Show Screen Captures Firefox Extension

Updated: October 29, 2006

Download:

About:

Show Screen Captures is a Mozilla Firefox web browser extension by Gina Trapani that will display thumbnail screenshots next to external links on a web page. Screenshots are provided by http://thumbshots.org/.

How to use:

Once the extension is installed you will have to restart Firefox. Then, in the Tools menu, choose "Show screen captures" or in the right-click Context menu, choose "Show screen captures" to activate.

Examples:

Show Screen Captures on popdex:

Show Screen Captures on del.icio.us:

Notes:

If you have installation problems, try upgrading to Firefox version 1.0 Preview Release.

Keep in mind that Thumbshots.org does not have a screep cap for every site.

This extension displays a screen cap of the front page of every site, not the page which is linked.

Bug Reports:

Please mail comments, bugs and suggestions to ginatrapani at gmail.com. Be gentle. This is my first Firefox extension.

Show screen captures has been tested on:

Firefox 0.9/Windows XP
Firefox 1.0PR/Windows XP
Firefox 1.0PR/Mac OS X
Firefox 2.0/Win/Mac

Thanks:

To the developer of the Google Preview Firefox extension, for inspiration and Javascript.

To Ted Mielczarek for the Firefox install.rdf generator.

To Eric Hamiter at roachfiend.com for the Creating Firefox extensions tutorial which I referenced heavily.

Bug Fix History:

10/19/2006 - Compatible with Firefox 2.0

12/4/2005 - Compatible with Firefox 1.5

9/17/2004 - Correctly differentiates between internal and external links (even fully qualified internal links, with or without www.)

Source code:

For developers interested in learning how to build extensions, source code and a bit of explanation.