My favourite web-browser, Firefox, is light-weight and extensible. I love that I’m able to add stuff to it, and customize my experience.
Recently I’ve been trying out the new 1.5 beta version (which is great, by the way), but I’ve had to switch back to 1.0 because of various incompatabilities. During this switch, I lost my extensions. Seeing as I have to install them all over again, I might as well compile a list of links right here. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe I will.
Extensions
- Tabbrowser Preferences
- SessionSaver
- PageRank Status
- IE View
- Web Developer Toolbar
- Plain Text Links
- Aardvark
A light weight tab extender that allows you to force new windows to open in tabs instead of, well, new windows.
Saves your Browsing session, including open tabs and textfield contents.
Shows the Google PageRank in the statusbar.
Allows you to quickly open active page in Internet Explorer.
I usually close the toolbar itself, but I do use the right-click context menu.
For web URLs that aren’t clickable, Plain Text Links allows you to select the text, then right-click and select “View URL in new Tab”.
Right-click, select “Start Aardvark”, and immediately block level HTML elements beneath the cursor are highlighted. Incredibly useful.
How’s your customization?
All-In-One Sidebar – Clears up the clutter of the main bar and makes switching between bookmarks and sage far easier.
Sage – Rss reader (you must have seen this coming, right?)
Gmail Notifier – To notify me of my, ehm, gmail.
Menu Editor – To clear up menu clutter (send link as..wtf? Who needs that?)
Compact Menu – To clear up more clutter.
Scrollbar Anywhere – Think adobe-type use-the-page-to-scroll. Works in the adobe and regular scrollbar way. A definate improvement to webbrowsing for sure. Highly recommended!
Screen grab! – Adds the options ‘Save window/viewport/document as image’ to your context menu. Beats pasting it into photoshop seperately…
Adblock for the love of everything holy!!
Adblock indeed.
But it’s purposefully not on this list, because Adblock has cost me a day of debugging an obscure and strange bug where a JavaScript show/hide combined with some Flash content would work once, but not twice!
So I haven’t used adblock since.
But oh, how I miss it. I hope they fix the problem some time.
Adblock – Most important
Add Bookmark here – Add bookmarks directly in the favourite menu
BugMeNot – gives password/account to many sites
downTHEMall! – Download content easily
Enhanced History Manager – Better history management
FlashGot – Downloading in combination with a downloadmanager
GeoURL – shows GeoURL data in any site
Gmail Notifier
Greasmonkey – customize sites with scripts
Linky – open many links at once (in tabs/windows)
Resizeable Textarea
ScrapBook – Save status of any website
Web Developer – Most important
Bookmarks Synchronizer – Very cool, synchronize bookmarks through FTP on many computers.
Sort Bookmarks
Tabbrowser Extentions – Many tabbing features
Html Validator (based on Tidy) – Validate code on the fly
View formatted source
Content Style Switcher
I can’t believe no-one’s mentioned good ol’ Colorzilla!
Colorzilla? Whachadowiththat?
Colorzilla is, to quote:
“Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.”
Find out more:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Developer%20Tools&numpg=10&id=271
Okay, I’ll play…
Disable Targets for Downloads
Flat Bookmark Editing
ColorZilla
AniDisable
CookieCuller
SpoofStick
View Cookies
Flashblock
IE View
Bookmark Backup
OutSidebar
OpenBook
BugMeNot
EditCSS
Always Remember Password
Some really good extensions here.
I’ve added BugMeNot. Fantastic stuff.
Some of them are really nice extensions, and perfect as just that: extensions.
But they’re not all essential
By essential I won’t upgrade to Firefox 1.5 until all essential plugins work there.
And there’s even an extention to do just that Joen!
Nightly Tester Tools
[...] FireFox extensions essentials [...]