We all know that there are tons of add-ons for Firefox but I am very careful not to simply install just any plugins. Reason is Firefox can take up a lot of memory usage and having more add-ons installed will definitely increase the memory usage. After using Firefox for an hour, the memory usage for firefox.exe already gone up to 185MB.

Luckily my laptop has 2GB of memory so I don’t really feel any lag in using Firefox. Recently I found a very useful plugin which is able to help convert unclickable text links into clickable links. For example, when you visit a website and found a link on the page but you couldn’t click on it, you either have to manually type the link, copy&paste, or drag&drop into the URL bar. With this add-on, you no longer need to do that as it automatically make the link clickable.

Linkification, an add-on that converts text links into genuine, clickable links. This Firefox extension contains many options, all of which are accessible by (1) right-clicking the status bar icon, or (2) clicking “Tools->Addons/Extensions” and double-clicking the Linkification entry. If you still don’t understand how Linkification works, see the animation below.

For testing purposes, the author of Linkification add-on has compiled a fairly exhaustive list of test cases. Linkification should recognize each of these, unless otherwise marked. To linkify the text on the test cases page or any webpages, just press the CTRL+SHIFT+L keys simultaneously and you’ll see the difference. This plugin is only 65KB in size and you shouldn’t notice much on memory usage increase.

[ Install Linkification for Firefox ]

For Internet Explorer users, if you are interested to try this out, here is an Internet Explorer extension designed to turn text links into genuine clickable links, links that you can click on, copy, etc. This tool is based on the Firefox Linkification add-on, only tailored for the Internet Explorer engine. IE Linkification add-on installs and registers itself for internet explorer engine based browsers (including IE Tab on firefox). The shortcut key to convert all unlinked text URLs in a webpage into clickable links is the same as Firefox which is (CTRL+SHIFT+L). To access Linkification options, go to Tools > Configure Linkification. By default auto linkification is turned off and you can turn it on in the configuration options. Tested working on IE8 Beta 2.

[ Download IE Linkification ]