I don’t like the idea of a separate search box in my browser. Instead, I much prefer conducting my searches from the address bar itself. I previously used YubNub, but the YubNub server has in the past few months been down rather often. So, I thought of switching to using the Firefox quick search feature instead, but was rather surprised to find that no one has compiled an extensive list of quicksearches that I could simply copy to my browser. I therefore made one, myself. Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, my Firefox (2.0) has been acting up today. The problems seem to be related to reading CSS style sheets and other additional content properly. At first, I had trouble accessing some forums, which showed up as far too wide for my screen, and then later on with font colours that were identical to the background colour of the site. Then, I lost the ability to read my Bloglines account, which I could access, but where I could not see a single feed — neither in the “updated feeds” section, nor in the “edit feeds” are. When I then accessed my personal blog (which you are currently reading), I was shocked to see that the design was all over the place. Read the rest of this entry »

Last updated: May 4, 2007

Added: Colorzilla, Download Statusbar, MeasureIt, Repagination, Tiny Menu

Removed: Digg This! [I realised that I'm not a Digg person in the end], Forecastfox [I don't really need to know the weather 24h a day]

Here is a list of Firefox addons that I currently use. I originally posted this as a reference for myself, so that I can keep my various computers up-to-date.

Without further ado, here are the extensions in an alphabetical order:

Adsense Notifier (Mozilla Add-ons link)
If you are in the Adsense bandwagon, you may have the nasty habit of logging in to Adsense every twenty minutes to check how much money your websites are making. Adsense Notifier saves you the trouble, and displays your Adsense data in the Firefox status bar.

Bloglines Toolkit
I use Bloglines to read the news and find it handy to have a direct link to my account in my browser. It also notifies me when there is something new to read, but that ends up being quite useless once you have more than 300 feeds on your list, as there is always going to be something to read, anyway. However, you can change your Bloglines setting so that you get notified only for the feeds that you are most interested in.

BugMeNot
It is rather time-consuming to have to register to online newspapers in order to read their articles. That is why Bugmenot.com exists, letting you simply copy-paste a random username and password for the website that you are trying to access. Yet, it is time-consuming to go to Bugmenot.com and do all that. That is why I use the BugMeNot extension, which does the work for me without me really even having to think about the whole issue.

ChromEdit Plus (Mozilla Add-ons link)
ChromEdit lets you customise your Firefox look.

ColorZilla
As a web developer, one needs an easy way to read colour data from websites that one visits. With ColorZilla it couldn’t be easier!

Commentful
One of the biggest problems with blogging is that, after leaving a comment in someone’s blog, no one ever remembers to check back and see if someone has replied to you. Or at least I never do. In rescue comes Commentful, a service that lets you bookmark blog posts and then forget about them until Commentful tells you that someone else has added to the discussion. While Commentful is not the only one of its kind (coComment is another often mentioned option), I find Commentful the most user-friendly. Although using Commentful’s “blinker” extension is not necessary (you can either check Commentful itself or, as I do, get a feed of your watch list), I still decided to give it a try, and now my Firefox just looks weird without it.

Copy Plain Text
An extremely simple plugin that simply allows you to copy text from a web page without any of the formatting being included. Extremely useful.

CSSViewer
CSSViewer lets you take a look at the CSS settings of different website elements by simply pointing your mouse at them. Hugely useful if you deal with websites.

Customize Google
Google is good, but it can be made better. Customize Google lets you tweak a large number of aspects including privacy, security and the look.

del.icio.us post
Browser-internal bookmarks get you nowhere if you travel a lot and use whatever computers you can get a hold of. Consequently, online bookmarking services are the way to go, and del.icio.us is certainly the best known of them. This extension adds a handy button to your Firefox, allowing you to bookmark items easily.

Digg This!
Digg is everyone’s favourite social news bookmarking website thingy, and this extension is my favourite Digg thingy for Firefox.

Distrust (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Sometimes, for one reason or another, you don’t want to leave traces on your computer of whatever pages you are viewing. With Distrust you can, with a click of a button, switch your Firefox to a mode where it does not remember your browsing history, cache or cookies used during the Distrust session, but will still keep track of whatever browsing you did before or after. Very handy for all of us paranoid androids.

Download Statusbar (Mozilla Add-ons link)
This one has quickly become one of my favourite Firefox extensions. It does away with the extra downloads window, and simply puts your downloads into a Status Bar of its own. It feels a bit strange at first, but if you get through the first couple of days you’ll notice that it makes the handling of your downloads much faster and easier.

Firefox Extension Backup Extension (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Firefox extensions don’t come much handier than this. FEBE allows you to backup your extensions and other settings for importing them again later on. Very useful, if you try to keep two Firefoxes on separate computers more or less in synch.

Flashblock (Mozilla Add-ons link)
I don’t like seeing flash animations all over the place when I’m simply browsing for information. With Flashblock, I can choose when I want to watch a flash animation, if at all. It makes your life easier especially with websites that bombard you with flash ads. (If you want to get rid of all ads, try Adblock — but I personally quite like Adsense and other textual ads.)

Forecastfox (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Brings you the weather, so you don’t have to open the shutters.

Gmail Notifier (Mozilla Add-ons link)
I read my e-mail predominantly with Gmail, so I like to have a notifier that tells me when something important has arrived. There are a number of extensions available for the task, but this particular one takes the least space on your screen, and also comes with all the basic functionality you would expect.

Google Pagerank Status (Mozilla Add-ons link)
If you have websites and are interested to see how they are doing in Google, the Google Pagerank Status is the tool for you. It displays the PR on every page you visit, and does it in a very informative, yet space-economic manner.

Linkification (Mozilla Add-ons link)
In all its simplicity, Linkification converts text links to ones that you can click. No need to copy-paste URLs that are not hyperlinked.

MeasureIt
If you deal with websites, you need to know how wide certain elements are. MeasureIt lets you know this important piece of information in the most straight-forward way possible.

Menu Editor
Extensions tend to fill your menu space. I have also always felt that the “go”, “history” and “bookmarks” menus are totally useless to me. Menu Editor has allowed me to remove the offending items, and keep my GUI nice and lean.

Methusalem
Time to time you hit a website that you want to see but which does not exist anymore. Makes you wish you could go back in time, doesn’t it? Well, Methusalem adds a context link that points to the Wayback Machine for exactly this purpose.

NextPlease! (Mozilla Add-ons link)
NextPlease! allows you to jump to next and previous pages via special keys. It works on a wide number of websites including the common search engines, eBay, Amazon and many others. It even functions on forums, making your life much easier, as you will no more need to scroll to the “next / previous pages” list, but simply hit a key combination. I have assigned the keys LSHIFT+CTRL+RIGHT for “forward” and LSHIFT+CTRL+LEFT for “back”. It makes surfing so much faster.

Nightly Tester Tools
When Firefox 2.0 was launched last autumn, my main problem was that most of the extensions I use were not updated to work in it. Yet, in most cases the problem was simply with the extension’s compatibility text, i.e. in reality the extension would have worked fine, but Firefox simply refused to install it. Nightly Tester Tools allows you to, among other things, force Firefox to believe that a given extension is fully compatible. Very handy, although also potentially capable of destroying you Firefox.

Options Menu (Mozilla Add-ons link)
When you have all the extensions I have, you wish you had an easy way of accessing their options. While you can always go to Tools > Add-ons, select the extension and press “Options”, it somehow seems easier to do this through a specific menu under Tools. And that’s what Options Menu basically does. It saves you two clicks.

Organize Status Bar
With many of the extensions pushing their content into the status bar, that space quickly becomes very unorganized and cluttered. But help is at hand in the form of Organize Status Bar, which is the tool to make the status bar look like you want it to look.

Page Zoom (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Sometimes websites are not designed properly and the text is either too big or too small for one to read. And sometimes you want to take a closer look at an image. Page Zoom lets you zoom the page. It isn’t quite as good as what comes natively in Opera, but it still does its job rather well.

PDF Download (Mozilla Add-ons link)
It is usually really rather annoying when one clicks a link and it turns out to be a PDF file that causes the computer to load Adobe Reader. PDF Download allows you to choose what to do with the file: view it as HTML, download it, open it in Adobe, or just simply forget about it. Simple but very useful.

QuickJava (Mozilla Add-ons link)
There are those who browse with Java and JavaScript disabled, either for performance, stability or security reasons. I am not one of those. Yet, there are times when I want to disable either Java or JavaScript (for example when viewing my own websites and not wanting to add to the Adsense impression counts). QuickJava adds two buttons to the status bar, allowing you to disable Java and JavaScript as you wish.

Repagination
There are times when the 10 to 20 search results you get on a single page from a web or forum search engine don’t really do it for you. Repagination lets you glue a number of search result pages together with a couple of quick clicks, letting you then for example use Firefox’s “find on this page” search to locate the information that you are really after.

Stop or Reload Button (Mozilla Add-ons link)
I don’t like clutter in my user interface, and having separate buttons for “stop” and “reload” seems incomprehensible. After all, when you need to use “stop” (i.e. while loading a page), you don’t need “reload”, and vice versa. This one fuses the two together.

StumbleUpon
One of the best things to hit the web for a long time. With a press of a button you are sent to a peer-recommended website that usually is either very interesting, a lot of fun, or both. Definitely recommended.

Tab Mix Plus (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Tabs are fab, but Tab Mix Plus makes them even better. It gives you more control over how you do your tabbed browsing, and while there are other similar extensions available, this one is the leader of the pack.

Tiny Menu
I don’t really need the Firefox menus all that often, so in order to save screen estate I might just as well put them all under a single menu item. Which, of course, is exactly what Tiny Menu accomplishes.

TinyUrl Creator (Mozilla Add-ons link)
When I write e-mails I sometimes need to include URLs to my posts. However, some of them are so long that email programs mess them up, and that is why many of us use TinyURL.com. Yet, going to TinyURL’s website is really rather time-consuming, so I prefer to be able to create a TinyURL with just a click (or two) of a mouse. And that is exactly what TinyUrl Creator does.

Update Notifier (Mozilla Add-ons link)
With all the extensions that I have, it is a pain in the neck to keep them up-to-date. Or it would be if I didn’t have Update Notifier installed.

Web Developer (Mozilla Add-ons link)
If you work with websites, this extension makes it much easier to test them.

WebmailCompose (Mozilla Add-ons link)
Like I mentioned earlier, I use Gmail for e-mail, and this extension comes in handy when you do. It changes your Firefox in a way that when you click a mailto-link or an e-mail address on a website, instead of opening the computer’s default mail program, a compose window in Gmail is opened instead. It also supports a number of other webmail systems, in case you prefer Yahoo or Hotmail, or whatever else.

Theme:

The theme (skin) that I use would like to use if it were available for Firefox 2.0 is called Breeze. It takes the least space while still making everything easily accessible. I currently use Firefox’s default theme.

Searches:

You may also be interested in my Firefox quicksearches and YubNub for Firefox posts.