Context Explorer is a sidebar Firefox plug-in that uses open-source desktop indexer Regain to automatically associate your local resources to the pages you're browsing. For example, imagine you're browsing your school account and need to open a document for a current class. All you do is click the file in your sidebar because Context Explorer will have already found it. There's no need to waste time hunting through endless folders and drives.

It's part of a new way of looking at your computer, a contextual way, an organic way that gives you a view of your computer tailored to your actual needs in the moment. The idea is to reduce the distance between the Internet and our desktops in a way that is effortless and self-adaptive.

You shouldn't be faced with your entire system all the time. You should just see what you want, when you want it.

How does it work? Once installed, you tell Regain which folders you'd like to index. From there, Regain maintains an updated view of your files. When you open Context Explorer in Firefox, it appears as a sidebar that shows you a dynamically updated view of the files on your computer that are associated to the web page you're looking at. Any page you load is fed to a keyword extractor that uses those keywords to query your local system.

Additional features include content restriction (title, metadata, content), keyword restriction, document type filtering and query expansion.

Platform: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003

System Requirements: Firefox