The Firefox web browser has been my browser of choice for years. With thousands of add-on and plug-ins its infinitely customisable and with version 4.0 coming soon (here’s the beta), the Mozilla team are constantly working on improvements. There are several Spotify-related add-ons, search plug-ins and bookmarketlets. Here’s a full run-down!
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Add-Ons Available from Mozilla.org
The original Spotify plug-in for Firefox, with this add-on you can select any text on a webpage then right-click to search for the selected artist, album, or track in Spotify.
This search add-on lets you type in an artist, track etc. into the Firefox search area then returns a webpage with results from Spotify. The webpage apes the Spotify client and lists track titles, artist, duration, and Spotify popularity. Songs are ordered by popularity; click the track, artist or album to open in Spotify.
Supposed to display the name of the artist, song or album of the links displayed on the page. I couldn’t work out how to get this working though: I installed it then checked various webpages containing Spotify links (both HTTP and URI variety) but didn’t see any difference. Please let me know in the comments if you get this one working!
A continuously evolving project from Dr. Sounds, FireSpot previously analyzed webpages for songs then flagged each track with a small green clickable Spotify-like logo. The plug-in was then revamped to provide a playlist-generation tool: when viewing a webpage, click the FireSpot icon in the Firefox status bar to auto-generate a new playlist in Spotify with any tracks identified on the current webpage. It seems though that this post-processing plugin (weighing in at a rather hefty 3.1 MB) may have fallen foul of Spotify’s terms & conditions and is currently rather flaky (the author advises to “please remove Fire Spot at this time.“) It’s a great idea though and one I will be checking out again in the future.
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Other Add-Ons & Scripts
FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser. Supports many music services, including Spotify.
Adds a Spotibot playlist generator search to your browser’s list of search engines. Type in an artist name to the Firefox search box to generate a custom playlist of related-artist tracks:
This excellent browser bookmarklet lets you select song tracks on a webpage then generate a Spotify playlist via the Playlistify site. I find it extremely useful, although you do need to go through several steps to register the playlist before you can listen to the songs. Here’s Playlistify maestro Roeland to tell you how it works:
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Other Tools
For a list of other URL decoding bookmarklets, see the Spotify URL Tools page.
If you know of any other Firefox-related apps, plug-ins or bookmarklets please let us know in the comments!