Personally I never really got into the whole Slashdot thing. Sure, I read it from time to time. Most of the time though, it just confused the heck out of me. I guess some of it was a little over my head. Well, if you have ever used Slashdot and figured you wanted a few more tools to help you navigate the Web site, then you need the Slashdotter Firefox extension.

Here is what the developer of the extension has to say about it.

Slashdotter adds the following features to the Slashdot website:

A “Reply to Selected Text” option is added to the context menu whenever you select text in a Slashdot comment or topic. The reply box is then pre-filled with the selected text, and can be formatted using your choice of format string. The default is ‘[blockquote]%s[/blockquote]’ (HTML angle brackets shown as square brackets). You can also choose to always have the reply page open in a new tab or only when you middle-click the “Reply” context-menu option.

A link is added at the end of each comment (next to the “Reply to This” link) that allows you to toggle open/closed all of that comment’s replies. Links to the Coral Cache, Mirrordot cache, and Google Cache are added after each link in a article description.

An advanced set of styling options allows you to style each Slashdot section differently. For example, you could have all Slashdot sections use the style from the Apple section, except for Linux, which you could have use the Politics style. The possibilities are endless! (Well, there are actually 10! possibilities, but that’s still a lot.)

Some of the other features include AJAX replies, quick parent links, and when you have your maximum comment length set low, clicking on “Read the rest of this comment…” will load the full comment in place, rather than in a new Web page.

This Firefox extension is for versions 1.0 and up of the browser. If you want to download it and try it out for yourself, you can do so at the Mozilla Update Web site.

Tags: firefox, extensions, comments, slashdot, editing, features