My Current Favorite Firefox Add-ons
Written by Steve on June 27th, 2008I currently use 20 Firefox add-ons, or plugins, if you prefer. Some of them are for specialized purposes, but there are 8 that I use virtually every day that I would rather not live without. In alphabetical order, they are:
- Autocopy - a cool utility that saves keystrokes when you want to copy and paste text within a document, blog post, or whatever. Simply highlight the text you want to copy, wait a second or two and it’s automatically copied to the clipboard ready to paste. You do have to be careful not to highlight text you don’t want copied, but once you get used to it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. It can be turned off, if desired, for special circumstances.
- Colorzilla - if you do any web design, or other work where you need to match colors, this is very handy. Colorzilla puts a small eyedropper icon in the lower left corner of the browser window. Click on that icon and the cursor becomes a cross. Click on any area of the browser window and the color under the cursor is copied and displayed as its RGB and hex values. Right click the icon and you get a whole menu of things you can do with the color you captured. The cursor picks up the pixel directly underneath it so areas with non-solid graphics can be a bit tricky.
- DownThemAll! - I very often download multiple files from a single web page. Until I found this tool, it was tedious to do them one at a time. Now, I right click on the page, click DownThemAll!, select which files I want to download from the page, select the directory to which I want to save them, and click Start. DTA downloads up to four files simultaneously and continues until all the selected files are downloaded successfully. DTA is a download manager so if the download gets interrupted, the download can be resumed (sometimes automatically) without having to start over. This is very nice for large files. I use this capability often with single files that are larger than a couple of MB.
- FireFTP - a basic FTP client that works in a separate tab within Firefox. If you need to up- or download something to your web site quickly, you can do it right from Firefox without having to open your FTP client. Very slick.
- Google Browser Sync - another lifesaver for those of us with multiple computers. I use three computers on a regular basis and I have GBS on all three of them. GBS keeps track of my bookmarks and history so that I only have to bookmark a site once. The bookmark is then duplicated on the other machines. GBS also remembers what tabs I had open when I closed Firefox and reopens the same ones on another machine when I start Firefox.
- Google Notebook - another killer little application from Google. Make notes, gather clips or URLs of web pages and more right from within Firefox while you’re browsing. Make multiple notebooks to keep different subjects separated.
- McAfee SiteAdvisor - I’ve been using SiteAdvisor since before McAfee acquired it. So far they haven’t managed to screw it up, which was a concern of mine at the time. This application puts a dropdown on the status bar at the bottom of the browser window that changes color based on the relative safety rating of the site you’re currently visiting. Green is safe. Any other color indicates either that the site has not been evaluated or there are warnings about it. SiteAdvisor also puts ratings next to sites found during Google searches so you can see at a glance whether you should visit a site or be cautious about doing so.
- NoScript - the bad guys keep finding more ways to drop nasties on our machines through so-called “drive-by” methods. Simply by surfing a “toxic” web site it is possible for malware to be placed on your machine. This is usually done via Javascript or Flash or other scripting tools that have unpatched exploits. NoScript turns all these off by default. You tell it which sites are okay to turn scripting on to see the full dynamic wonderfulness of your favorite sites. There seems to be an update at least once or twice a week as the developers keep on top of the ever changing scripting technologies. A word of caution: NoScript will be a bit annoying until you have it “trained” to know which sites are allowed to run script. This will be especially apparent with e-commerce sites that you haven’t visited before, and with sites that use PayPal for their payment processor. If you don’t okay the sales site first, the link to PayPal won’t work properly. Fortunately, this is easy to fix by simply clicking the Back button, okaying the sales site, then clicking the Order button again. IMO, NoScript is well worth the small inconvenience for the added safety.
- SearchStatus - this is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool for marketers and others who want to see how a given web page ranks in Google’s PageRank and Alexa’s ratings. Very unobtrusive, it puts these two values at the bottom center of the browser window where you can see them at a glance.
I’m sure this list will change in the future and as I find others that I add to my must-have toolbox, I’ll let you know.
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Source: Browsers
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