There’s a plugin out there for FireFox that has really streamlined the way that I browse the Internet. It’s Previews by Cooliris.

When Previews is active, any link that you hover over (based on your settings) will produce a preview icon that will overlay the linked page in an interactive window. This is very useful when making edits to multiple entries in a control panel, previewing search results, or any number of sites that offer a list/detail view.

I recently had to use the Expression Engine maintenance suite to mark 12 entries as ‘not active’. I was able to open each in the Previews window,  set the selection to inactive, and save - all without leaving the list view in the edit screen. This probably saved me 1/2 the time it would have taken to navigate back to the edit screen and finding the next entry.

Still waiting for a Safari 3.x compatible version, but it shouldn’t be too long.

I have had great success with this plugin and the Piclens (though I don’t use it nearly as often) plugin by the same folks.