Here are all of the best Firefox Extensions I use. I do stay on Firefox 1.5 for most of my browsers, so some of these may not be available for 2.0 and greater. These are presented roughly in the order of how often I use them.
| Extension & Link |
Description |
| SearchLoad Options | This extension is great because it will reset the little search engine chosen back to the default one after a certain length of time. It can clear the search field automatically as well and make searches start a new tab. |
| DownThemAll! | This is the cleanest / most professional extension I’ve used. Essentially, a download manager with resume support, great for losers like me on unreliable connections. Lots of options, nice UI. |
| flashblock | This one really unclutters web sites. It replaces all flash(animated) parts of a web page (animated ads, videos, etc) with a box and a button. Press the button, the animation loads and plays like normal. Keeps animations from being obnoxious, essentially. |
| Nuke Anything Enhanced | Delete anything from a web page — text, images, formatting. Works with flashblock, so if you know something is just getting in your way, right-click and nuke it. I sometimes use this to delete stuff that makes pages hard to read, like large images and what-not. |
| Sage | Simple RSS reader. Bare-bones, but a good way of keeping up with sites. |
| Google Browser Sync | Keeps browsers in sync — bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history, and open tabs. Theoretically. Bookmarks don’t merge well when more than one machines is contributing. In practice, it manages to keep one browser up-to-date. But it is still good, every new install, I can temporarily use this to pull down all my settings once. |
| Web Developer | This is sort of for hard-core web application makers, but I use this quite a bit to change the behavior of sites I interact with. You can enable buttons and form fields and (best of all) turn on user/password autocomplete so that firefox can remember and insert them for you. |
| Quick Preferences button | Quick access to common settings. Don’t use this too much anymore, but if there is a specific setting you tweak a lot back and forth, works nice. |
| ScrapBook | Cool content-capture extension. Works like Save As Web Page (Complete) but skips the prompt, stores it in firefox plugin. You can tweak the page and add notes to it if you like. Good for capturing receipts, instructions, etc. |
| Google Notebook | A lot like ScrapBook, but networked. Google provides a web page where you can manipulate the scrapbook. The plugin lets you highlight text and capture it and the URL it came from. An example here. |
| Reveal | Another classy extension, and one I don’t use enough. Presents all your open tabs as thumbnails, lets you search and sort through them. You can drag them around and reorder your tabs! |
| Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics | Quick diagnostic tool. Probably not as full-featured as something like what DSLReports.com offers, but pretty good. |
That’s the mind of Pat.