Integrate Google Calendar Into Firefox

Let me ask you guys here: who doesn’t love Google Calendar? The nifty web application from Google can be used in every way possible. It helps you organize your day, week, and month. You can sync it with most of the popular desktop calendar applications available, you can make it badger you with emails and SMSs so that you won’t forget that very important appointment, sync it with Facebook events, among other things.

But getting to it entails opening a new tab (or window, if you’re picky about tabs), and going to Google Cal and loading it. Normally I won’t mind this, but constant opening/closing of Google Calendar can get pretty tedious at times. Not even my eternal love for Google Calendar can keep me from getting annoyed at this. Maybe if there was a way to access Google Calendar without opening another tab, window, or leaving the page I’m on.

Well, worry about it no more, because if you’re using Firefox, the GCal Popup add-on will enable you to to bring Google Calendar right into Firefox. You can access Google Calendar without changing the webpage you are currently browsing on.

GCal Popup brings up Google Calendar in a nice overlay so that your calendar can be updated without ever leaving the web page. The site says that it’s compatibe with Firefox 1.5 up to 3. Now let’s see if it works the way its supposed to.

Upon installation of the plugin, I could not find anything in the status bar that lets me use the plugin. No options for the plugin either. Upon checking the GCal Popup site, I saw it included a link to a Greasemonkey script that is said to be optional. I installed it anyway. Still nothing. The computer I was using was running Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Mandriva Linux, so I switched to my other computer which had Firefox 3 and GCal Popup worked like a charm. I installed the Greasemonkey script, and it gave me a minimalistic interface which I love. It loads fast, and lets me access my Google Calendar on the fly.

Given that the add-on is still in beta, the bugs are forgivable (except maybe the compatibility issues with Firefox 2 and below) and this is a Firefox add-on that makes me love Google Calendar even more than humanly possible.