CoolPreviews is an extremely useful add-on to the FireFox (& IE6) web-browser that allows you to preview a hyperlinked page’s content without actually clicking on the hyperlink. This can be particularly useful when browsing a site with many hyperlinks as it allows you to view hyperlinks without actually clicking on them and opening the page in FireFox.

Firefox 2.0-3.5b4+ required.

Having installed CoolPreviews, you’ll see a little blue magnifying-glass icon after a hyperlink when you mouse-over it. Clicking that icon will cause CoolPreviews to present its own sub-window within your FireFox or IE6 browser, in which a preview will be displayed. This preview can be locked so that it doesn’t vanish when you remove the mouse-pointer from the CoolPreviews window.

I’ve tested this FireFoxadd-on in Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and also in Windows Seven RC (64-bit). It will also work in Windows Vista, Mac osX, and Linux.

There is also a version for use with Internet Explorer 6: This version doesn’t work with IE 7 or IE 8; however I have noticed that the majority of my readers who use Internet Explorer as their preferred browser actually have IE 6 installed; therefore I thought this worth a mention. (Incidentally; also worth a mention is that IE6 is getting rather dated. Although it’s not as sucky as IE7 to my mind, it’s probably worth upgrading to IE8 if you want to stay with IE, unless you have a very old computer that’s short on resources. Also, once again unless you have a very old computer with depleted resources – Particularly with regard to RAM – it would be worth your while to install FireFox in addition to IE in my humble opinion, even if you continue to use IE as your default browser.)

- And the best thing of all is, of course, that this add-on is absolutely free of charge. – So why not download it? If you don’t have FireFox and don’t use IE6 then why not download FireFox as well? (‘Awaiting brownie points from Mozilla.)

Here are the links again: –

CoolPreviews

FireFox