Necessary Extensions for Firefox
I’ve been a Firefox convert since the 1.0 release and I’ve slowly been converting my officemates ever since. I tried Firefox/Mozilla a few times before, but was never impressed. Sure, tabbed browsing was fun, but I didn’t really need it. About the only time I use it now is when I select “Bookmarks->Distractions->Comics->[Open in tabs]”.
The thing that’s sold me, and kept me using Firefox religiously since the heavily publicized 1.0 release, is the wide availabity of extensions. Here’s a list of some that once I tried them, I couldn’t live without them.
- Gcache - I actually signed up for a Google developer ID just so I could start working on a Google “cache browser”. I was annoyed that when I viewed a page in the cache, each link on the page wasn’t modified to link to the cache version of that page. Turns out, thanks to this Firefox extension, I finally have my cache browser… wipes tears
- All-in-One Gestures - This extension wraps a bunch of extensions into one: mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation. My favorite mouse gesture is the image zoom. Hold a mouse right-click on any image in a web page, spin the mouse in a full circle, and release… And the image is now doubled in size, right in place, shifting the text of the web page over as if the designer had actually intended the image to be double it’s size.
- ScrapBook - This extension is what’s helping me build up a sort of library of helpful web pages. Allows you to save a copy of a web page, or just a selection, into a local collection. If the page disappears, you still have your copy. It also allows a full text search of your collection and you can organize everything into folders. I’d like to be able to synchronize this between home and work… Maybe the next release will help me out with that.
- Password Composer - This one is still on my “tentative” list. I love the idea… But it isn’t terribly practical. The concept is that you use a portable, easy-to-remember master password and combine that with information about a particular site to produce a unique password for the site. This means that if the site admin is bad or if the site is hacked, your easy-to-remember (and re-use) password has only been compromised on one web site and they can’t use that to access your information on any other website. Where it fails the “practicality test” is when I sit down at your computer and you don’t have it installed. Actually, there may be a web interface that takes “master password” and “site url” to give me the unique password so that I can still use it anywhere, so I should research that before I pass judgment.
- AutoCopy - Know how Trillian auto-copies any text you select into your clipboard? Yeah, this extension makes Firefox do that.
- del.icio.us - This is really the only way I’ll post links to my delicious page anymore. You get a pop-up window that shows you a list of your tags and a list of popular tags. There is a “recommend” box which contains the intersection of those two groups. So now I just click the tags out of the recommended box and hit “post”… So much easier than visiting delicious each time so that I can remind myself if I was using “.NET” or “DotNET”.
- SmoothWheel - Gives web pages a much smoother looking scroll, with options for accellerated scrolling if you hold an option key.
- BugMeNot - After you install this extension, you’ll never have to register to read an article at a web site (that you likely don’t want to get spam from) again. Whenever the site prompts you for a username/password to continue, right-click and select BugMeNot. The extension searches the BugMeNot database for a user/pass combo and fills it in for you automatically
- greasemonkey - In short, greasmonkey is an extension which allows you to associate “user scripts” with a given web page. With “user scripts”, you could make sure that all URLs displayed on any page are clickable links, improve the usability of a site you frequent, or route around common and annoying website bugs. They have a huge repository of scripts available if you don’t want to write your own. One of my favorites is the Google Smart-Delete Button (why won’t Google add this??). Actually, all of the Google user scripts should make you want to install this extension.
- ForecastFox - Adds a nice weather display to the status bar. Okay, I could probably live without this one, but that’s why it’s at the end of the list.
- TabMix - added 6/7/05 - Updates the tabs UI with lots of options. I enabled the “X” to close on each tab and the “Duplicate Tab” context menu option. I find myself using both of these features a lot. Duplicating a tab seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since the “Open this page in new tab/window” menu option was blatantly missing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in Mac OSX Firefox, for which I ended up going with 2 other extensions to solve the same problems: TabX and Duplicate Tab
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