One of the great things about the Firefox web browser (other than it’s generally very good standards compliance and speed), is its framework of extensions, which allows you (or anyone) to create and add functionality to your browser, and make those enhancements available for everyone else to use.
I thought I’d post a list of the extensions that I find most useful personally, and see if anyone else out there has some to share as well. Some of these may not be useful for you if you don’t do web development, but many are general purpose and meant for all types of users. Here are some of mine:
- DOM Inspector / Web Developer: I lumped these together because I believe they both now come with Firefox as options when you install it. Anyone doing web development of any kind will find the web developer toolbar invaluable, and if you write javascript code on complex pages, the DOM inspector will save you hours of time.
- NoScript: This one is a huge security feature for web browsing, enhancing the already pretty safe environment that you are in when using Firefox. It basically denies all javascript from running on any page you visit, and then allows you to add domains that you trust to a list that it will allow javascript execution from in the future. This way you get to make the decision on what sites you trust, and automatically disallow all others. Of course, this can kind of screw with sites that use javascript based stats tracking systems (like Google Analytics or Sitemeter) unless you choose to allow them, but I don’t think that any site stats system should depend on Javascript anyway.
- Adblock: This one will filter out ads (or any other content) that you don’t want to see from any pages loaded in the browser. You can also set it up to update itself from a central list of known ad servers; kind of like anti-spam for the web.
- Spellbound: The spell checking extension for when you’re entering text in any text box in your browser. I won’t get into my grammar and spelling rant right now, but suffice it to say, spell checking helps you not look like an idiot (or at least less like one).
- Colorzilla: For those familiar with photoshop, this is the eyedropper tool for your browser; point it over any area of the page and get the color code for that particular element.
- MeasureIt: Allows you to draw a ruler on (actually over) any page to measure pixel distances. This can come in handy when you’re doing absolute positioning in CSS.
- SwitchProxy Tool: This one allows you to quickly swap between various proxy servers you have configured, and even cycle through a list of anonymous proxies on a specified time interval. I use it all the time, because I usually go direct when I am at home, and when I’m not I will SSH tunnel or VPN to my proxy server running at home, and this extension makes it easy to switch in those cases.
There are several others I use, but I don’t know whether they’d be interesting to anyone or not. If you use Firefox and have a favorite extension not listed here, feel free to post it.
15 Comments
I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for awhile now so I’ll make it short.
Google Toolbar- After I change the layout of all the toolbars it no longer is a piece of crap. I take the Google suggest box of the toolbar and replace it with the default Google box and then put the spell check plugin to the left of my bookmarks. So it’s really not a toolbar anymore and the spell checking is way better then what I previously used (spellbound).
ColorZilla
WebDev
Bugmenot- So I don’t have to register for sites like NY Times or what-have-you.
Greasemonkey- with a few GMail scripts.
IETab- lets me surf sites that need IE (work sites) within firefox.
SessionSaver- is the best. If firefox crashes all of your pages are restored including the saved text you typed in a comment form or post form. This has saved me so many times.
Tabfx- I like the close tab buttons on the tabs themselves.
Download status bar- Better solution because the download popup sucks sometimes.
Gmail notifier
Foxmarks- only thing I’ve found to sync all my bookmarks between multiple machines. It’s too easy.
Measure it
Adblock
LastTab- ads a better crt-tab navigation between tabs.
Google calendar Quick add- does what it says.
If you can’t use Google then wait until I have my own post.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Greasemonkey, which is probably the coolest plugin idea ever.
I tried the Google toolbar a while ago; so long ago that I forget what I didn’t like about it.
Yeah, the google toobar sort of sucks except for the spell checker and if you change the top of firefox enough like I have it works out well.
http://flickr.com/photos/camerons/135086161/
So it looks like you put the Google suggest search in place of the Firefox search bar, is that correct?
I wouldn’t want to do that, though, since I like the way that search bar works, and the fact that you can add various search engine (or other) targets to it (like Wikipedia, Flickr, Technocrati, dictionaries, del.icio.us, etc.).
I’m tempted to try it out just for the spell checker, but if that’s the only thing I’d use, then I might just want to stick with what I’ve got. One question on that part: with their spellchecker can you modify the dictionary as you go, like adding words that aren’t in their dictionary, etc., like you can with Spellbound?
Do you just like the way you can add other targets or do you like them because you use them? I too like the idea but I found myself rarely using the other targets, including wikipedia and dictionary.com, which I thought would have been used a lot, since I due use those services a lot. And since dropping them I find myself not missing them at all and not regretting it since I use the suggest feature and the search history functionality a lot more.
As for the spell checker I never knew you could add to the dictionary until now. The reason why I never cared is because of the way it works. Since you don’t have to click on a word you know is right I just overlooked them and moved on. Which reminds me of how much I dislike the standard spellcheck routine.
I’d like to add a few more too.
PDF Download- Which helps out a lot on windows because you can just download the pdf instead of breaking to a hault waiting for adobe to load.
clearcache
Pearl Crescent page saver- It’s an awesome plugin when you need to get webpage shots including the whole scrolling page.
BTW, I don’t use all of the extensions at the same time. It really depends on the machine I’m using.
Yes, I do use the other search bar engines quite a bit.
Re: PDF download - can’t you just right-click and choose “Save Link As…”? If not, I’m pretty sure you can just set them (along with any file type) to download instead of open by default, by going to [Options... Downloads... View & Edit Actions]
Re: clearcache - what does that do that Firefox’s native “Tools… Clear Private Data” (or CTRL+Shift+Del) doesn’t?
Re: the pearl page saver - does that work well? I just downloaded one called screengrab the other day that does the same thing, but I haven’t actually tried it yet.
PDF- It helps since most of the time you don’t notice that it is a PDF you are being linked to. And it’s better since it gives you a link to open the pdf in html through an online service which I use a lot.
It’s a clearcache button, instead of digging into the options and you can clear more then one page rather then one with the keystroke method. I don’t use it much.
Pearl is great, you just need to change the defaults a little unless you want to take a screen shot of only what you see, I set it up to take the entire page instead (top to bottom).
The “Tools… Clear Private Dataâ€? (or CTRL+Shift+Del) clears the whole cache (not just one page), plus all kinds of other things, which you can choose to disable or not. Since it seems like this would take care of everything, and since I also don’t really use it that much, I’d rather not install an extension for it.
That’s one thing about extensions: they do take up some amount of resources, and there is the small possibility of a conflict, which increases with the more that you have installed. So that’s why it’s my preference to not install them if there’s another way of doing things that’s pretty much just as easy, like the cache clearing thing and telling the browser to save PDFs (by default, whenever you go to one, without needing to right-click) rather than open in the browser, because both of those things are pretty easy to do without extensions.
Yeah, I remembered that part, I just don’t think I’d ever want an extension that adds a button that there’s already a built-in keystroke for that’s more functional than the extension.
oh yeah, something I overlooked was CTRL+Shift+Del clears everything (clear history, cache, cookies, download history, and saved form information) not just the browser cache. And I rather not uncheck all those boxes instead or dig around and change the defaults, which I don’t know if you could.
Please don’t drag this on anymore, it’s a plugin I use, you don’t have to and you wont change my mind.
I meant that half seriously by-the-way. Since if you find inconsistencies you could always comment.
oh yeah, and it’s your blog.
I know, I’m not trying to change your mind; just commenting on what I think about it.
=D