Northwinds

Essential FireFox Add-Ons

Posted on 16. Sep, 2009 by Beth in Web Ready

By now almost everyone is using FireFox for web browsing. IE6 & 7 are a not far behind but FireFox is, for now, the frontrunner. It also happens to be the browser of choice for me on a MAC. A major factor in this is its Add-on capability that launches it way past Safari (the next logical choice for MAC users).

As great as FireFox is, Add-ons make it much better and they can be used in any number of combinations making FireFox as customizable as you may want it to be. To help you get the most out of FireFox, I am listing some of the top Add-ons as well as a couple personal favorites.

FireFTP
http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

FireFTP

Without question this is the most important of all business needed Add-Ons. How often are you presented with a vender or client that asks you to FTP something over to them? Yeah, don’t have a good way to do that do you? Now you do. This is one of the easier FTP applications to use out there and its built right into your web browser. FireFTP offers a two-paned interface that lets you browse and transfer files between the remote server and your local computer.

ScrapBook
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/427/

If you are like me you go through hundreds of pages on web sites daily. Eventually they all start to look the same and you forget which ones you wanted to remember. Save and annotate bits of text and whole pages from all over the web to your computer with Scrapbook, an amazing web clipping and annotation tool. Create folders of clippings, highlight text inside saved web bits and add sticky note annotations as well. See a screencast of ScrapBook in action. (You can do the same with Google Notebook and its Firefox extension for saving clippings online.)

Firebug
http://getfirebug.com/

-or-

Web Developer Toolbar
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

If you are a web developer or even a content manager on a web site having the additional web developer tools in FireFox is a must. Firebug web development extension gives you a peek under the current web page’s hood and gives you the tools to take apart the gears. Browse and edit HTML and CSS markup and watch live previews of your changes as you type. Firebug can help you track down script errors and monitor network usage of page element downloads. The development Toolbar (what I use) is a lighter version of Firebug with almost all the features without editing tools.

AutoCopy
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/383/

A super-simple extension that transfers text to the clipboard as soon as it’s highlighted. AutoCopy also remembers past clipboard contents items, can append text to the existing clipboard, or open wrapped URLs on a web page in a new tab. If you know how to right-click to pull up a menu, you will know how to use this tool. It is super easy and will save you a lot of time if you do a lot of copying and pasting.

DownThemAll!
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/201/

Replace Firefox’s built-in downloads pane with an advanced download manager that can speed up your downloads, automatically grab all the images, music or video files on a page, queue, pause and resume downloads too. This is an incredibly robust add-on and anyone who is constantly downloading things this is a must have.

Adblock Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

There are some web sites that hit you over the head with talking banners and flyover ads that deserve to be blocked. Quiet down those talking, blinking ads that distract and take away from the good stuff on the web. With Adblock, you can block images, iframes, flash movies and other adverts on a URL basis (with wildcards capability) that you can configure. Just please don’t tell our advertising department you heard about it from us. Word of caution, blocking ads on sites can mess with the functionality of the site.

Fire.fm
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7684

Winner of the Extend Firefox 3 contest, Fire.fm is your direct access to the extensive music library on Last.fm. Listen to music related to your favorite artist, and discover new artists and music in the process. Listen to your friends’ favorite music. Find Last.fm users with musical taste similar to your own. Quickly access your favorite stations by just typing a few letters into the location bar. This is the ultimate add-on for the music junkie.

CustomizeGoogle
http://www.customizegoogle.com/

The one thing Google does well is give you a lot of stuff to look at. In truth for must of us out there we don’t want to see all of it and that takes up time we so desperately want back. So now we can customize our Google Applications even further. With CustomizeGoogle installed, you can:

* Remove ads from Google search results
* Add links to results from other search engines
* Anonymize Google’s query tracking cookies
* Remove Gmail’s Spam folder and invite box
* Automatically use Gmail and GCal’s secure connection
* Filter out the sites you never want to see again from Google’s search results

Tab Mix Plus
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1122/

We all love tabbed browsing – and Tab Mix Plus gives you ever more control over the tabby goodness. Since the launch of Firefox 2.0, Tab Mix Plus is a little less of a must-have than it used to be, but it still gives the tab connoisseur some handy features, like stacking rows of tabs, locking permanent tabs, merging different windows of tabs and the ability to rename tabs.

Brief
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4578

Brief makes reading RSS feeds as easy and intuitive as it gets. Designed to have exactly the right set of features, it is powerful and simple at the same time. Feeds are presented on a seamless, interactive page which let’s you bookmark and tag items with a single click.

Foxmarks
http://foxmarks.com/

Never lose your bookmarks when you move to a new computer again. The Foxmarks keeps your bookmark lists in sync across multiple computers, even if you’re using Firefox on more than one at the same time. Foxmarks makes a copy of your bookmarks to its servers or your own server so you have easy access to your master bookmark list.

Greasemonkey
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/

This Add-On is for the geekiest and most web savvy of us out there. Customize the appearance and add enhanced features to the web sites you love with the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, a user script manager that can automatically run custom Javascript on certain web sites. Not to worry, there are a wealth of people out there writing scripts you can use so you don’t have to be a whiz developer to use this add-on to reap the benefits.

Honorable Mentions:

* Forecastfox
* StumbleUpon
* FlashGot
* Meebo
* Interclue

Tags: addons, browsing, firefox, top, web