Certain of my Mac-using friends — who know who they are — insist upon composing their messages with that platform’s Mail.app, which likes to honor a tradition established by its apparent idol, Microsoft Outlook, and indiscriminately break any line longer than 80 columns. Should such a line happen to consist of a URL, well, too bad.

After reassembling broken links by hand for the umpteenth time, I finally got sick of it and decided to find a Firefox extension that would solve the problem for me. Cue URL Link, which lets you highlight any chunk of text in Firefox and treat is as a URL, opening it in either the current window or a new tab. It reassembles broken links en passant, but its usefulness extends to any situation — as frequently arises on, for instance, message boards — where someone supplied a URL but for whatever reason didn’t, or couldn’t, turn it into an actual hyperlink.

Joe Bob says check it out.