Firefox 3

Got tired of waiting for the FF2 auto-updater to tell me it was ready to download (which I supposed would be a cleaner way of doing it), and went ahead to the main Mozilla page and installed the new version of Firefox.

Well, so far, so good.  Nothing’s crashed or blown up or anything. I’m not particularly noting any lower memory, but neither is it crashing on me.

The trick is always, of course, the Add-Ons and Extensions that are obsoleted (or not yet updated) with a new version. So, courtesy of Extension List Dumper, here’s what I currently have loaded:

Application: Firefox 3.0 (2008052906)
Operating System: WINNT (x86-msvc)

June 23, 2008

Total number of items: 22

• Adblock Plus 0.7.5.5
  Ads were yesterday! — Almost required for any FF installation, this blocks ads on pages. Brilliant. I never realize how much it adds to my life until I have to load up IE.
• Add Bookmark Here 3.0
  Add bookmark here in bookmarks menu — Very simple, but an excellent way to add a bookmark to the directory you want.
• AI Roboform Toolbar for Firefox 6.9.90
  Allows the use of Roboform in Firefox. — I haven’t tried the new password manager in FF — but Roboform spans both FF and IE, and does an excellent job of it. 
• Clippings 3.0
  Save frequently-entered text for pasting later. — I don’t actively use this, but it’s been useful on occasion.
• ColorZilla 1.9
  Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies — Again, not an everyday thing for me, but a couple of times it’s come in quite handy to see what the HTML color code is for something on a screen.
• DownThemAll! 1.0.3
  The mass downloader for Firefox. — Useful for doing … well … mass downloads.
• Extended Copy Menu 1.5
  Provides the option to copy selection as plain text or html. — I use this almost daily in conjunction with blogging.
• Extension List Dumper 1.14.1
  Dumps a list of the installed extensions. — Generated this list (which I edited with these comments). The previous analog I used for this, ListZilla, is no longer supported. ELD’s output is a bit uglier, but more useful.
• FireFTP 0.99.1
  FTP Client for Mozilla Firefox. — My FTP client of choice.
• Flashblock 1.5.6
  Replaces Flash objects with a button you can click to view them. — Nearly as useful as AdBlock.
• Forecastfox 0.9.7.6
  Get international weather forecasts and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable extension. — Handy, especially before I step out for lunch.
• IE View Lite 1.3.3
  Cut down version of IE View by Paul Roub. — Open the current page in IE, either as a one-off or forever after. This is useful, since a lot of my company’s intranet pages use ActiveX and other IE-specific crap.
• ImgTag 0.3.2
  Generates img tags — Again, extremely useful for blogging. Rightclick on an image, choose ImgTag, paste in your post, hey-presto.
• Make Link 8.06
  Make HTML or ForumCode links via the context menu — Nice for doing a quick link-by-title in a blog post.
• Resizeable Textarea 0.1d
  Resize textareas to your needs. — Tired of dealing with too-small text input areas in web forms? This lets you expand them easily. Nice. This is an older program, updated to run with FF3; a parallel add-on I was using, Resizable Form Fields, is no longer supported.
• Tab Mix Plus 0.3.6.1.080416
  Tab browsing with an added boost. — Adds many nice features to FF’s already-nice tabbed browsing experience.

There were a few extensions that I ended up not auto-updating or finding new versions for, or that just plain old aren’t (yet) available in FF3.

• Bookmarks Synchronizer: I never actually made use of this, but in theory it does a backup of your bookmarks, so that you can access them from another machine. Or, alternately, as a backup in case your system blows up. Didn’t upgrade to FF3, though there are many add-ons that do this.
• BugMeNot: I just never use this “get a dummy userid/password to registered sites” extension, though it’s very clever for all that.
• ChromEdit Plus: Really don’t need to edit FF config files directly these days.
• Google Pagerank Status: Don’t really need it.
• Print Preview Toolbar Button: I can’t believe that FF doesn’t have a default button for the toolbar for Print Preview. I’m going to see, though, if I can do without for a while.
• SnagIt Firefox Extension: I use SnagIt for grabbing screen graphics — but I don’t need something on the toolbar to do it, and it doesn’t update in a secure way, which makes FF3 cry.

So that’s my Firefox installation. What