Looking to dig deeper for information about any word or phrase you find on a Web site? Then you'll want to get the free Firefox add-on Apture Highlights, which gives you a remarkable amount of useful and entertaining information with a few quick clicks. If you're familiar with the Apture Highlights for Chrome extension, this one for Firefox will be familiar to you: It looks and works the same.

Install the add-on, and then highlight any word or phrase on a Web page. A gray "Learn More" bubble appears just above it. Click that bubble and a window appears with three tabs on it: Explore, Videos, and Images. The Explore tab includes a summary of Wikipedia information about the word or phrase and a link to the entire Wikipedia entry; a link to a YouTube video; a small thumbnail of any relevant Google Maps; as well as photos related to the word or phrase, if any are available. Beneath all that are search results from Google and Bing on their own subtabs.

Click the Videos tab in Apture Highlights for links to videos from YouTube and other sources. And click the Images tab for thumbnails of photos and graphics from many sources--click the thumbnail to go to the source itself. To close the small window, click the X.

There's another nifty feature as well. Press a hotkey (which you can customize), and an Apture Highlights appears at the top of the page, letting you share the current page with others via Facebook or Twitter

You'll find this small freebie exceptionally useful for when you want to get more information about anything you come across on the Web, whether it be news, travel information, or just about anything else. Apture Highlights for Firefox is a great time-saver.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can automatically install the file into your Firefox browser.

--Preston Gralla