David Naylor: Blog

Favourite Firefox Extensions

I'd like to show a list of my favourite extensions, beginning with my absolute favourites:

1. Searchbar autosizer. A great extension which automatically increases the width of the searchbar if you type something too long into it. This should be a default feature of Firefox - it's very useful, and doesn't get in the user's way.
2. AdBlock Plus. Makes the web so much nicer to browse and look at. Especially combined with the Adblock Filterset.G Updater.
3. SessionSaver. It's wonderful to be able to just close your browser and know that everything you've got open (including half-finished forum/blog posts) will be there when you fire it back up again (pun intended).
4. Answers. Lets you alt-click any word to instantly look it up on answers.com. Very nifty and slick.
5. Search Engine Ordering. Allows you to order your search engines as you want them. Very useful – this should also (and will?) be part of basic Firefox functionality.

The great thing is that everyones favourite extension list looks different. Firefox extension system allows you to add just those cool/useful/slick features you yourself like.

There's also a whole bunch of other extensions that I've got, but which I use less regularly. These are maybe also slightly less interesting to the broad masses:

• Nightly Tester Tools
• Minimize to Tray
• Update Channel Selector. Useful when I feel like keeping in touch with the latest Firefox development.
• Web Developer. Has some very handy funcions when managing and editing your website.
• Classic Menus. To improve the look of Firefox 1.5 under W2K & co.
• FoxyTunes. Control your media player from inside Firefox.
• Blogger Web Comments. Cool extension by Google which displays links to blog posts talking about the webpage you're currently looking at. Makes for lots of overtime surfing.
• ChatZilla IRC client for Firefox.

You often hear (as a reason to use Opera instead of Firefox) that Firefox's extensions will interfere with each other and won't play nice.

Well, if you install extensions sensibly – that is, don't install several extensions which attempt to do the same thing, then you're extremely unlikely to run into any problems. (For instance, there is a huge number of extensions which enhance Firefox's tabs. If you install several of these you're bound to run into problems.)

All my current extensions work perfectly together. In fact, I can only remember having one slight problem with extensions treading on each others toes since I started using Firefox 1.0 one year ago: The Web Developer and Tab Sidebar extensions use the same keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+T, which resulted in only one of the extensions responding to it.

Labels: browsers, firefox, mozilla

Posted by David Naylor at 19:22