I want to tell you about a very handy Firefox extension that could save you some money.

My VOIP telephone adapter went on the fritz the other day and I spent a disheartening amount of time on my cell phone with AT&T troubleshooting the problem. When the replacement came, I spent even more time on the cell phone when installation didn’t go smoothly. The result? I exceeded my allotted minutes by a large margin, and will get an extra $31.50 tacked on to my bill. I know that I got off lucky, and there are some real horror stories out there, but I’m kicking myself for a lack of foresight all the same.

You see, a couple of months ago, I bought a new PC and have been slowly migrating my applications and documents off of my old one. I neglected to port one particular Firefox utility that would have helped me to avoid the sting of over-usage, much to my chagrin. It’s a handy little tool created by Winston Huang, that carries the straightforward and self-referential name “Verizon Minutes Used Firefox Extension”. There’s a version for T-Mobile as well, similarly named, and both may be found here. Thank you, Mr. Huang, for these very useful tools.

Installation was straightforward, which is one of the things that keeps us all loving Firefox, and resulted in a snazzy little Verizon Icon in the corner of my browser. This is what it looks like after it’s been configured. Makes it easy to keep an eye on your minutes used, don’t you think?

Hover, and you’ll get full information as shown below:

Needless to say, I’ve ported the sucker and won’t be frittering my minutes any time soon. I’ve also removed the battery to avoid temptation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Firefox, Money, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.