5 awesome Firefox add-ons for journalists

Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser is fast, secure and can use a huge variety of add-ons (also called extensions). Journalists can harness this power to quickly look up information, collect notes, monitor Web sites and more.

Don’t have administrator rights on your computer to install software?

Grab a copy of Firefox Portable and run it off a USB drive.

Here are five great add-ons for journalists, in no particular order:

Juice

Select text, like a name or a term. Drag it out of position (into empty space somewhere in the browser window). Juice will launch a sidebar with Wikipedia, Google and video search results.

Thanks go to Mashable for turning me on to Juice.

Here I selected "Eric Cantor" from a New York Times story, dragged it slightly off into the whitespace and Juice looked up his bio on Wikipedia.

Get Juice

Update Scanner

This Firefox add-on will check Web sites for you periodically and tell you if they’ve changed. You can set how often it should check your list of sites and how big of a change is needed for it to alert you. It’s great for keeping up with sites that don’t offer RSS feeds.

Update scanner will tell you when a Web site has changed. No more wasting time checking a huge list of sites.

Get Update Scanner

ScrapBook

ScrapBook lets you save pieces of Web pages, highlight them and make notes. It’s very handy for general research or for collecting information for a news story.

It can also follow links and capture the pages behind them. If you see a page with 10 links, and you want to save not only the page you’re on but every page it links to, you can do that.

Forget pen and paper - make your notes directly on the page with ScrapBook for Firefox.

Get ScrapBook

Split Browser

This add-on lets you split your Firefox browser window into multiple panes so you can compare two things side-by-side or just read numerous sites at once.

This small screenshot doesn't make Split Browser look terribly useful, but give it enough screen real estate and it will really shine.

Get Split Browser

TwitterFox

If you can’t or don’t want to use Tweetdeck, the next best thing might be TwitterFox.

It’s not a big full-featured app for monitoring multiple Twitter searches and groups.

It’s a small, unobtrusive icon in Firefox’s status bar that you can click to quickly bring up the latest Tweets, replies and direct messages.

Plus, you can quickly switch among multiple accounts, which makes it a snap to update both your own personal Twitter account and any newsroom accounts you might be responsible for.

TwitterFox lets you manage Twitter from a small window in Firefox.

Get TwitterFox

What other Firefox add-ons are useful for journalists? Leave a comment!