Rather than post again in this thread, I just wanted to say that in the thread titled "findchips.com" in the General Chat forum, I've posted a link to the Mycroft Project that does have Firefox and other browser plugins that include findchips.com and octoparts.com so you can search directly from your search window in FF. There is no need to install any toolbars. It will have no effect on the performance of your computer/browser but you do have to use the pulldown to change your search engine... I happen to have about 26 search engine plugins, including findchips and octoparts and find it much faster to just put the chip number in the window, select the engine and then if I don't find it, I just switch to another engine and click to search again and in my case, as I use tabs a lot, I middle click the search so that the results open in a new tab, not displacing what I was already looking at.
Regards
Christian