With the rise of online email services from Google and Yahoo, not to mention online office suites, there is an increasing need to be able to count words. Word Count Plus adds a small counter in the status bar of the Firefox browser.

This is particulary useful because not all online text editors can count an area of selected text, if they can count text at all it's normally only the entire text.

Installation is very simple and after restarting Firefox the Word Count Plus icon appears in the Status bar along the bottom of the browser window. Simply select some text and then click on this icon to show the word count.

There are various options including adding a thousands separator and adding text before and after the figure. It is also possible to copy the figure to the clipboard.

The one thing that is lacking is a keyboard shortcut.