Even though Twitter itself is a web site, don’t you occasionally want to have access to Twitter while you surf away in a different window, or at least be notified when someone sends a tweet your way?  In that case, what you may be looking for is a Firefox add-on for Twitter. Unfortunately, there are a dozen or more already out there. Recently, I installed two and I’d like to share with you my thoughts about them.

Tweetbar

First let’s look at Tweetbar. This a brand-new plugin from Mike Demers that makes use of that sadly-underutilized sidebar to give you an almost-fully-featured twitter client, in the style of TwitBin. What this plugin does right is capture the essentials of the Twitter site in a sidebar-friendly format.

The essentials are all there — tabs to follow everyone, people you follow, people who follow you, and the vaguely-entitled tab friend which shows you who you are following, and their last tweet. You can also change your refresh timeout and clear out any of the tabs.

The bad part is that’s where the good bits stop. There is no “reply” or “favorite” or “direct message” buttons anywhere, not around the user icons, nowhere. So you have to do your tweet maintenance the old-fashioned way, typing it all in the input window. Also, if someone posts a link in their tweet, Tweetbar helpfully makes it a link, but when you click the link it uses the current tab. There doesn’t seem to be a way of changing that behavior. Worse, it does not honor ctrl-clicks to open a link in a new tab! For me, that’s makes it worse than the original Twitter interface, in all honesty.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox, from Naan Studio, takes a different approach to integrating Twitter on Firefox. It places a small, unobtrusive Twitter icon in the bottom status bar. From there you can left-click on the icon to log in and get tabbed window that defaults on recent friends’ tweets. You can switch to replies you have sent and a direct message window. There doesn’t seem to be any support for viewing all tweets, and you probably wouldn’t want to — the window is only 345 pixels high, good for about 4-5 tweets at a time. Also, it is not re-sizeable, which is definitely a drawback.

Each tweet has an “arrow” button in the upper-right-hand corner, making it easy to quickly shoot off a reply to incoming tweets. Also, TwitterFox keeps a tally of how many new general and directed tweets you receive. Another nice touch is a subtle fading of tweets you have already read, which acts as a sort of “bookmark” to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Finally, if you right-click on the TwitterFox icon, you can turn off TwitterFox popups, force an update, change Twitter accounts or set your preferences. The Preferences Pane lets you add/change a password for a selected account, change your refresh time and popup timeout, and assign hot-keys to TwitterFox actions. You can also enable/disable a notification sound.

Some people will find the tiny un-resizeable window a definite showstopper. However for me, and the number of tweets that I get, it seems to work and it’s fast. I definitely like this addon more than Tweetbar.

Firefox Compatibility

A final note about compatibility. I found that TwitterFox installed on pretty much any version of Firefox I had installed, but Tweetbar definitely was limited to versions older than Firefox 3 Beta. This might not be a big deal for you, but if you live on the edge it might make a difference.

posted April 16th, 2008 in Comparison | Tags: firefox, tweetbar, twitbin, twitter, twitterfox