Flagfox for Windows

Flagfox is what Firefox extensions are all about: ultracompact, free, open-source, and uniquely useful. When you visit a Web page in Firefox, Flagfox identifies the country hosting the site's server with a small national flag in the address bar. You can customize the information Flagfox retrieves and displays, too.

We installed Flagfox and restarted Firefox. The first thing we noticed was a small American flag in the Firefox address bar, just to the left of the Bookmark icon. Hovering the cursor over the flag icon produced a small pop-up listing the site's domain name, IP address, and server location. Clicking on the flag opened the home page of the extension's developer, Geotool. The Firefox add-ons manager gave us access to Flagfox's options dialog, which included check boxes to show favicons for the extension's actions as well as the ability to preview and select an alternate set of flag icons. Flagfox can retrieve and display much more information via its Add New Action wizard. This pop-up let us select, name, and configure hot keys for a wide range of data like page metadata, URL components, and prefixes such as JavaScript and copystring. We could also configure hot-key actions for individual sites by checking them in a list view and selecting the Configure Default Action wizard. We had the option to set hot-key combos and mouse clicks to perform actions, too.

We've used Flagfox for several years and always found it useful (and occasionally comforting) to be able to see at a glance where the site we're visiting is hosted, not to mention the bonus of learning to identify some national flags. Flagfox does a lot more than that, though, and we recommend it to all Firefox users.