The pros over at have taken their assistance to professional bloggers to a whole new level with the release of the extension.

This extension, although still in it’s early days, is a very powerful blog editor and should be included in the toolbox of every serious blogger running .

The extension adds a shortcut (F8) and an icon to the bottom right toolbar to access the blog editor in one of it’s three modes: split-screen, tab view, and windowed. Once within the blog editor you can setup access to multiple Wordpress, MovableType, and/or Blogger blogs and begin work quickly and easily. A tabbed pane on the right of the blog editor provides quick access to your blogs, the categories for the specific blog you are editing, the post history of that blog, and a more than welcome note storage.

The editing window itself features three different views: Rich Editing, Source Editing, and Preview. The Rich Editing window is what you would expect if you have installed FCKEditor, or other Rich text editors, on your blog, whereas the Source Editing window is what most will be most comfortable with since it acts the same as the normal Wordpress editing textarea. The Preview window I found essentially useless and saw very little difference between it and the Rich editor, with the exception of being able to click on links and not edit the content. The Preview pane would have been a lot more effective if it took the blogs stylesheet and/or design into account. Hopefully in the future we can see a full-powered Preview window showing you exactly what the post would look like if added to your blog.

Performancing has so far done an excellent job on this extension and I already find myself using it more and more often, but it is still in beta and has it’s own shortcomings. The most prominent fault among users right now is the inability to add tags easily, although Performancing is working hand-in-hand with Technorati to add this feature in the future. Excerpt editing and custom field editing is missing in this release as well, but the future looks good for these features.

Most of the other downfalls simply pertain to bugs, which are to be expected with an initial beta release. One of the bugs most Wordpress users will experience is a mysterious twelve whitespace indention to the title and body of a post submitted via Performancing for Firefox. Others have reported bugs within the category selection pane and the Preview editing pane, but I have yet to experience them or they left no bad taste in my mouth. Performancing has said they intend to release an update in about a week that will address many of these issues and we can all be assured that this extension will remain up to date and have continued addition of new features for a long time to come, as the Performancing team is firmly dedicated to this extension’s success.

I encourage you all to head over to the page on and giving the extension a whirl. Also, check in to the and submit your suggestions and any bug reports you may come up with.

Do any of you have experience with other blog tools developed as a Firefox extension? What are your favorites and why?