As time passes more and more applications are web-based. The World Wide Web has switched from being a place where you basically see static data to a place where everything is interactive.

Good examples of this are wikis and weblogs: two of the most remarkable kinds of applications that have appeared in recent years and can be used with nothing more than a web browser. Web applications are nice as they allow you to do the same job no matter where you are: at home, at work, at an internet cafe, at a friend’s house, …

One of the biggest problems of this is that a web browser is not really suited for all kinds of tasks. Example: a wiki is a great tool because you can edit a page very quickly, but the browser itself is a crappy editor. It lets you do very basic things besides moving around with the cursor keys, cutting and pasting text.

A great solution for this problem is Mozex, a Firefox extension that lets you use external programs for some of the actions that you normally do with the browser, including the editing of text areas. You just press a key combination and a text editor pops up with the text of the area that you have selected. Very easy to use.

Here’s an example of my browser editing the Wikipedia using my favourite text editor (click on the image):

A great tool. I’m sure you’ll like it 😉