These days the shortened URLs are flooding the internet. Be it social networks like facebook or twitter, or blogs, everyone seems to make use of the short URLs in order to save space and time. Some of the large sites like the PC World site have developed their own URL shortner services. But sometimes the spammers and scammers make use of these short URLs to hide their malicious URLs behind them. You really never know where a shortened URL is going to take you. But if you are a firefox user, then you can make use of the Cool Previews add-on to see a preview of all the links and images on a webpage.
After the installation of the Cool Previews in Firefox browser, when you hover your mouse cursor over a link, you would see a blue colored Cool Preview icon in the right side of the link. You can move your cursor over this icon to see the preview of that link.
This icon disappears after a few seconds, so you have be really quick to click on it. When you click on the preview icon, a new popup window is shown with the target link loaded inside it. The toolbar at the top of the Cool Preview window can be used to open the loaded preview in a new tab of the Firefox window, bookmark the link in the Cool Preview stack, email the link to a friend etc. You can also change the font size from the toolbar. Additionally, you can search Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter and others from within the Cool Previews popup window.
This Cool Previews window would disappear if you move your mouse cursor away from the window. But if you click on the pin icon to keep this window always open. Then you can open more previews in the same Cool Previews window. You can click on the gears like icon in this window to open the settings window for Cool Previews. In the Cool Previews addon settings, you can change the bahavior of how it opens the previews of the links. You can set the location of the Cool Previews icon. You can also choose the theme of the Cool Previews window from dark or ice.
The Cool Previews addon is very useful and lets you have a preview of the links of webpages and images before actually opening them in Firefox. This can save you great deal of time and save you from mistakenly clicking on malicious links. It allows you to share your links on the LiveShare site as well. This addon is a must for every Firefox user.
You can download and install Cool Previews addon from https://addons.mozilla.org/.