If you’re like me, you’re probably skipping between various Google services all the time. If you use Firefox, and are looking for a simple, customizable and, above all, fast way to access Google web sites from either a drop-down menu or a toolbar, you should check out GButts, a nifty add-on with a silly name.
To get started with GButts, install the add-on from the Mozilla Add-ons site and restart Firefox (it’s compatible with Firefox 2 and later). You won’t see any changes yet, because you need to configure GButts and add the drop-down menu or toolbar to your browser. First, go to Tools -> Add-ons and open GButts’ Preferences page. You’ll be presented with a huge list of Google services, as well as a few configuration options:
Select the services you’d like to be able to access, then select whether you’d like a toolbar or drop-down menu. You can then decide where to place the menu or toolbar by going to View -> Toolbars -> Customize. Then drag the GButts toolbar icon to wherever you’d like it to appear on your browser window (scroll down if you can’t see the icon). I put mine to the left of my bookmarks toolbar, but you could also put it next to your address bar or anywhere else on the browser window you fancy. Here it is as a horizontal toolbar:
The toolbar takes up a little too much space for my liking, particularly as I use quite a few Google services. So I have configured mine as a drop-down menu, accessible through a little Google icon:
Now I have easy access to all of my Google services, all from one handy drop-down menu in my browser. I have two suggestions for improvements to this extension. First, it would be really great if it had a built-in way to manage multiple Google accounts, and second, I’d like to be able to customize the drop-down button icon. Overall, though, GButts is really useful and saves a lot of time when jumping between the various Google sites, so I’ve added it to the WebWorkerDaily Firefox Add-ons Collection.
Found a useful Firefox add-on recently?
(via Demogirl, which also has a nice screencast showing how to install and use GButts)
Personally, I never use my Google Apps inside the browser. For the most part they’re in Fluid.app or Mailplane (in the case of Gmail).
Great tool. I added onto Firefox before I even finished reading your blog post. I was just thinking how I was always switching back and forth between calendar, reader, etc.
Thanks Simon, nice tip. I’m going to flag it up with Lifehacker too, just in case they’ve not already seen it.
Sorry, I don’t get it. What’s the advantage compared with using bookmarks?
very useful to many functions
@Peter — If you only use a couple of Google services, probably not a lot. But if you use a lot this is a neat way of packaging them up. You could have a bookmarks folder with Google services in your bookmarks toolbar instead, which would be similar, but this is more customizable (you can specify whether to open in new tab, to open in a tab but not focus on it, you can choose to place it wherever you like in the browser chrome).
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