Firedoodle for Windows

There's something kind of fun about this freeware Firefox add-on that lets you draw freeform on any Web page, but we weren't able to log in to the required account to access all of Firedoodle's features. The basic toolbar interface has just a few buttons to start and stop the tools and save your drawings. The save buttons are grayed out, however, until you create a free account on the publisher's site. There's no help file available on the toolbar, but you can view a YouTube video that walks you through the simple process of using the add-on.

Activate Firedoodle's drawing tool and use just a few keys to select color, width, and opacity of the line. You simply use your mouse to draw. Unfortunately, that makes for imperfect lines and there's no way to add set shapes as with more robust offline drawing tools. You are able to bookmark sections on any Web page, but as with the drawing tool, you'll need to log in to save them. And that's where we found the problem with this nifty tool. We entered our ID and password information only to find that the toolbar didn't recognize our logged-in status. This consistently occurred for our testers, and they weren't able to save their work. The Options button, which is accessible through Firefox's Add-on menu, also remained grayed out, so we never got to see the user settings.

There's promise in this free Firefox extension, and it's simple enough for the novice user, but most will be disappointed to find they can't save their work for future reference.