Pat’s Favorite FireFox Extensions, Oct 2010

pforhan — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:36:01 +0000

Here’s an update to a 2008 article. Extensions have come and gone, and Firefox is much updated now, at 3.6.x, with 4.0 on the near horizon.

First, a quick note: Yes, I still use Firefox as my default browser. It works, it is extensible, and I’ve never had performance problems with it. Yes, Chrome is out there, but every time I’ve tried it, it is broken in various ways (spellchecking, for one) and the UI decisions in it are perplexing.

Extension	Description	Status / notes
Subtle 2.0	A theme/persona, actually. Clean, light-colored. The mellow gradient spiffs up the flat gray of the default FF background.	Currently in use
Aging Tabs	Sort-of cool extension, changes tab colors for tabs you haven't visited recently.	Installed, but disabled. While it seems like a great idea, I ended up confusing myself more often than not.
BetterPrivacy	Calls itself the "Super-Cookie Safeguard". Deals with Flash LSOs, which are a kind of cookie not managed by the browser.	Currently in use. Pretty unobtrusive, I don't have to do anything after initial setup.
Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics	Quick way to do a speed test, provides a bunch of tools when an HTTP error condition is returned.	Installed, rarely used. I don't tend to use this much, anymore, so it may be on the chopping block.
DownloadHelper	Provides the means to download flash video and what-not	Installed and in use. Want to download a youtube clip? This makes it pretty easy.
DownThemAll!	Firefox download manager. Can queue up files, download them one at a time, etc.	Installed and in use.
Enter Selects	As you type in the address bar, if a match shows up below, hitting enter will select that match.	Installed and in use. Nice -- when it works. I haven't figured out the rules about this, but I still have plenty of times I have to select the first row.
Firebug	Very nice web development package and debugger.	Installed and in use. Great for development, largely unused otherwise.
Firefox Sync	Formerly known as Weave, a great bookmark/history/passwords sync app. If you are feeling paranoid, you can even host your own server.	Installed and in use. Not 100% perfect, but pretty good. Has a bit of trouble with slow connections.
Flashblock	Blocks flash before it starts. You can then pick and choose which flash bits to run, like a movie player.	Installed and in use. There are the occasional sites that have a problem with this, but you can whitelist the whole site.
Ghostery	Looks like a very nice "track the trackers" extension. Notifies user about cookies, tracking images, etc, and can block problem sites.	Installed and in use. I just added this today, after a harrowing bout of political ads all across the web.
Greasemonkey	Users can add scripts to a web page to modify its behavior.	Installed and in use. Rarely used, but crucial sometimes. For example, it can script the Groupwise web client to auto-refresh and prevent timed logout.
Link Alert	Provides a small icon upon hovering over a link. Can show PDFs, "new window" links, etc.	Installed and in use.
Nuke Anything Enhanced	Delete elements from web pages.	Installed and in use. Great for deleting flying boxes, inappropriate ads, unneeded flash bits, and more.
Poster	Development tool for dealing with REST services	Installed and in use. A bit crude, but it has all the functionality and HTTP methods needed.
QuickJava	Blocks java, JavaScript, flash, Silverlight content.	Installed and in use. I only have this because Flashblock does not do its thing for Java applets.
Remove New Tab Button	Removes the new tab button from the tab bar.	Installed and in use. Ctrl-T forever!
Sage	RSS Reader. Uses Bookmarks to organize links.	Installed and in use. Usage of this has dropped a bit, with smartphone taking on some of the work.
ScrapBook	Quickly copies a web page locally.	Installed and in use. Rarely used, though. Another candidate for deletion.
SearchLoad Options	Tweaks the behavior of the search box.	Installed and in use. I like the auto-clearing after a search. Also, the auto-reset to google is nice, but I find myself very rarely switching search engines. I tend to use keywords for this instead.
Web Developer	Web development features, messing with forms, css, more.	Installed and in use. This plugin differs in feel and functionality from Firebug quite a bit. Useful in day-to-day browsing at times.

And to my dearly departed extensions: you may still be installed, but you got left behind and I can’t use you:

Google Notebook
InstantAction Game Launcher
Quick Preference Button
Reveal
TagSifter
UrlParams
WebDAV Launcher

Pat’s Favorite FireFox Extensions

admin — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:13:02 +0000

Here are all of the best Firefox Extensions I use. I do stay on Firefox 1.5 for most of my browsers, so some of these may not be available for 2.0 and greater. These are presented roughly in the order of how often I use them.

Extension & Link	Description
SearchLoad Options	This extension is great because it will reset the little search engine chosen back to the default one after a certain length of time. It can clear the search field automatically as well and make searches start a new tab.
DownThemAll!	This is the cleanest / most professional extension I’ve used. Essentially, a download manager with resume support, great for losers like me on unreliable connections. Lots of options, nice UI.
flashblock	This one really unclutters web sites. It replaces all flash(animated) parts of a web page (animated ads, videos, etc) with a box and a button. Press the button, the animation loads and plays like normal. Keeps animations from being obnoxious, essentially.
Nuke Anything Enhanced	Delete anything from a web page — text, images, formatting. Works with flashblock, so if you know something is just getting in your way, right-click and nuke it. I sometimes use this to delete stuff that makes pages hard to read, like large images and what-not.
Sage	Simple RSS reader. Bare-bones, but a good way of keeping up with sites.
Google Browser Sync	Keeps browsers in sync — bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history, and open tabs. Theoretically. Bookmarks don’t merge well when more than one machines is contributing. In practice, it manages to keep one browser up-to-date. But it is still good, every new install, I can temporarily use this to pull down all my settings once.
Web Developer	This is sort of for hard-core web application makers, but I use this quite a bit to change the behavior of sites I interact with. You can enable buttons and form fields and (best of all) turn on user/password autocomplete so that firefox can remember and insert them for you.
Quick Preferences button	Quick access to common settings. Don’t use this too much anymore, but if there is a specific setting you tweak a lot back and forth, works nice.
ScrapBook	Cool content-capture extension. Works like Save As Web Page (Complete) but skips the prompt, stores it in firefox plugin. You can tweak the page and add notes to it if you like. Good for capturing receipts, instructions, etc.
Google Notebook	A lot like ScrapBook, but networked. Google provides a web page where you can manipulate the scrapbook. The plugin lets you highlight text and capture it and the URL it came from. An example here.
Reveal	Another classy extension, and one I don’t use enough. Presents all your open tabs as thumbnails, lets you search and sort through them. You can drag them around and reorder your tabs!
Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics	Quick diagnostic tool. Probably not as full-featured as something like what DSLReports.com offers, but pretty good.

That’s the mind of Pat.

MuddyHorse Farm and Tech » firefox

Pat’s Favorite FireFox Extensions, Oct 2010

Pat’s Favorite FireFox Extensions