Speed Dial is a Firefox extension developed by uWorks that allows you to create shortcuts to your favourite websites. It takes a screenshot of the site and shows it in a little window, visible each time you open Firefox.

Its not a new concept, Opera and Chrome have very similar shortcuts to your favourites or most visited sites when you open the browser. I think Opera were the first to do this.

Its a very handy extension that I’ve been using for a few weeks now with shortcuts to some of the apps I’m developing.

I had the idea to use it for a slightly different reason the other day. To watch the websites of some competitors. Rather than taking the time to periodically visit each competitors website, I’ve set each of them up as a tab in Speed Dial. Each of them is visible to me each time I open a Firefox or a new tab.

By default, the screen shots that Speed Dial takes are updated every 24 hours. This can be changed to take new screen shots every 2 seconds if you like.

Its handy for motivation too if you keep seeing the other businesses updating their sites. It could be used too to see if a favourite blog has been updated.

Heres a screen shot of Speed Dial keeping an eye some Search Engines

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