How the extension works and what you’ll see?

Mozilla Firefox is a “Web Browser”, which is what we use to view web pages, or surf the web. Internet Explorer and Apple Safari are also Web Browsers but the special thing about Firefox is that it allows us to extend or change the functionality of the browser with special computer programs called “extensions”

How does that help me find pet friendly rentals?

As I couldn’t easily make the links come to me, I decided to build a Firefox extension to make the links go to you!

You see, there are sometimes quite a few pet friendly rentals on websites such as Real Estate.com.au but the problem is that the text which either says “no pets” or “pets ok” is the last piece of text on the detail page. And who has the time to click on each of the 200 rentals in each region on RealEstate.com.au to find out whether a property is or isn’t pet friendly? So what’s the solution?

Computers are renowned for making short work of repetitive tasks and for finding pet friendly rentals, they work a treat. Here’s a step by step example of how it works.

• You go to http://www.realestate.com.au and search in the Gold Coast region of Queensland
• The page loads and brings back 30 rentals out of a total of 200
• Once the page has finished loading (all images and ads finish displaying), the extension gets to work, looking at all of the details for each rental
• If it sees “no pets” or something similar, it hides the property from the list
• If it sees “pets ok” or something similar, it indicates visually that it is pet friendly.

This property is pet friendly, but you wouldn’t know it without the extension, as the text “outside only pets will be considered” is the last piece of text on the page.

So that about wraps it up for how it works. Now I’ll show you how to set this up for yourself!