Firefox Sidebar + Google IG = Useful on any platform

Posted on July 15, 2006, 1:39 pm, by EricaJoy, under Google.

Whenever I’m on my Mac or Linux box, I miss the functionality of my Google Desktop Sidebar. I like being able to have a to do list, my Google calendar, and other various useful things right at my fingertips. I got to thinking about the Firefox Sidebar yesterday and how I could use that along with my Personalized Google page to make a sidebar I could use on any OS. Once I did it, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it sooner. I’m quite sure some enterprising person has already done this and it was posted on Lifehacker ages ago, but once again, its new to me. Anywho, here’s what I did.

1) If you don’t already have it, install Firefox.
2) Using Firefox, browse to http://www.google.com/ig
3) Line up all your Gadgets on the left, putting the ones you’ll use most at the top.
4) Once you’ve got everything arranged, bookmark that page and give it the name Google IG.
5) Open Bookmarks in the toolbar and select Manage Bookmarks.
6) Highlight the Google IG bookmark and click on the Properties button.
7) In the Properties dialog check the box next to “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” then click OK.
8) Double click the Google IG bookmark and it should load in the sidebar.
9) Close the Bookmarks Manager and enjoy. :)

To make your Google IG book more accessible, your can put it in your Bookmarks Toolbar.

Edit: Hey 50th post! Where’s the falling balloons and cupcakes?

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  • Chris Sansbury

    What a great idea! Simplicity itself.

  • Jonathan Riley

    That’s great! I love it!

  • Mattyv

    you go girl!

  • Tushar Joshi

    Great Idea Erica. Now I also have this side bar on my Firefox browser. Thanks for sharing the tip.

    Tushar

  • Sridhar

    Can you pls tell me the name of the Firefox theme in use in the screenshot?

  • ffoxer

    great tip

  • Joël Kuiper

    Shamefully they janked out the sidebar in the 3.0 development builds.
    No worries they’ll add it back before the 3.0 release somewhere in 2007, but as a nightly tester: no neat tricks for me :p

  • Francis Siefken

    Great alternative for the sidebar. Now I can see digg boing slash gmail and gcal all at once. Muliplatform, less system load. Thanks.

  • Robin Card

    “Can you pls tell me the name of the Firefox theme in use in the screenshot?”

    it’s the default theme…

  • Eric

    Great job!

  • Ivan Minic

    Wow… Brilliant!

  • jason

    Thanks for the wonderful tip, Erica. You rock!

  • charliedigital

    good stuff, ran into this item via digg.

    *subscribes to blog*

  • Jason

    Excellent tip! Thanks for sharing.

  • dep

    This also works great with pageflakes.com — Thanks!!!

  • Dan

    @Sridhar:

    Thats the default theme for FireFox on Mac OSX.

    and great tip!

  • Charles

    Thanks Erica for taking the time to help us out.

  • Ryan

    girl geeks are cool….’grats on gettin’ dugg!
    just realized you work at google…so you’re a genius too

  • Thejesh GN

    Good idea. Its really helpful.
    Thanks,
    Thejesh

  • Yang

    This is good idea, I don’t know if I’ll use it much, but good nonetheless. Maybe the next step is to use Greasemonkey to change the layout of the Google page so that images and text aren’t cropped.

  • Pyrolyte

    excellent.

  • Michael P

    Excellent tip! Very creative, Erica!

  • Oliver

    Very nice idea :)

  • Keith

    Nice tip, Erica! Congrats on your 50th post, and got your post dugg. Has this been a software, I would write about it on SoftSift. Great work!

  • teddy

    That’s great! Good idea!

  • Charles D.

    You know I had seen that ‘open in sidebar’ feature before in the all-in-one sidebar extension. (It’s implemented quite simply as an ‘open this website in sidebar’ icon so it gives you another approach to getting to a setup like yours.)

    However, I didn’t see any application for such a feature. I would have had to resize the sidebar to see any normal website that I opened up, so where’s the feature in that, i thought. So I couldn’t figure out why I would want to use such a feature.

    But putting all the key content in the first column makes everything work together quite smoothly. done! works.

    Pretty interesting that such an obviously effective setup was overlooked by so many.
    A keen eye, that you have.
    Thanks.

  • morpheeze

    Brilliant Idea!
    Thanks and here are some virtual falling balloons and cupcakes *throw*

    KR morpheeze

  • Scott

    Thanks for the tip!

    Do you know of a way to reduce the size of the Google logo and search box? All of my gadgets fit nicely in the sidebar except the one I use most – Google search!

    Scott

  • Soyapi

    Thanks for the tip, Erica.

    I’m now using Linux full time at work and I missed my GDS gadgets.

  • farmhead

    You rule. Thanks for the tip.

  • Dustin

    This is pretty cool. Ill try it the rest of the day to see how I like it.

  • ed

    Thanks for the IDEA!!!

  • rapture

    Good idea, but wouldn’t it be better to use the Google IG Mobile version instead of the standard version?

    http://www.google.com/ig/mobile

  • Jimmy

    Your mouth is massive

  • Markus

    Google sometimes tries a bit to hard, thats what I believe

  • Nick Schmidt

    Why couldn’t you use google desktop?? I thought it was comptable with Mac & Linux…

    Nick Schmidt

  • jun

    nice

  • Neil
  • drkN

    The same can be done with Opera.

    Expand the panel bar, (view -> toolbars -> panels), do the same thing with your gadgets on the left side, then drag the tab into the panels bar. then, click it to get this function.

    Note: Theres probably a nice opera widget to do this while looking nicer anyway.

  • Lazlonger

    Thanks for the trick. Got it from Digg. I use the homepeage all the time and sometimes I just like a change. I’ll put it in the sidebar for a while and see how I like it.
    Oh Joy!

  • sam

    You can use this URL to point directly on the first widget of the page..

    http://www.google.com/ig#c_1

  • PictureRipper

    Thanks for the sharing this yet another google toy with us,
    used your trick to add it to Opera Panel (yep, I am an Opera 9 fan :)

  • Jack Lund

    Very cool! Thanks!

  • Donovan.UK

    Love it. Simple, useful, delightful. So obvious, but only when you think of it. Thanks for thinking of it.

  • JPow

    This is a beautiful thing! Thanks!

  • ML

    Thanks alotz buddy … great tips ;)

    ML

  • gus

    rather just have it open in a tab.

  • Jaime

    great idea, a lot more accesible
    saludos

  • Yakito

    great , great, great , great , great !!

  • Pallab De

    Just a clarification :
    This can be done on Opera also.

    1) If you don’t already have it, install Opera.
    2) Using Opera, browse to http://www.google.com/ig
    3) Line up all your Gadgets on the left, putting the ones you’ll use most at the top.
    4) Press Ctrl + D and add it as a bookmark. While saving the bookmark make sure that the “Show in Panel” option is ticked.
    Screenshot
    5). That’s it! Now the panel will appear in your opera sidebar. Just click on the icon to open that panel.

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