Firefox tools: Forms and RSS

by Sapphire (June 26, 2005)

Found two Firefox extensions this week that are worth mentioning: InForm Enter and Sage. InForm Enter is a form filler, and Sags is a newsfeed reader. There are a lot of other solutions available for both of these tasks, but here’s why I found each one best for me.

Sage is really simple, doesn’t make me click very many times to get to a feed, and so far no bugs. It displays the posts in blocks with a really nice CSS layout, which makes it easy for me to scan quickly. I haven’t tried the other Firefox readers, but from what I’ve read of comments on the extensions site, a lot of people consider it the best. Of course, there are plenty of non-Firefox solutions out there as well.

I have complicated form filling needs, because I submit my sites to directories and fill out applications for affiliate programs and stuff like that. For me, a simple contact form filler like Autofill (Firefox’s equivalent of IE’s built-in filler) just doesn’t cut it. InForm Enter is not as sophisticated as RoboForm, but if you’re having any sort of issues with Roboform in Firefox, or don’t want to pay $30 for it, you may find InForm Enter a pretty interesting solution.

It puts little arrow tags on all the form blanks you could fill out on a page. Clicking one of those allows you to choose what to input from a list belonging to whatever profile you’re using. You build profiles by clicking a little arrow icon in the right corner of your status bar (at the bottom) and choosing InFormEnter Options. From there, you create profiles (in my case, one per site, and one per every other type of redundant form I fill out). Each profile contains a bunch of items - what’s nice is you can just cut and paste these from another program, in one big lump. Then you choose at each form blank what to enter - it’s just a few mouse clicks. You can have several descriptions for a site, for example, different URL’s, different titles, whatever.