14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Safari is the dedicated Internet browser for Apple computers, it failed to impress me and when I switched from Windows to Mac, I decided to take my browser with me. Considering the fact that Firefox is a very customizable, cross-platform browser, along with the huge number of add-ons available, I came to the conclusion that this was the one for me. Still, the basic functionality of Firefox can use some improvements and here is where the add-ons come in.
This article is not meant to be an actual top of Firefox add-ons, but a simple presentation of 10 extensions that I find useful and worth installing in your browser. Firefox extensions come from such a wide variety of categories, from news readers to download management tools and from multimedia utilities to browser themes, that it would be hard to gather them all together in a general classification. This is why I chose to present only a few of the most representative extensions in their categories.
Let's start by taking care of the security of your browser. Adblock Plus is a very handy Firefox add-on that prevents the browser from opening those pesky ads and banners. Save a great amount of time that was normally lost with the banner loading process. Simply right click on a banner and select the 'Adblock' option from the context menu to make sure that the banner will never bother you again. To make it even easier for you, Adblock Plus provides a filter subscription that will block most ads without your interference.
Also, a very appreciated Firefox security extension is NoScript, which offers extra protection for the Mozilla-based browsers by preventing the execution of Flash, Java, JavaScript and other plugins if they are not from a trusted website. You can create a whitelist with the websites that are allowed to run scripts and never mind the rest.
We can't speak of the best Firefox add-ons without mentioning a download management utility: FlashGot seems to be the general user’s choice in this respect. Although it's not an actual download manager, FlashGot helps you download a simple link, a selection of multiple links or all the links in your current page using your default download manager (iGetter, Leech or Speed Download). The extension is also able to intercept downloadable addresses for streaming video or audio clips, allowing you to grab YouTube videos, for example.
Taking care of the appearance of your browser is another important subject. I will list here 3 add-ons that will improve your general Firefox user experience: Tab Mix Plus, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, and Session Manager. Since their names are pretty much explanatory, I'll only give a short description of each.
Tab Mix Plus is a tab management utility that lets you duplicate tabs, control tab focus, customize the buttons displayed on the tab bar and manage tab events. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer enables you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on different computers. Whenever you work from another computer you can have all your bookmarks available and by logging in to the developer's website, you can manage the bookmarks online. Session Manager is an easy to use tool that allows you to save the state of your Firefox windows and restore them at any time. You can set it to encrypt your session information and specify the name format you wish for the saved sessions. Session Manager is very useful when Firefox crashes and you have multiple tabs opened, providing a backup session that you can easily restore.
Multimedia objects are also a big part of the whole Internet browsing experience. We often find ourselves in need of a specific image on the web and the search process is not always as easy as we'd like.
Cooliris provides you with a full-screen display of photos from various dedicated sites, like Flickr, Photobucket or Facebook.
FoxyTunes is another multimedia Firefox extension; it enables you to listen to your favorite music while you surf the web. FoxyTunes offers the basic media player controls right in your browser's window. You can also use it to find lyrics, album covers, videos and biographies of the artists.
StumbleUpon can be considered a social Firefox enhancement as its main purpose is to help you discover new websites based on your area of interest and meet people who have the same interests as you. You can report if a stumble is factually incorrect or unsafe and mark the stumbles with different labels (Not for me, Stumbled this before, Too much like this lately). The last extension in the list is ForecastFox, a weather forecast utility that brings the weather information right to the status bar of your browser. There's no need for you to install a standalone application to retrieve the weather forecast from a specialized website. ForecastFox gets the weather conditions from AccuWeather.com and displays them in an unobtrusive way. Whenever you need to know the weather status, all you have to do is have a glance at Firefox's status bar.
While there are many other Firefox add-ons worth mentioning in this article, I will stop here and let you write about your own favorite extensions in the Comments section.
