I recently had to reinstall Mozilla Firefox on my machine (the upgrade from 1.0.x to 1.5.x left behind a few lingering issues), and, like any other highly customizable piece of software, it takes a lot more time for me to tweak the settings to get the look-and-feel right than it is to actually install the program.
One of the best parts of Firefox is the ability to add user-created functionality via Extensions. The idea is that Firefox itself is a (relatively) bare web browser, and you can customize the set of extra stuff to enhance the browsing experience. Supposedly, as they’re continuing development, they’ll integrate some of the more common and popular extensions into the main program.
So I had to hunt down and reinstall all my Firefox plugins, and I figured that since I had to find them, I might as well share some of the ones I find useful. And if you don’t use Firefox? At least tell me your primary browser isn’t Internet Explorer.
- FireFTP — Lightweight FTP client directly in Firefox. It’s quick, free, and better than most of the free FTP clients out there.
- History Menu — Categorizes your browsing history into days, useful when you need to look back more than 10 sites.
- IE View Lite — Adds an option to open a page in Internet Explorer for those sites that refuse to work anywhere else. Same functionality as IE View, but smaller.
- Download Manager Tweak — Adds more options to Firefox’s download manager, such as pause and resume functions.
- SwiftTabs — Navigate between tabs with keyboard shortcuts.
- Adblock Plus and Adblock Filterset.G Updater — Block popup and banner ads and remove them completely out of the page. The Filterset keeps an updated list of sites that require such blockage.
- GooglePreview — Inserts images into Google and Yahoo! search engine results; great for previewing homepages for professionalism before you spend hardearned seconds clicking the link.
- Tab Mix Plus — Adds a lot more options to Firefox’s tabs. Customize how they look and feel the way you want.
- RadialContext — Replaces the right-click context menu with a circular menu that behaves like mouse gestures. Makes the common commands a lot faster to get to.
- UI Tweaker — Pretty self-explanatory; make Firefox the way you want it to look.
- Foxmarks — Synchronize your bookmarks across multiple Firefox installations on different computers. E.g. between a work computer and a home one.
Any good ones I missed?