Check Website for Updates with Update Scanner in Firefox

If you are addicted to the Internet like me, then you know how often we check a website for new content – whether someone has posted something new on their blog, if someone answered a question that you asked, when is that new version of a software is going to be available and so on. But checking the same website looking for new content multiple times a day is counter-productive, irritating and above all – very depressing (if you do not find anything new for many days). You can save yourself from all the trouble of manually checking sites for updates if you use the Update Scanner extension in Mozilla Firefox. This extension automatically looks for modified webpages and informs you about it. This way you do not have to bother about opening a website in your browser unless its really time to do so.

You can download Update Scanner for Firefox from the Mozilla add-ons webpage. The extension requires you to restart Firefox. After restarting Firefox, you can toggle the Update Scanner sidebar using the hotkey Alt + U. Here you can manage all the monitored webpages. To add a new page, click on the new entry icon, enter the webpage title & webpage address manually, set the update scanning frequency and click on the OK button.

You can also simply right-click on a webpage and select Scan Page for Updates to add it to the monitored websites list. This will again open the same dialog box for adding the new entry where you can select the frequency of the update scanning.

Update Scanner Firefox

Once a webpage has been added  to the Update Scanner list, it will check that page periodically for any changes. Smaller changes are usually ignored, but when the monitored webpages are reasonably changed, you are shown a notification popup to the effect.

At this point, you can open the Update Scanner side bar by using the hotkey Alt + U. It would display all the changed pages in bold font. Pages that have not changed are shown in the list using the regular font. You can click on these updated pages and view the webpage on the right side. All the changes since the last time are highlighted with yellow color for you to easily find our what’s new on that webpage.

Update Scanner Firefox

So if you do not have enough time to check your favorite sites for updates, then you can make use of the Update Scanner extension for Firefox. It promises you less stress in your daily internet life.

You can download Update Scanner extension from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/update-scanner/.