VideoSurf recently released a nifty Firefox extension, which lets you scan through the video on Youtube and in your search results even before you play they video..cool right? (Download from here)

The idea is to save time by scanning through the strip of thumbnails of the video that is instantly created and skip the video if the you don’t find what you are looking for or if the thumbnails don’t seem interesting enough.

I have tried using this plugin on sites like Vimeo, Metacafe, Break, Dailymotion, etc. however, it just worked on Youtube and Google Search. It turns out that this plugin works only on Yahoo Search, Google Search, Youtube and Friendfeed for now, although it would be nice to see more video services on the list of this extension.

The extension earlier existed as a Greasemonkey script which only worked on search results..

The following image shows how this extension adds a image strip of the video and by clicking on any of the thumbnail you can start the video from that point on.  Not only that but the extension is designed to recognize if there is a face in the thumbnail and by checking a checkbox you can choose to see thumbnails with faces only..

Interestingly the extension manages to create thumbnails from video services other than Youtube, for example Vimeo. See the Image below …

Click here to download VideoSurf Firefox Extension