FireFox rocks! One of the coolest features of FireFox is its customization. By adding addons you can easily enhance your online experience. Here are my top ten FireFox addons!
Facebook Toolbar integrates your Facebook life into your browser. You can set your status right in the toolbar. It also gives notifications about your friends. This is a must have for Facebook junkies.
GooglePreview is a simple addon that enhances your Google searches. It adds a thumbnail picture next to each search result. This gives you a clue about the website you are clicking on.
Hyperwords let’s you select any text on any webpage and quickly choose from a few powerful commands. You can do a Google search, wiki search, or even translate the word into a number of languages. This is a great addon for college students, or anyone who does a lot of online research. I did have to change it’s annoying auto pop-up feature. It would automatically pop-up its context menu every time I selected text. Instead, I preferred to get to the context menu by right clicking on the selection.
Web Developer is a great addon for anyone doing web development. It gives tools to edit css, quickly re-size your browser to a set size, view information on just about any element, and much more. One of my favorite tools is a ruler that will measure pixel distances on a webpage. This is an extremely useful addon. Web Developer does add a toolbar that I quickly removed. You can still get to all of the functionality of the toolbar by right clicking on the page.
DownloadHelper is a great tool to get media content that is already downloading in the background. It can be used to download videos from just about any YouTube like site. It now comes with file conversion! Great for getting music videos off of YouTube and onto your iPod.
IE tab is another very useful addon for developers. With a single click, you can view your current page in Internet Explorer. The great thing is that it opens Internet Explorer within a FireFox tab. This is great to see how a page looks in both IE and FireFox. You could also use it to have two Gmail accounts open at the same time.
Cooliris is a very cool addon that transforms just about any webpage with photos or videos on it, into a beautiful full-screen 3D wall. Cooliris is integrated with many big-name sites like Facebook, Flicker, GoogleImages, and even YouTube. This is how surfing the Internet should be!
FireGestures allows you to execute many commands with mouse gestures. You can open tabs, close tabs, reload pages, and much more all by right-clicking and preforming a simple mouse gesture. With a little practice you will wish this functionality was built into your operating system. I now find myself trying to close non-FireFox windows with mouse gestures. This addon has quickly ran up my list of favorites!
Web development is impossible without Firebug! Easily inspect the source of any webpage, change it, and see your results. View any element’s css, then change it right there. Amazingly useful. You can even use it to step through your javascript code. I would refuse to do web development without it!
I can’t stress enough how great Adblock Plus is. I haven’t seen an Internet ad in three years thanks to Adblock Plus! If you don’t have it yet, go get it! Be sure to subscribe to a filter subscription. I subscribe to “Easy Element+Easy List.” This is a must have addon. Definitely my #1.
There you have my top ten FireFox addons. What do you think? Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments.
One Comment
Nice list! A lot of these I have never used before.
I just downloaded google preview, hyperwords, ie tab, cooliris and gestures. I like the simplicity of the google preview and the ie tab. It looks like hyperwords and gestures will really improve my productivity (especially after I figure out the getstures). Cooliris is neat and flashy, but it seems like a lot of websites don’t work with it (at least my own websites don’t).
WebDev, Firebug and Adblock Plus have always been my favorites. I simply can not surf the internet on a computer that doesn’t have firefox with adblock plus.