Using multiple toolbars on Firefox can be tempting but it’s always worthwhile checking how much you use these and whether they are crowding out your screen space or actually saving time and making your reading/searching more effective. At the moment I’ve got Diigo, Zotero, and Athens toolbars plus Firefox bookmarks toolbar. This last is the one that I use to store all those websites I return to again and again – Facebook, Amazon, Google Docs, Google Reader, Kwout etc. They’re sitting right there so I can access them quickly and easily at a click of the mouse.

Here’s one little tool that I think could sit very comfortably on your Firefox toolbar. Readability is what is know as a bookmarklet – a little bit of code inscribed in a button. What readability does is remove any extraneous materials (adverts, links, navigation) from an article you are reading. Here’s an example:

To read this article without all the extraneous stuff, I simply click the Readability button and I get:

This is now much easier for me to read and digest.

Check out the Readability website for instruction on how to instal.