Text URLs made click-able

As a heavy computer user, I am forever looking for shortcuts - any tweak or tool to make my daily life that little bit easier. I wouldn't put that down to being lazy, I'd say it's more to do with wanting to be as productive as possible. Although if I spent my time working rather than looking for shortcuts, by now I would have made enough money to last me the rest of my life - providing I'm dead by next Tuesday.

The Problem at hand

By default, browsers assume little - in an effort to be compatible and render pages as intended, it is left to the developers and content writers to state functionality. This applies to links, where domain names and URLs are not click-able by default. This was only ever a minor inconvenience but with the ever growing popularity of forums and blogging, content can now be placed online by those having no programming skill. This is of course a positive and important step in the sharing of information online - yet one side effect is that it is increasingly common to find URLs and domain names posted without being coded into links.

The solution as a Firefox Add-on

Linkification Add-On Download

To the rescue comes a simple yet clever add-on for Firefox called Linkification. Available from the official Firefox add-ons site, Linkification scans a webpage while loading and automatically converts text URLs into click-able links. The add-on presents many options (such as where to open the link and the ability to blacklist/whitelist domain names) - yet the default configuration will serve most just fine.

The add-on will go unnoticed, silently helping you day in day out - like the monkey under your desk (as said, you wouldn't have noticed it), but there are instances where the power of Linkification is apparent. One such case is for members of file sharing websites like Rapidshare and MegaUpload. Large files downloaded through these websites are often split into many parts and you will often find the forums and blogs that provide these links intentionally in pure text form. I assume one reason for this is to prevent the service provider (eg Rapidshare) knowing where the link was posted. In these cases, all links will be made click-able thanks to Linkification, potentially saving a good deal of time for those who frequent such sites.

Another useful note is that Linkification works for any document read using firefox, meaning plain text documents containing links suddenly become a lot more usable. I hope this add-on benefits you lovely people, for those who are unproductive, at least this may help you get nothing done at a faster speed than before.