I love FireFox, because not only is it faster and more secure than Internet Explorer, it’s also a lot more powerful, especially when you consider the many extensions you can use to add functionality.
Here’s a list of some of the ones I use:
This is a brilliant add-on which works in two ways. Firstly, it adds a button to your FireFox toolbar which allows you to tag a site with a small popup window and without having to visit del.icio.us itself. The second button it adds opens up a sidebar in the browser, showing your latest tagged links and a search box to hunt out stuff bookmarked years before.
This makes downloads appear in FireFox’s status bar, rather than in a pop up window. Makes life much tidier, and offers more information on what’s happening.
As a blogger I find this invaluable. Selecting text and right-clicking allows you the option of copying text, while stripping out any formatting, which makes copying it into a blog paste a breeze, without the fear of weird formatting messing things up.
I try not to use Internet Explorer wherever possible, but sometimes you just can’t get out of it – when, for example, the site you need to view doesn’t work so well in FireFox. This cool extension allows you to switch the rendering engine in a tab to IE, so you are running it within FireFox.
I don’t know about you, but I often end up with tonnes of tabs open, and sometimes it can be a nightmare telling them apart. But with Colorful tabs, they are all presented in a number of delightful pastel shades, making it easy to switch to the one you want.
This is installed along with BlogJet, the desktop blog editor I use. It makes it easy to reference a particular web page in a blog entry, by pulling the URL and the text from the page in question into the editor for you.
This is an honourary mention, because I don’t currently use this. ScribeFire is a blog editor that runs as a Firefox add on. It works really well, but I’m a dedicated Windows Live Writer guy these days…
Integrates Twitter into your FF sidebar, so you can keep up to date with your friend’s tweets without having to leave your favourite browser!
This plugin makes life much easier when copying snippets of the web to Evernote for future reference.
The search box in the FF toolbar can be added to so it becomes even more useful. I’ve added GodDaddy, Wikipedia and Mahalo to mine so far.
Can anyone recommend FireFox extensions that they couldn’t live without?
Firebug is a dream come true for web design whilst Fireftp is a built-in FTP client with everything I need.
Good choices, Si. Will take a shufty.
Love Foxmarks for synching bookmarks (if you use more than one machine – I’ve used it to set up user accounts at relatives houses and it works a treat).
Download helper is pretty good for sucking down any video or audio content embedded on a webpage.
One other, name escapes me, (on my machine at work but not at home) for taking screengrabs.
PermaTabs – automatically opens those pages you were going to open anyway