Kim
02-20-2008, 11:09 PM
StumbleUpon (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/138/)
First, a warning. StumbleUpon is hazardous to your productivity! StumbleUpon is one of these social networking Web applications that are becoming so popular lately. This one provides a way to find new Web sites that you may find enjoyable or useful.
This extension adds a StumbleUpon tool bar to Firefox. You can get to all the core functionality of StumbleUpon via this tool bar, including setting up an account. You pick some initial categories of the kinds of sites you're interested in (a few examples: Ancient History, Humor, Self-improvement) as part of the sign-up process, and can always tweak these later.
Yahoo Mail Notifier (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1264/)
The Yahoo Mail Notifier is fairly basic; it just puts a small mail icon in your status bar and indicates how many new messages are in your Yahoo mail account. It'll display a little pop-up to catch your attention if you want it to. Clicking the icon takes you to Yahoo mail.
Gmail Manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1320/)
The Gmail Manager does all this and more. If you hover your mouse over it, you'll see the total number of new messages, how many spam messages you have, new message counts for all your labels and how much space your mail is taking up. Below all that is a listing of your most recent 10 messages, showing From, Subject and first line of the body of the mail (you can turn all this off). It also supports multiple Gmail accounts, and you can set it to cause all mailto: links to open up a Compose New Message window in Gmail.
Greasemonkey (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/)
Let's get this out of the way right up front: Greasemonkey is not for the faint of heart. It basically allows you to add JavaScript to any Web page, but writing these scripts requires a good knowledge of scripting. The good news is that there are many generous souls out there who share the scripts they create.
When first installed, Greasemonkey does nothing. It just enables the scripting. You'll have to write, or install, scripts before you see any changes on your pages.
Firefox Showcase (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1810/)
Firefox Showcase is a great extension both because of its usability and because it takes away one feature advantage that Internet Explorer 7 has over Firefox: the ability to display thumbnails of all open windows and tabs.
Once you install the extension, you'll have a new Showcase submenu under the View menu. From here you can choose to show thumbnails of all tabs in the current window or all tabs in all windows. (IE7, incidentally, only shows thumbnails of the tabs in a particular window.)
Additionally, you can choose to show these thumbnails in a new tab or in a floating window.
Cooliris Previews (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2207/)
This interesting extension allows you to preview a Web page before clicking off the one you're on. After installing Cooliris Previews, a small blue icon will appear next to any link you hover your mouse over. Slide the mouse over to that icon and a window pops up containing the destination page. For all intents and purposes, you're on that page, except if you move the mouse off the icon and the pop-up window, the preview vanishes.
Colorful Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1368/)
Colorful Tabs is pretty basic. It colors each of your tabs using lovely pastel colors. After a long day of research, this becomes more than just something pretty and can make life easier on tired eyes.
Chroma Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3810/)
ChromaTabs is in many ways similar to Colorful Tabs. The difference is that ChromaTabs determines a tab's color based on the hostname in the URL. For instance, any tab displaying a Computerworld page might always be a light green color. If you surf away to a different site, the tab's color will change.
Google Browser Sync (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/)
If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you might be frustrated keeping track of what bookmarks are where. Google Browser Sync to the rescue. Using your existing Google account, Google Browser Sync will sync not only bookmarks, but sessions, persistent cookies, passwords and history among instances of Firefox on different machines. (This is user configurable on a broad scale -- i.e., you can choose to sync cookies, or not to sync cookies, but you can't make the decision based on individual cookies.) In addition to your Google account name and password, you'll assign a PIN to add additional security to the transaction
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2410/)
If all you want to do is sync bookmarks, try Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. You'll have to set up an account with Foxmarks (the same is true of Google, but many of us already have Google accounts), but the initial sync seems much faster.
Session Manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2324/)
Session Manager is a handy utility to help you manage your Firefox tabs. If you're a Web surfer who habitually visits the same sites every morning, all you need do is open the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session under a name of your choosing. After that, every morning start up Firefox and go to Tools > Session Manager, pick your session and voila, all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them.
You can also choose a saved session as your Start Session (instead of just using a start page) that'll open each time you launch Firefox. As an added bonus, Session Manager tracks your sessions as you surf, and if Firefox (or your system) crashes, you can recover the selection of tabs you had open when it crashed.
Session Manager makes it easy to reopen closed tabs.
One last perk: If you accidentally close a tab, you can easily reopen it from the Session Manager menu.
All-in-One Gestures (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/12/)
This is one of those extensions that does more than you'll probably ever need, but the core function is to assign commands to Gestures made with the mouse. For instance, holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse a bit to the left issues a Back command. A right-mouse button/dragging up combo opens a new tab. And so on.
A few of the many gestures you can assign commands to. (Click image to see larger view)
There are more than 90 commands available, and the gesture to trigger each is user-configurable. Will you ever remember 90 different gestures? Of course not. But find the commands you use often and assign each a gesture; you'll save yourself miles of mousing.
The extension also provides auto-scrolling, as seen in Internet Explorer. This is where you click the middle button, then move the mouse up or down to start the page continuously scrolling. The farther you move the mouse, the faster the page scrolls.
IE Tab (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/)
It's a fact of life that there are still Web sites out there that require (or work better with) Internet Explorer. IE Tab to the rescue. Once installed, it places a small icon in your status bar. Clicking this icon swaps out the rendering engine from Firefox's to Internet Explorer's. In my experience, this is particularly helpful with sites that refuse to play video in Firefox.
You can set filters so that certain sites are always displayed in an IE tab. In fact, the extension comes preconfigured with filters for the Microsoft Update site (http://update.microsoft.com/). It also adds an Open Link in IE Tab option to the right-click context menu of Firefox.
Since the extension uses IE's engine, this one is for Windows only.
Download Statusbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/26/)
You're probably familiar with that sometimes-pesky Downloads window that pops up whenever you download a file in Firefox. Download Statusbar suppresses that window from popping up, and instead provides you the same information in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. (You can still manually open the Downloads window if you find you need it.)
You can roll your mouse over the filename and get a pop-up tool tip with some extra information about your download, too (where it's being download from, and where it's being saved to, the speed of the download, percentage complete and so on).
Download Sort (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/25/)
If you find yourself doing a lot of Save Link As or Save Image As downloading, then Download Sort will be quite a timesaver. It allows you to file downloads by extension, or by a keyword or regular expression in the URL.
Here's how it works. After installing the extension, you set up filters. As an example, you might want any file with the extension .jpg to go into a Pictures folder and anything ending in .zip to go into an Archives folder on your drive.
Nuke Anything Enhanced (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951/)
If you find yourself printing a lot of Web pages, this extension will help you save on ink. Once installed, it adds a Remove this object option to the right-click context menu. Place your mouse over information you don't need printed (menu bars, big graphical logos and so on) and use Remove this object to zap them temporarily. Clean up the page, then print just what you need.
Forecastfox (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/398/)
Forecastfox puts an up-to-date weather forecast in Firefox's status bar. Just click one of its icons to see the full weather report at AccuWeather.com.
A wide range of options gives you control over how much, or how little, information you want, including a radar image button, severe weather warnings and extended forecasts of up to eight days. You can set up profiles, each with its own set of options. Use these to get the weather in different zip codes if you're a traveler, or create profiles with lots of data for turbulent winter conditions and minimal data for warm, sunny summer days.
Answers (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/735/)
This one's simple: Just hold down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) and click on a word, and a window will pop up with information about that word from Answers.com. (You can have the results displayed in a full window if you'd rather.) There's a More button in the pop-up that'll open a new tab with the full Answers.com results page.
For phrases, you still have to highlight, right-click and choose Look up on Answers.com to get results in a new tab.
FireFTP (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684/)
Why bounce between applications when you can use FireFTP and have a full-featured FTP client in one tab, and the page you're working on in another?
FireFTP adds an option to Firefox's Tools menu. Click on it and a new tab opens (you can set this to a new window if you prefer) with a traditional two-panel FTP client: local files on the left, remote on the right. By right-clicking on files you can tweak their permissions and all the other things you'd expect to be able to do via FTP.
Firebug (http://www.getfirebug.com/)
Firebug is an essential tool for developers working on Web pages. It allows you to examine and tweak the HTML, CSS and JavaScript contained in a page, all on the fly. Firebug opens either as a panel at the bottom of the page you're inspecting, or in a separate window.
Web Developer (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/)
Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page.
Web Developer's cascading menus. (Click image to see larger view)
For instance, you can modify cookies on the fly, examining, deleting and even manually adding them. You can tweak form settings, clear private data and disable the cache -- all kinds of real-time manipulations.
Web Developer's features can be accessed as a tool bar, or as cascading menus under Firefox's Tools menu. The tool bar is particularly handy since you can see all 12 of the top-level categories of features at a glance (and, of course, it can be easily turned off when you're not in the midst of site development).
MeasureIt (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/539/)
So simple and so useful. After installing this extension, you'll have a small ruler icon in your status bar. When you click on this icon, the client area of your browser window will fade out a little, and you'll have a crosshair cursor.
Use this to drag out a box over a section of the screen. Next to the box is its height and width, measured in pixels. No more guessing as to how wide a sidebar really is, or if the footer is really rendering 150 pixels deep like your style sheet says it should. When you're done, a tap of the Escape key turns off MeasureIt and gives your Web page back to you.
ColorZilla (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/271)
Another quick and simple tool, this one more for designers than developers. ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you'll get a crosshair cursor. As you run this over a Web page, the RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair will display in the status bar, both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 | #FFFFFF).
First, a warning. StumbleUpon is hazardous to your productivity! StumbleUpon is one of these social networking Web applications that are becoming so popular lately. This one provides a way to find new Web sites that you may find enjoyable or useful.
This extension adds a StumbleUpon tool bar to Firefox. You can get to all the core functionality of StumbleUpon via this tool bar, including setting up an account. You pick some initial categories of the kinds of sites you're interested in (a few examples: Ancient History, Humor, Self-improvement) as part of the sign-up process, and can always tweak these later.
Yahoo Mail Notifier (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1264/)
The Yahoo Mail Notifier is fairly basic; it just puts a small mail icon in your status bar and indicates how many new messages are in your Yahoo mail account. It'll display a little pop-up to catch your attention if you want it to. Clicking the icon takes you to Yahoo mail.
Gmail Manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1320/)
The Gmail Manager does all this and more. If you hover your mouse over it, you'll see the total number of new messages, how many spam messages you have, new message counts for all your labels and how much space your mail is taking up. Below all that is a listing of your most recent 10 messages, showing From, Subject and first line of the body of the mail (you can turn all this off). It also supports multiple Gmail accounts, and you can set it to cause all mailto: links to open up a Compose New Message window in Gmail.
Greasemonkey (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/)
Let's get this out of the way right up front: Greasemonkey is not for the faint of heart. It basically allows you to add JavaScript to any Web page, but writing these scripts requires a good knowledge of scripting. The good news is that there are many generous souls out there who share the scripts they create.
When first installed, Greasemonkey does nothing. It just enables the scripting. You'll have to write, or install, scripts before you see any changes on your pages.
Firefox Showcase (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1810/)
Firefox Showcase is a great extension both because of its usability and because it takes away one feature advantage that Internet Explorer 7 has over Firefox: the ability to display thumbnails of all open windows and tabs.
Once you install the extension, you'll have a new Showcase submenu under the View menu. From here you can choose to show thumbnails of all tabs in the current window or all tabs in all windows. (IE7, incidentally, only shows thumbnails of the tabs in a particular window.)
Additionally, you can choose to show these thumbnails in a new tab or in a floating window.
Cooliris Previews (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2207/)
This interesting extension allows you to preview a Web page before clicking off the one you're on. After installing Cooliris Previews, a small blue icon will appear next to any link you hover your mouse over. Slide the mouse over to that icon and a window pops up containing the destination page. For all intents and purposes, you're on that page, except if you move the mouse off the icon and the pop-up window, the preview vanishes.
Colorful Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1368/)
Colorful Tabs is pretty basic. It colors each of your tabs using lovely pastel colors. After a long day of research, this becomes more than just something pretty and can make life easier on tired eyes.
Chroma Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3810/)
ChromaTabs is in many ways similar to Colorful Tabs. The difference is that ChromaTabs determines a tab's color based on the hostname in the URL. For instance, any tab displaying a Computerworld page might always be a light green color. If you surf away to a different site, the tab's color will change.
Google Browser Sync (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/)
If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you might be frustrated keeping track of what bookmarks are where. Google Browser Sync to the rescue. Using your existing Google account, Google Browser Sync will sync not only bookmarks, but sessions, persistent cookies, passwords and history among instances of Firefox on different machines. (This is user configurable on a broad scale -- i.e., you can choose to sync cookies, or not to sync cookies, but you can't make the decision based on individual cookies.) In addition to your Google account name and password, you'll assign a PIN to add additional security to the transaction
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2410/)
If all you want to do is sync bookmarks, try Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. You'll have to set up an account with Foxmarks (the same is true of Google, but many of us already have Google accounts), but the initial sync seems much faster.
Session Manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2324/)
Session Manager is a handy utility to help you manage your Firefox tabs. If you're a Web surfer who habitually visits the same sites every morning, all you need do is open the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session under a name of your choosing. After that, every morning start up Firefox and go to Tools > Session Manager, pick your session and voila, all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them.
You can also choose a saved session as your Start Session (instead of just using a start page) that'll open each time you launch Firefox. As an added bonus, Session Manager tracks your sessions as you surf, and if Firefox (or your system) crashes, you can recover the selection of tabs you had open when it crashed.
Session Manager makes it easy to reopen closed tabs.
One last perk: If you accidentally close a tab, you can easily reopen it from the Session Manager menu.
All-in-One Gestures (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/12/)
This is one of those extensions that does more than you'll probably ever need, but the core function is to assign commands to Gestures made with the mouse. For instance, holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse a bit to the left issues a Back command. A right-mouse button/dragging up combo opens a new tab. And so on.
A few of the many gestures you can assign commands to. (Click image to see larger view)
There are more than 90 commands available, and the gesture to trigger each is user-configurable. Will you ever remember 90 different gestures? Of course not. But find the commands you use often and assign each a gesture; you'll save yourself miles of mousing.
The extension also provides auto-scrolling, as seen in Internet Explorer. This is where you click the middle button, then move the mouse up or down to start the page continuously scrolling. The farther you move the mouse, the faster the page scrolls.
IE Tab (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/)
It's a fact of life that there are still Web sites out there that require (or work better with) Internet Explorer. IE Tab to the rescue. Once installed, it places a small icon in your status bar. Clicking this icon swaps out the rendering engine from Firefox's to Internet Explorer's. In my experience, this is particularly helpful with sites that refuse to play video in Firefox.
You can set filters so that certain sites are always displayed in an IE tab. In fact, the extension comes preconfigured with filters for the Microsoft Update site (http://update.microsoft.com/). It also adds an Open Link in IE Tab option to the right-click context menu of Firefox.
Since the extension uses IE's engine, this one is for Windows only.
Download Statusbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/26/)
You're probably familiar with that sometimes-pesky Downloads window that pops up whenever you download a file in Firefox. Download Statusbar suppresses that window from popping up, and instead provides you the same information in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. (You can still manually open the Downloads window if you find you need it.)
You can roll your mouse over the filename and get a pop-up tool tip with some extra information about your download, too (where it's being download from, and where it's being saved to, the speed of the download, percentage complete and so on).
Download Sort (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/25/)
If you find yourself doing a lot of Save Link As or Save Image As downloading, then Download Sort will be quite a timesaver. It allows you to file downloads by extension, or by a keyword or regular expression in the URL.
Here's how it works. After installing the extension, you set up filters. As an example, you might want any file with the extension .jpg to go into a Pictures folder and anything ending in .zip to go into an Archives folder on your drive.
Nuke Anything Enhanced (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951/)
If you find yourself printing a lot of Web pages, this extension will help you save on ink. Once installed, it adds a Remove this object option to the right-click context menu. Place your mouse over information you don't need printed (menu bars, big graphical logos and so on) and use Remove this object to zap them temporarily. Clean up the page, then print just what you need.
Forecastfox (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/398/)
Forecastfox puts an up-to-date weather forecast in Firefox's status bar. Just click one of its icons to see the full weather report at AccuWeather.com.
A wide range of options gives you control over how much, or how little, information you want, including a radar image button, severe weather warnings and extended forecasts of up to eight days. You can set up profiles, each with its own set of options. Use these to get the weather in different zip codes if you're a traveler, or create profiles with lots of data for turbulent winter conditions and minimal data for warm, sunny summer days.
Answers (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/735/)
This one's simple: Just hold down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) and click on a word, and a window will pop up with information about that word from Answers.com. (You can have the results displayed in a full window if you'd rather.) There's a More button in the pop-up that'll open a new tab with the full Answers.com results page.
For phrases, you still have to highlight, right-click and choose Look up on Answers.com to get results in a new tab.
FireFTP (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684/)
Why bounce between applications when you can use FireFTP and have a full-featured FTP client in one tab, and the page you're working on in another?
FireFTP adds an option to Firefox's Tools menu. Click on it and a new tab opens (you can set this to a new window if you prefer) with a traditional two-panel FTP client: local files on the left, remote on the right. By right-clicking on files you can tweak their permissions and all the other things you'd expect to be able to do via FTP.
Firebug (http://www.getfirebug.com/)
Firebug is an essential tool for developers working on Web pages. It allows you to examine and tweak the HTML, CSS and JavaScript contained in a page, all on the fly. Firebug opens either as a panel at the bottom of the page you're inspecting, or in a separate window.
Web Developer (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/)
Web Developer is another virtual Swiss Army Knife for coding. There's some overlap with Firebug, but where Firebug concerns itself almost exclusively with the content of a Web page, Web Developer offers tools to tweak how you're interacting with the page.
Web Developer's cascading menus. (Click image to see larger view)
For instance, you can modify cookies on the fly, examining, deleting and even manually adding them. You can tweak form settings, clear private data and disable the cache -- all kinds of real-time manipulations.
Web Developer's features can be accessed as a tool bar, or as cascading menus under Firefox's Tools menu. The tool bar is particularly handy since you can see all 12 of the top-level categories of features at a glance (and, of course, it can be easily turned off when you're not in the midst of site development).
MeasureIt (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/539/)
So simple and so useful. After installing this extension, you'll have a small ruler icon in your status bar. When you click on this icon, the client area of your browser window will fade out a little, and you'll have a crosshair cursor.
Use this to drag out a box over a section of the screen. Next to the box is its height and width, measured in pixels. No more guessing as to how wide a sidebar really is, or if the footer is really rendering 150 pixels deep like your style sheet says it should. When you're done, a tap of the Escape key turns off MeasureIt and gives your Web page back to you.
ColorZilla (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/271)
Another quick and simple tool, this one more for designers than developers. ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you'll get a crosshair cursor. As you run this over a Web page, the RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair will display in the status bar, both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 | #FFFFFF).