Gmail shows the number of unread emails in the tab itself. The title of Gmail gets updated whenever you receive a new email. But the favicon remains unchanged. You can apply a tweak so as to show the number of unread emails in your Gmail favicon. It can also let you know if someone has sent you a chat message. So, far this can be done just in Mozilla Firefox.

First head on to the Mozilla Firefox Addons page for the Faviconize Tab plugin. Now install it and restart your browser. This plugin lets you reduce the size of a tab to just about the size of a favicon.

Now, you’ll need a Greasmonkey script that does the trick for you. Install “Gmail Favicon Alerts” script to your browser. Installing is easy; just click on the Install button but make sure that the Greasemonkey is enabled on your browser(via the button at the bottom of the browser). After its installed, open up Gmail and you’ll notice that the number of unread emails are shown on the favicon.

When you have unread emails, you’ll see the number on a yellow badge on a blue Gmail Favicon.

When you have no unread emails, you’ll see a red Gmail Favicon.

When you get a chat message, you’ll see a chat bubble instead of the Favicon.

Similarly, the “GReader Favicon Alerts” script for Greasemonkey shows notifications on the Favicon for the number of unread feeds. When the number of unread feeds, is below one thousand, it shows the exact number. When the number is above 1000, it simply shows, 1K+ on the favicon.

With these scripts, you can make the favicons of Gmail to show the unread emails and show the Google Reader items that are unread.

Related posts:

1. Reader and Calendar in Gmail
2. Pimp My Gmail – a cool interface for Gmail
3. Greasemonkey for Chrome
4. How to add a Favicon to your blog
5. How to get the older Facebook chat sidebar back

You can download and install this plugin from Mozilla’s Website. After restarting your browser, the plugin is ready to function. Now when you login to your Twitter account, the first thing that you’ll notice is the twitter search box that sits itself neatly just below your profile. You can now search the updates of any particular twitter user or search through all the tweets for any keyword. This is a very useful feature because without this, you would have to search Twitter from a different location, i.e. from a different Twitter subdomain.

One great thing about Power Twitter is that it lets you see the images or videos right from your Twitter page, instead of clicking on those links. Images uploaded in Twitpic, Flickr, etc. are viewable right inside the Twitter updates section without having to click on the links. The links to Youtube videos appended to the tweets will also show up directly in the updates. So, next time you won’t be seeing only those dull texts in Twitter but a wide range of images and video too shared originally as links. Isn’t that great?

Power Twitter also lets you see the most recent tweets of the people you are following. Just hover your mouse over the user icon in the updates and you’ll see a box that will show you the latest 4 tweets by the user. You can also access this feature by hovering the mouse over the thumbnails of people you are following. Isn’t this a great time saver?

Power Twitter can pull in your social network updates from Facebook? Clicking on Facebook link in the right hand panel will show the updates of your Facebbok buddies. Actually this is much easier than seeing on Facebook.

The @ replies feature is also fixed by Power Twitter. You can now see all the messages that contain your username, not just the ones beginning with @username.

Thus this plugin fixes some major drawbacks in Twitter and makes adds some very handy features to it. A greasemonkey script called the Troy’s Twitter Script is also a very useful userscript for adding lots of features to the default Twitter. So, use Power Twitter and become a power Twitter user.

Related posts:

1. Troy’s Twitter Script-A great greasemonkey script for Twitter
2. How to automatically post Google+ updates to Facebook or Twitter
3. See how much time you spend on Twitter
4. Tools for creating a collage of your Twitter friends
5. Some Twitter text commands that might interest you

Scribefire: Scribefire is a boon for bloggers. It serves as a desktop weblog editor and can be used within the firefox. It lets you post easily on your blog without having to login into your account. It lets you upload images directly into your blog, ie you don’t need to do that tedious job of uploading the image first and then giving the relative path. It also lets you ping your blog to sites like technorati and pingomatic. It also makes it easier to share your posts in social bookmarking sites like digg, stumblupon etc. So try out this very useful firefox addon if you are into blogging.

Universal Uploader: It lets you upload your images or other files in the web. Unlike the uploading features provided by many websites where you can upload only a single or very limited files at a time, it supports uploading multiple files with ease and also shows the progress status. You can also add multiple accounts and upload files to them with a single interface. With its cool and easy to use interface it supports file uploading in a couple of popular websites. Here is a list of a few.

- Box.net
- Flickr
- Picasa
- Youtube
- Facebook
- Webshots
- Omnidrive
- Smugmug
- SmeStorage
- Google Docs
- Snaphappi

AdBlockPlus: You might be annoyed many times by the worthless popup ads that appear in many websites. With this useful firefox plugin you can block those ads and speed up your browsing and downloading experience.

Control de Scripts: This extension helps you to control the javascript content that loads into your computer. You can set what functions each site can access and what not. It also adds extra setting to your preferences window.

Seo quake: This is an amazing tool for power bloggers and search engine optimizers. It lets the users to study very important SEO(Search Engine Optimization) parameters. It can show your page ranking in google and also your position in the search list for a keyword.

Download them all: It is a download manager plus an accelerator which can accelerate your download speed upto 400%. It allows you to pause, resume or stop your downloads like any other download managers. It is also capable of downloading all the images and links within a web page. What makes it most effective is that you can access it from the browser itself.

Shareaholic: If you are an addict of social networking and social bookmarking sites then this the tool for you. This piece of useful mozilla addon allows you to quickly share your bookmarks and email web pages. It supports many popular sites like Facebook, digg, google reader, delicious etc. It also lets you see the popoularity of a page by showing details about the number of times the page’s been dugg, stumbled or saved on delicious.

Cooliris: Formerly known as pic lens its attractive window  gives you a 3d image and video browsing experience. Its 3d wall lets you view and zoom images, videos, news and feeds effortlessly. It works on many popular sites some of which are listed below.

YouTube
Google Images
Picasa Web Albums
Smugmug
FotoTime
Friendster
DeviantArt
Photobucket
Yahoo Image Search
Ask Image Search
Fotki
Getty Images
Bebo Hi5
Live Image Search
AOL Image Search

Splash: It adds a splash screen to your firefox browser. You can customize CSS, images and many other things. It gives a very elegant visual information about the loading content.

There are many other addons which enable you to change the appearance of Firefox, take screenshot from particular regions on the browser etc. You can get these addons  here.

Related posts:

1. How to create a list of all installed and active Firefox addons
2. Manage addons and themes using Add-ons Manager on Firefox
3. Add an image search option in Firefox Search box
4. Change the appearence of your Firefox with Anycolor
5. How to restore the icons on the Addons bar to the right hand side in Firefox