Firefox Scores One For World Cup Fans

Keeping up with the World Cup can be a pain, especially if you're at work and have to keep one eye peeled for your boss. If you could use a better way to catch the latest scores -- and if you only want soccer results -- drop by Mozilla.org and try out Boris Ruf's Footiefox extension.Footiefox isn't completely new: The earliest release appeared back in May, 2005. The first post-version 1.0 release, however, appeared just last month, earning some impressive user-review scores. Another Footiefox update, issued just this week, appears to have worked out the last significant bugs, including conflicts with other extensions. (It also no longer places any items in the Firefox context menu, at the request of users whose context menus are already bloated with unnecessary, extension-related items.) If you want baseball scores, or any other sports results, you'll have to go someplace else: Footiefox reports only scores for 18 major European football leagues (including the English Premiere League, along with the Spanish, German, and Italian leagues), as well as up-to-the-minute results for World Cup matches and other major international tournaments. Footiefox will usually report that a team scored just a few minutes after the fact; you can configure it to deliver scoring alerts for selected matches, either as silent desktop flags or using your choice of audio cues. (I wanted to link here to an audio clip of the Univision announcer's now-famous renditions of the world "gooooooooal!" But I couldn't find one -- presumably, I wasn't spelling "goooooal!" correctly! If you have better luck than I did, send me the link, and I'll add it here.)