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The Mozilla Foundation announced this morning that it has hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian and the Ajax Experience, to run a new Developer Tools Lab aimed to make Open Web development easier and more powerful. The term Open Web refers to a paradigm in which data and users can move easily from one standards-based application to the next, without being hindered by proprietary technology or vendors hording user data.

Shortcuts for commonly performed functions are beautiful things and we just found a great Firefox extension that's going to save us a lot of time. It's called UrlbarExt and it puts six little gray icons on the right side of your address bar. What do those buttons do? They perform in one click some common functions that would otherwise take several keystrokes.

Adam Pash over at Lifehacker unearthed this extension for a post about three as-yet unapproved ("experimental") Firefox plug-ins. We didn't find the other two Pash highlighted especially inspiring, but UrlbarExt rocks. Here's what it does.

If you've ever tried to make a guide or tutorial visually appealing, then you know just how hard and tedious it can be. There are plenty of tools floating around the web to make this easier. Just do a search for screencasts or presentations in the ReadWriteWeb search box for our reviews on such tools. For simple guides and tutorials, or for creating overviews of a project, we may have just the solution you're looking for. Whizle is a newly launched service that looks to be a great tool for creating simple and visually appealing work.

Social media tools are some of the latest crazes these days. We happen to be huge fans of a ton of them here on ReadWriteWeb. Yet the biggest problem with most social media tools is that they aren't for everyone. There's a constant debate on how early adopters can persuade more mainstream users to try these tools out. We might have the most flexible social media tool available for any user: Yoono!

Sharing web pages in a conversation shouldn't be as tricky as it is. Sometimes you're on the phone, or speaking to a group of people and there isn't a handy way to bring people along with you from page to page and then let them have easy access to those pages after the conversation is through.

Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.