Sunday, December 18th 2005

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.

Posted at 18:22. Tags: Mozilla. Categories: browsers, Mozilla Firefox. Both comments and trackbacks are closed.

No Responses to this post:

1. jer says:

   December 18, 2005 at 23:20

   I’ve been using SessionSaver for a long time, and only have one complaint about it. Firefox takes FOREVER to open up 70 tabs at once.I guess I shouldn’t use my open tabs as a filing system.FYI, on bloglines there are 7 people subscribed to your old feed, and only 2 subscribed to your new feed. If you can still update the old feed, a heads up for the others might be a good idea.
2. David Naylor says:

   December 19, 2005 at 09:58

   LOL! 70 tabs… Well…Thanks for the info about subscribers. I’m not quite sure how I’ll get to those people, but I’ll try. Thanks again.
3. stn says:

   December 19, 2005 at 21:01

   SessionSaver == LifeSaver!To many times when you have been involved with some project have alot of pages up and you just found that url that has the answer to your problem and then BOOM! firefox dies (my flash installation is really crappy and I cant get it to play well with esd)When I start firefox again it’s all there! That was one of the features in galeon that I missed the most when I first started to use “phoenix(?)/firefox”…(btw, rss added )
4. David Naylor says:

   December 19, 2005 at 22:33

   Oh, that’s right. I forgot to mention the fact that it saves you on crashes too.
5. Whopper says:

   December 22, 2005 at 04:55

   Speaking of favorite Firefox extensions, my FireFox theme since I first installed the program was the Doodle Classic theme, which appears to be incompatible with FF 1.5…any hope of an update?
6. David Naylor says:

   December 22, 2005 at 17:44

   Greg Ziebold has contacted me about taking up the Doodle theme. However, this would be his first theme so it might take a little while before he has worked everything out and got an updated version of Doodle out of the door.
7. Anonymous says:

   February 2, 2006 at 18:36

   Also try these 50 best firefox extensions.