When you download Firefox for the first time, it's pretty bare. It gives you some basic browsing functions, but to fully appreciate Firefox, you have to download extensions to completely customize your browsing experience. The image above is a pic of my Firefox browser. It will look very different from the default Firefox browser you download. I have over a dozen extensions and a customized browser theme. There are a lot of useful and cool extensions out there, so lets take a look at a few of my favorites. You can pretty much get any one of the extensions I'm talking about here at the link I provided earlier. Extentions are listed by categories, but you can also search by name.
Adblock - This is one of the first extensions you should download. This will block any popups or webpage ads on any website. This does, sometimes, cause issues with free webmail accounts like Gmail. I usually include Gmail to the Adblock whitelist, which allows ads. This will keep you from having issues seeing some images in your emails. A companion to this extension is Adblock Filterset.G Updater. This extension helps to automatically update the Adblock extension's ability to recognize web ads.
Fasterfox - This is another one at the top of my list of extensions. This extensions tweaks the network settings for Firefox to allow it to run faster. It pushes a lot of the browser's workload to the webservers and decidedly increases your browsing speed.
Google Toolbar for Firefox - I love Google. I search it at least once a day. More often than not the images in my blog are from Google Images. Needless to say, I have to have this extension. It's the Google Toolbar, complete with AutoFill utility, ability to search webpages or images right from the toolbar and a cool feature called Autolink to help search map sites and the dictionary. Too much awesome for me to get across in one blog article. There are two extensions that are unofficial companion extensions to the Google Toolbar. The first, CustomizeGoogle and Aggregate Yahoo! & Google. CustomizeGoogle completely customizes how Google works for you. You can eliminate ads and force Gmail to use a secure connection. You can also tell Google how to behave based on your searching criteria. Very nice. Aggregate Yahoo! & Google will put Yahoo! Search results in the result lists of your Google Searches. This essentially gives you two search engine results with one query. Every other entry will be a Yahoo! entry and it's highlighted blue. Very cool.
Tab Mix Plus - One of the coolest default features of Firefox is tabbed browsing (coming soon to Microsoft Internet Explorer). This extension gives you total control of how tabbed browsing works. There are several extensions pertaining to tabbed browsing (nay, even an entire extension category) but this extension pretty much includes all those other extensions into this one. It's super customizable and I love it.
Download Manager Tweak - Based on how much stuff you download from the internet, you may want this extension. It gives greater functionality to Firefox's anemic download feature set. Believe me, you want this.
MediaPlayer Connectivity - Allows you to tell Firefox what applications are associated with what files. Play windows media files in Windows Media Player, play real audio files in Real Audio Player, etc., etc.
The extensions you see above, are pretty much the must haves for me. When a new install of Firefox goes down, these are first on my list. Now I'll look at some of the nice-to-haves, ones that I really enjoy, but don't really HAVE to have.
AI Roboform for Firefox - This extension exists for another application. I currently use Roboform's Pass2Go utility on my USB drive. It stores and encrypts all my online passwords and allows me to quickly logon to my favorite password sites. To check it out, go to Roboform.com. Pass2Go does not natively work with Firefox, so this extension/adapter is needed to make it work.
Colorful Tabs - This extension is nice for when you have several browser tabs open at once. It will make each tab a different color so you can easily distinguish between them.
Flat Bookmark Editing - This is a nice extension to help edit/organize your bookmarks. One of Firefox's exceptionally cool features is the ability to read RSS. Websites now use RSS as a means of dynamically updating users of their content changes. Firefox can take an RSS feed and store it as a "Live Bookmark". You navigate to it like a normal bookmark, but it shows up as a list of subject titles. Very cool feature, and this extension helps to manage this.
Restart Firefox - When new extensions are installed or when an extension is updated, you usually have to restart the browser. This gets tedious after a while. This extension gives you the ability to shutdown and restart the browser with one click. Very simple, very nice.
Forcastfox Enhanced - Very cool extension to give you updated weather reports for your local area. It shows up as a small alert on your status bar. You can mouse over it to get more information. Very cool.
I have more extensions, but these are the best. This list is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, there's a world of wonderful little extensions out there for your Firefox browser and I hope you explore it well.
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