12 Firefox Add-Ons

I have just been reading David Fair’s post: Which internet browser is best for learning professionals?

David discusses a range of browser options and share with us:

My primary reason for sticking with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer all these years was simply that I could depend on it to render web pages correctly. Each time I flirted with alternatives, I’d run home to IE as soon as I noticed missing objects and mangled layouts.

I did the same a year or so again – closed down firefox and went back to Internet Explorer for all of those webpages that were ‘IE only’.

Then a friend told me about the a firefox add-on called “IE tab” that allows you to open a virtual IE tab within firefox.  It works so simply . . .

Once installed a little firefox symbol will be shown at the bottom of your firefox window: .  This allows you to change what engine you are using to render a webpage, click on it and the page will reload in Internet Explorer .  You can also teach IE tab which pages are best displayed in Internet Explorer so whenever you visit those websites they will automatically be opened in a IE tab.

I then got thinking about some of the other wonderful firefox add-ons that improve my browsing experience and productivity and wanted to share these with you.

ColorZilla:  ‘Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies’ – wonderful  to quickly grab the colors from client logos/materials and use the same color scheme in development.

Delicious Bookmarks:  ‘The official Firefox add-on for Delicious, the world’s leading social bookmarking service’.  The best delicious add-on I have tried!  You can open all of your delicious bookmarks in a sidebar at the press of a button (or keyboard combination).

Download Statusbar: ‘View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing. ‘

Faviconize Tab: This tool really frees up your browsing by allow you to reduce the size of tabs that you use often (e.g. gmail, twitter, delicious, facebook etc.) to just the ‘favicon’.

Google Gears: Google Gears ‘enables more powerful web applications’, it allows supported web based applications to run offline and heaps of other geeky things that you can read about here.

Google Reader Watcher: Integrates Google Reader into firefox by adding a little notification at the bottom of your browser showing how many new items you have .

NetTabURL: Gives you the ability to specify what page to open when you open a new tab.  I have this set as my delicious bookmarks.

Open Image in New Tab:  ‘Adds right-click context menu item for opening images in new tabs.’

PageStyle2Tab: Helps you quickly identify a tab as it sets the ‘current page style to the tab’.

Save Session:  This great add-on means that you can press the save session and exit button when closing firefox.  The next time you open firefox all of your tabs will be restored.

Undo Closed Tabs Button:  Allows you to reopen any closed tabs.  This has saved me a million times!

I have also tried lots of other add-ons . . .

When installing a new add-on the focus needs to be on answering the question “how will this improve my browsing experience?”.

Because if it doesn’t . . . uninstall it!

What are your favorite add-ons?

~ by mfubib on October 21, 2008.