your computer safer, you should definitely be using Firefox.