It’s Monday, so Strawberry Singh has launched another in her series of new Monday Memes. This one is on how we make our SL experience better via the tools (viewer buttons, HUDs, etc.), we use, or as she explains it:

Share a screenshot of your viewer setup and/or a list of tools/HUDS you guys use to make your Second Life experiences better.

I’m actually totally boring when it comes to HUDs and the like, so I’m actually going to take things a little further to cover a few little things I use outside of SL which help me enjoy my SL time.

First off, my viewer-set up. My primary viewer of choice is Firestorm. I’ve been with it since the very first iteration, and I’ve been fortunate in that by-and-large it has performed well for me across two main PCs, and also works reasonably well on my Intel ATOM / nVidia ION powered notebook.

My viewer window is pretty boring, as you can see. No HUDs are permanently attached as I utilise capabilities in the viewer for everything I routinely need. The only HUDs which get attached tend to be related to boating, flying or weapons.

For me, my Second Life experience is made somewhat easier by the tools I use outside of the viewer, These come by way of Lance Corrimal of Dolphin Viewer fame.

In May 2013, I picked-up on a pointer from Daniel Voyager and blogged about some Chrome browser extensions which can be used with SL. As a result, Lance tapped me about a set of Firefox Helpers he had created for Second Life. I gave them a try – and have been using them ever since.

The helpers are all search-related, and add options to the Firefox search bar which allow you to access:

Second Life Search

Marketplace Search

Marketplace Merchant Search

SL Wiki search

the JIRA search (search results subject to viewing permissions on the JIRA).

All of them are quick and easy to install, and all of them work reasonably well (or as well as the Second Life and Marketplace searches can sometimes be expected to work…).

The obvious beauty of these options is that I don’t need to faff around opening my SL dashboard to search the SL website or load the Marketplace and then search for something; it’s purely a case of tabbing over to my browser and selecting the helper I need.

Installing the helpers is a breeze. Lance has kindly hosted them in a ZIP file on his Dolphin viewer website, so it’s purely a matter of:

Downloading them

Dropping them into the Firefox browser Searchplugins folder (for Windows, this is located in either C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\browser\Searchplugins (32-bit) or C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\browser\Searchplugins (64-bit)

Restarting Firefox to enable them.

If you spend a lot of time searching the SL Marketplace or website for products or information, having these helpers installed might high shave a little time off of initially launching and searching one of the websites. Kodus to Lance for providing them.