Firefox add-ons

[spudtater]

Firefox is great. I'm sure everybody knows that by now. But some of its best features are in the optional add-ons contributed by various developers. Here are some of my favourites:

For everybody:

• Adblock Plus: Does what it says on the tin. That said, I don't really use it for ad blocking much. I originally installed it for downloading pictures from Flickr.
• CustomizeGoogle: Twiddles with the output from Google in a variety of ways. Can remove Google ads. I like the fact that it adds direct links from Google image search.
• Duplicate Tab: Finally! Firefox really needs this one. Click on a tab, then click "duplicate tab", and the current page will be loaded again in another tab, with page history preserved and everything. Highly configurable; play around with the options until you get what you want.
• IE Tab: My mind boggled when I first saw this one. Addicted to tabs? Don't want to open a separate window when you just have to use IE for some site? Now you don't have to. Yup. IE inside Firefox.

For the seriously geeky:

• Firebug: The development tool. Displays the current page source in a separate frame, which you can then edit, with all changes displaying in real time on the page. All neatly formatted and collapsible. Right-click on any page item and click "inspect element" to find its source. Useful for developing your own pages, and for dicking about with form parameters and suchlike on other people's. Shows Javascript errors, too.
• Launchy: Slightly rough-around-the-edges, but handy. Open pages in a variety of different browsers, or in a media player, or text editors, or... Useful for development work, especially when combined with Multiple IEs.
• /Find Bar/: Regular expressions. Find bar. Need I say more?
• Source Viewer Tab: Open source code in a tab instead of a new window.
• View Cookies: Adds a 'cookies' tab to the page info window. Simple, yet indispensable.

What about you? Any gems to share?

Comments

[deralte.livejournal.com]

I recommend the Smart Bookmarks Bar. It hides the names in your bookmark's toolbar allowing you to put a whole row of bookmark's as easily clicked icons (the names show when you run your mouse over them). Most of the icons assign themselves but you can installed Favicon Picker 2 which allows you to assign any small gif image as a bookmark icon - this is why I have images of yoda and spider-man in my toolbar;) It ends up looking something like this which is just cool.

[nuttyxander.livejournal.com]

Dear god, I've been doing that manually for a couple of years. Awesome.
edit
But it doesn't work with the current Firefox Beta. Natch.

[deralte.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm running 2.0.0.14 atm, though I've been using Smart Bookmarks for over a year now and have yet to have a problem when upgrading. The beta's new so they'll probably upgrade it etc.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

Intruiging. I don't actually use bookmarks for much at all... I'm fairly used to just typing addresses in. But if anything can make me switch, it would be this.

[wee0ne.livejournal.com]

Firebug is good, but not yet updated to work with FF3

Twitterfox follows your tweets (but again, has issues with FF3b5

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

Arg! Not the twittering!

I'll leave off downloading FF3 until it leaves beta. Or perhaps until Firebug supports it. It really has become that much of an essential feature for me!

[figg.livejournal.com]

I use Opera, it is fast, stable and does the following things out the box:

* Save and Restore Tabs
* Page Zoom rather than Text Zoon
* Fit Page to width Option
* Block Content based on Globbing (rather than rx's sadly)
* Source opens up in a tab instead of a window
* Mouse Gestures
* It looks for next and previous links and it can use these for navigation, so you can use space to scroll though a large colletion of linked html things (Think of those latex2html manuals)
* Quick Launch - a new tab shows 9 little thumnails of sites you have picked, and you can use Command+Number to go to them or click on them, it is pretty awesome.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

But does it have a Firebug-a-like?

I do approve of Opera, because it was the first to get CSS2 fully working (IIRC). So the developers must have their heads screwed on right. But I think I'll stick to something with a wider user base, for now.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

I use Flashblock.

Thanks for the duplicate, source viewer and IE tab links. I didn't know about the first two. I'd seem the IE one but haven't gotten round to trying it yet.

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

Flashblock I've heard of, but flash files have never bothered me enough to go that far. Might download something like Flash Killer instead...

Just heard about Duplicate Tab yesterday myself... thought everybody should know about it, because I've been doing it manually for so long, which is a pain in the arse.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

I'm currently 'borrowing' Eleanor's laptop. She's using her normal desktop. The laptop is a backup in case the desktop fails. I'm at Mark's parents dogsitting and really dislike their Mac. Eleanor wants me to do lots of website stuff so I asked for her laptop as the stuff I use isn't on Mark's parents' Mac and I really shouldn't install stuff on it. It worked. I like this laptop. I really shouldn't be installing programs that she'll never use, like Firefox and Videolan, but I am. I doubt she'll mind if I install a few more add-ons. She'll probably never know. I put Firefox on her desktop machine and she hasn't noticed. There's even a shortcut on the desktop!

There used to be a wonderful addon called eBay Negs. You highlighted a seller's name, rightclicked and selected 'ebay negs'. It brought up tab with a www.toolhaus.org search for all of the seller's negs and neutrals. Very useful. It wasn't compatible with Firefox 2 and I haven't looked for it since. Hmm, must remember to do that.

Enjoy the icon :)

[spudtater.livejournal.com]

> Enjoy the icon

Hehe. Nice.

[leynos.livejournal.com]

I've now graduated from vertical tabs to Tree-Style Tabs. It's more or less the browsing experience I've always wanted. Open a page in one tab, then open links from that page in child tabs. Branches of the tree can be collapsed, dragged around and pruned. It's teh r0x0r.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890