Extensions I’m currently using with Firefox. (And I promise I’ll quite nattering about it Real Soon Now) … I’ve ranked these as *** (essential) to * (nice-to)
Add Bookmark Here: Creates a context menu item to add a bookmark for a page. Also inserts an “Add Bookmark Here” in the menu for each bookmark folder, making it easy to go through and add the bookmark where you want it. **
Bookmark Backup: Makes a backup of the bookmark file — incremented by day-of-the-week — in the folder of your choice. (Can also back up other files.) **
Bookmarks Synchronizer: Automatically FTP your bookmarks file to web page when you exit, or FTP it down when you start up Firefox. Good for going between home and work. (And, yes, this duplicates certain functionality of the above; once I figure out my New Grand Backup Strategy, one or the other of these will be going away). **
Sort Bookmarks: Autosorts your bookmark folders — by name, URL, access time, etc. **
EditCSS: Pulls up the CSS file for the page, and lets you tweak it “live.” Great for web development (just copy/save the tweaked page, and put it into your web site). **
Download Manager Tweak: Tweaks the Firefox download manager, giving it alternative placements and other niceties. *
PrefButtons: Adds additional items from the Prefences dialog that you can put into the (anemic) Firefox toolbars. *
ChromEdit: Lets you directly edit various Firefox application files. *
Print: Add a “Print” to the context menu (like IE). **
Show Image: Puts a “Show Image” in the context menu, similar to the IE context item (to reload a broken/timed-out image file). *
imgTag: Creates an XHTML-compliant tag in the clipboard for any image you right-click on and select this context menu item. Very simple, very slick. **
ieView: Adds a context menu items to open the current page/tab with IE (good for cross-platform testing or dealing with ActiveX-required pages). ***
Copy Plain Text: Lets you copy rich text from a web page without all the text formatting coming over with it. Very nice. **
text/plain: Recognize and activate plaintext URLs and Mailtos. *
Tabbrowser Preferences: Unleashes the options and power of tabbed browsing. Very nice. ***
Single Window: Similar to the above. There are some things that TBP doesn’t do that Single Window seems to enable. I’m still trying to sort it out. **
Flowing Tabs: Lets the tabs flow into multiple lines (like SlimBrowser). Essential. ***
Close Tab on DoubleClick: Just like SlimBrowser, close a tab with a double-click. **
Duplicate Tab: Adds a context menu item to duplicate the current tab. *
AdBlock: Block ad images, ad frames, etc. Very powerful and unobtrusive. Excellent. ***
FlashBlock: Blocks Flash movies from autoplaying, replacing them with a nice little icon that you can click on if you actually do want to see them. Nice. ***
Now, that’s a heck of a lot of extensions, and I can (and should) probably cut that number down. Indeed, there are some oddities in how Firefox is working for me that I suspect are caused by “drug interactions.” We’ll have to see how it goes, but I wanted to pass these on to you, my faithful (and patient) readers.
Besides, the extension-development community is one of the keen things about Firefox and Mozilla. Open source rocks …
Focus Last Selected Tab also enhances the tabbing experience.
Just a comment. Clicking on the links in your blogroll doesn’t seem to open in a tab. They seem to open in the existing window. I don’t know if this is something in your setup or my inexperience with Firefox.
I’ve had FocusLastSelectedTab running before, but haven’t felt the difference since I turned it off. 🙂
I noticed that the blogroll stuff was acting funny earlier today, but now it seems to be working properly. It’s just got a basic target=”_blank” on it (or at least most of them do, and all should).
Where do you find most of these extensions for firefox? I’ve been getting the ones I used from the Mozilla website, but I wonder if there are places to find them other than there.
There are a couple of main sites: the one you get to when you click “Show me more Extensions” in the Extension manager, and the other off the Firefox links that came bundled with the browser.
Looking at the above, they look like the came from mainly extensionroom.mozdev.org and update.mozilla.org and texturizer.net .
That and googling on “Firefox extensions ” …
And that would have been a comment from Dave on Margie’s machine. *sigh*