Wolfram Alpha is an interesting experiment in compiling, crunching and displaying the world’s data. While many are obtusely selling it as a competitor to Google, it’s really nothing of the sort. While Google excels at returning pages, Wolfram Alpha narrowly excels at returning data. Did we mention that it errs on the painful side of erudition?

Therefore, to determine whether or not Wolfram Alpha would be useful to you as a user, we have designed the Wolfram Alpha Litmus Test found below:

If you answered no, you’re joined by the global community of laypersons who aren’t statisticians or engineers. While us simple folk dink around in our Google garden, we can still have a crack at Wolfram Alpha’s ivory tower with a neat addon that embeds Alpha’s results straight into Google queries.

In the interim, you can amuse yourself with approachable Wolfram searches like this, this & this.

There’s a headline I never thought I’d write. Huh.

Jay Baldwin’s ErrorZilla addon rejiggers Firefox’s default 404 screen and replaces it with a useful version containing a suite of buttons to diagnose the issue or, perhaps, get you to the content anyhow. The buttons tell the tale, so put your peepers on the screencap and jump to downloading if you’re sold.

Facebook has popularized a technology called Facebook Beacon which allows a growing array of partner sites to report your usage statistics back to Facebook. This usage information is then used to refine the advertising profile created expressly for your account.  Call us loonies, but this privacy business squicks us out.

To combat Facebook Beacon, an author has written an experimental Firefox addon that will block the exchange of beacon data. If you’re not keen on registering to give it a go, we’ve heard that BugMeNot will bust the login block.

A hot new experimental addon for Firefox called SiteLauncher gives Launchy-like control over your bookmarks. Tap a hotkey to summon a menu and then hit the hotkey assigned to the site you want to visit.

Because the addon is experimental, you must have an account with Mozilla or register. Lame, but worth it.

Today’s Firefox addon of the day is called FireNes, and it brings an army of NES games straight to your browser. Though the page requires a translator (WARNING: Español ahead), the installation method should be pretty obvious.

I would write more about how amazing a duo Firefox and the NES is, but I have to kill more Foot Soldiers. April is waiting!

UPDATE: After a user tipped us off, we have discovered that this addon is actually illegally using content hosted on another site. We tested this addon and managed to find the one game that works alright,  so we ran with it. Bah. You can still play games online, however, as the real source does the same deal for free. I am playing Super Mario 3 right now.

Polaroid enthusiasts re-starting production of the classic film. I love it!

Today’s stupendous Firefox addon is called TooManyTabs and boasts the swank ability to put user-specified tabs into an idle state. Tabs that have been idled no longer take residence in system memory and free those precious megs for other tasks. Any tab brought up from its sleepy slumber will be restored with all the hot state and history action it was suspended with.

Today’s Firefox addon of the day, Integrated Gmail, is a fantastic find from the productivity jockies over at Lifehacker. This amazing addon turns the mail section of GMail into a collapsible window which joins collapsible elements for Google Reader, Google Calendar and Google Maps.

Given that the productivity and timeliness of my life revolves around these applications, I appreciate having a convenient dashboard to access all of them with a single tab.

There’s no better a time to return to our love affair with Mozilla’s darling Firefox than with today’s announcement of the “Fashion Your Firefox” campaign. This new initiative bundles a variety of popular addons together to serve the needs of nine distinct personalities of internet users.

Are you a Shutter Bug? Rock Star? News Junkie?

Adopt a profile or mix’n'match your own with the checkboxes, then get started with your more productive life by installing them at the touch of a button.

Is there a so-addicted-to-news-we’ve-started-hiding-RSS-feeds-under-our-toenails package?

Alright, Mr. Bigshot, maybe you work for yourself or a company that would seriously benefit from being able to add business card-like signoffs to an email. Today is your lucky day!

Using today’s Firefox addon of choice, WiseStamp, you can embed spiffy HTML signatures to most webmail services including Gmail. That’s pretty pro, if you ask us.

Have an addon you’d like to see featured? Drop us a comment or send a mail to robert [AT] icrontic [DOT] com.

Given that virtually everything on YouTube is SFW (no pr0n?!), it has always struck us as a bit uppity that users flag videos for mature content. As you may well know, this requires you to log in and verify your age. Rather than registering or choosing a random date prior to 1990, you can use the Firefox addon You Old Enough? to just play the damn video.

Delicate sensibilities: 0, You: 1.

It is often said that Web 3.0 will be the semantic web, or an internet where information will relate and be accessible in pertinent and natural ways. Rather than mastering the art of obscure queries, we might simply type naturally to Google. Today’s addon of the day, Juice, offers a look at that future by presenting relevant and related content just by providing a clip of text or a picture.

Juice is in its infancy, but a go ’round with its webcast clearly demonstrates the potential of information being accessible in this way.

Firefox is meticulous about using the right application to display a MIME type, almost to a fault. Rather than displaying documents and movies in the browser when it would save time, it loves to launch Office or a media player. Sometimes we just want to see whatever we’re downloading directly in the browser. Not only is this a time-saving choice, it saves on system resources by not launching an external application.

Today’s Firefox addon of the day, the aptly-named Open in Browser (beta addon; registration required), will do just that. By adding a new option in the Firefox download menu, you now have the choice to launch certain universal file types directly in Firefox. These files include ASCII documents, movies which can use a browser plugin, images, webpages, and more.

Another usability addon today with the simple and stunningly ingenious Plain Text Links.

Rather than copying and pasting addresses that have not been hyperlinked into the address bar, Plain Text Links allows you to right click on the text to open the link. Common URIs like FTP://, HTTP:// and HTTPS:// are all supported with this convenient little number.

A little piece of me dies every time I’ve been selected to win two free iPod Nanos. Were I a lesser man, I would wither away as though I had chosen poorly in the search for the Holy Grail. Thankfully, gaining some control in the ever-growing morass of web advertisements isn’t any harder than picking the right cup. Today’s Firefox addon of the day, Adblock Plus, gives you that control by allowing you to block the advertisements you find most annoying. A click of the mouse is all it takes to eliminate that advertisement forever.

While the convenience of today’s addon cannot be doubted, it’s a double-edged sword. Be mindful of the fact that the longevity of established sites relies on the continued delivery of advertisements to end users. A site that delivers no ads is a site that no longer runs. Do your favorite sites a favor and leave their ads intact, but it’s totally okay to block all the ads on a site you hate so you stiff them out of a dollar.

Block wisely.

China Channel, today’s addon of the day, illustrates what life on the internet is like behind the great firewall of China.

Through the magic of a little routing, China Channel will submit all HTTP requests through Chinese servers which filter pages believed to inspire dissidence or contain anti-governmental messages. Users of the addon can then see what it would be like to live in a Big Brother state which keeps communications under constant surveillance.

While native Chinese users would typically be disconnected from the internet for fifteen minutes, China Channel allows you to continue the experience by relaunching the browser to obtain a new IP.

There’s no way to fully describe the limitless potential of Ubiquity, today’s Firefox addon of the day. Therefore, we shall do it in one sentence:

Customize the internet.

There. One sentence that describes what it does. Just go look at the video and download it.

In an internet landscape of meaningless, compulsory registrations, wouldn’t it be nice if we could simply avoid them and get straight to the desired content? For many years, the BugMeNot service has provided the solution for that wish by providing communal logins for the sites that require free registration to access complete content. Common offenders of this practice include IMDB, New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Today’s FireFox addon leverages BugMeNot’s thorough repertoire of these communal logins to broaden your access to free information. Skip the pesky single-use registrations that result in spam and get directly to reading the content you want to read.