Today we’ll look at fifty of the best extensions for Firefox that can improve your usage and experience when browsing the web.
A word of warning — several of these add-ons are labelled experimental and may cause problems with your Firefox configuration. Each link provided goes to the official Mozilla Add-on page, each of which give a good overview of the particular add-on. But still, backup your Firefox configuration (and the rest of your computer while you’re at it) and install at your own risk.
Read it Later is a handy Firefox add-on, which we’ve covered earlier. Basically, it’s pretty similar to the bookmarking feature, but it’s meant only for those one-time interesting pages. You can save pages of interest to read it later. The developer has released a new version of the add-on, which makes it compatible with Firefox 3 and adds several new features as well.
Read it Later for Firefox 3 tightly integrates with Firefox 3’s address bar. Just next to the ‘one-click bookmarking’ star in the address bar, Read it Later adds a checkmark. Clicking on the checkmark will save or remove the page from your reading list.
Another nifty feature to be included in this version of Read It Later is the ability to sync your list with multiple computers. For instance, you can sync your office reading list with your home computer using the unique feed ID and password given to your list. This way, your read list is no more tied down to your home or office computer. What’s more? Read below the fold:
Offline Reading: If you want to access your reading list, while you are away from active internet connection, Read It Later can prefetch those pages and save it for offline reading.
RSS Feed: Your reading list is accessible from any RSS reader (like Google Reader, FeedDemon or even a mobile phone). You can also use your personalized RSS feed to share your reading list with others.
Click to Save Mode: While running through tons of links in delicious, digg or any other social media site, you can toggle the ‘click to save’ mode by pressing Alt + M (customizable). Any link clicked, while this mode is active, will be straight away added to your reading list.
You can install Read It Later from Firefox 3 from here.
When you install Firefox 3, it checks to see if your old extensions have been updated for the new version of the browser. If it finds they haven't, it disables them.
If you like living on the edge, you can change a couple of settings to force Firefox to use your old extensions. Be forewarned, though, that doing this can cause compatibility problems and other woes.
Go to the following settings in about:config, and change both to false by double-clicking them:
extensions.checkCompatibility
extensions.checkUpdateSecurity
If you don't want to muck around with about:config but still want to force old extensions to work in Firefox 3, download and use the Nightly Tester Tools extension.
Foxmarks, Inc. has released several variants of its browser add-on, Foxmarks, that can now be used to synchronize bookmarks between Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The add-ons automatically back up any bookmarks to the company's servers every time a change is made. Users can also view, add, edit and delete bookmarks directly from the Foxmarks website if using a borrowed or public computer, or visit a mobile version of the site to access content from any web-enabled handset.
Foxmarks allows the links to be separated into different groups, determining which bookmarks appear on each computer. Website lists can be shared with friends, with viewing options that include a web page, RSS feed or a widget.
The add-ons are available for free directly from the company. Foxmarks for Firefox supports Firefox 2 or higher and Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS X and Linux platforms. Foxmarks beta for Internet Explorer 6 or 7 requires Windows XP or Vista, while Foxmarks Safari requires Safari 3 and Mac OS X 10.5.
Firefox is getting ready to hold its annual Firefox Extension Contest, where the grand prize winners will get the Ultimate Firefox Developer Kit. The contest, which is called Extend Firefox, is looking for extensions with elegant design, ease of use, and innovation. Extend Firefox ends December 31st and the winners will be announced on January 15, 2008.
All the cool stuff included in the grand prize winners’ developer kit includes travel and accommodations to a Mozilla Developer Day of their choice, a Macbook Pro with VMware Fusion and ActiveState Komodo, a 1 year unlimited access to O’Reilly’s Safari Library, and a Firefox Ogio Messenger Bag filled with schwag. Who doesn’t love t-shirts, mugs and stickers? Speaking of t-shirts, all qualified entrants get one. The panel of judges include industry leaders and technologists, who are to be announced soon.
Google, Mazda, Skype and countless others take advantage of contests to find new ways to use their technology, gain support from the developer community, and offer new products to end users. A fun new Firefox extension that was released last night comes from Meebo, enabling you to chat from a client that’s integrated with your browser. In other news, Firefox recently revealed some details of the upcoming Firefox 3.
One other interesting feature I have fond in Firefox 3 is that you can easily save all media and image files. To do this first you need to click on the site identification button sitting just left to the address bar. A “Manage Information” Button will pop up. Click on it and you will see another popup with lot of options. Select the Media Option. Here you can see all the images and other media files availble in that web page. Select any or all, then click on the Save As button. This will ask you to specify a folder where it will save all the media and image files.
I am also using flash block extension which blocks all annoying video and flash contents and help the pages to load faster. Interclue is another useful add-on I have installed, which helps me see less and know more, click less and do more, and warns me of dangerous sites.
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Fast Dial replaces blank, empty tabs with thumbnails of your favorite sites. Fast Dial may look a lot like like its previous version, but it also has several cool features of its own that set it apart. For example, you can set custom keyboard shortcuts for any of your Fast Dial thumbnails, create Fast Dial folders that you drill into for more thumbnail bookmarks, drag and drop items to reorder them, and customize the look and feel of every aspect of the Fast Dial page.
Fast Dial also integrates with your Firefox bookmarks, so adding a thumbnail to your Fast Dial page is as simple as bookmarking it and filing it in the Fast Dial folder. (That also means that if you're syncing bookmarks with Foxmarks, for example, Fast Dial favorites will sync, too.) Fast Dial is available from the Firefox Add-ons site, but they're a couple of versions behind, so make sure you get it from the link below.
All platforms with Firefox: Firefox extension Timelope helps you keep track of web sites you've visited, when you've visited them, and how long you spent on each site. Sign up for an account, install the extension, authorize yourself, and you're ready to roll. Timelope works in the background and keeps track of the number of pages you visit: as you visit more pages, the number of Timelope "hops" is increased. Additionally, Timelope features a separate but useful social networking function where you can follow friends and see exactly where they've been online. By default, your visited web sites are private; you can make your stream public if you are interested in the social features of Timelope. For a similar application that keeps track of all computer-related activities to improve productivity, is free, works wherever Firefox does.
Firefox 3 Beta only: If you've taken the plunge into testing the new Firefox 3 beta your favorite extensions are disabled, that's because developers haven't updated them and may not be providing secure updates yet. If you're an impatient risk-taker who needs your extensions back NOW, here's a cheat that may get them to work.Big Honking Warning: Only do this if you're willing to deal with possible bleeding edge extension bugs and security risks!
Type about:config into Firefox's address bar and click the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button.
Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
Restart Firefox.
All goes well, and any extensions that aren't yet officially Firefox 3 Beta 3 compatible and don't have secure updates will be enabled.Final warning: These changes may lead to unexpected wacky behavior. Proceed at your own risk!
Anyone that hasn’t seen PicLens before is sure to be left in awe. It’s a nifty image browser for sites like Flickr, Google Images, Photobucket, and more. It brings an astonishing 3D realm for navigating photos to the browser. Transitions are smooth, effects are amazing, and there aren’t really enough words that can describe how awesome the experience is. We’ve gotta throw a YouTube video out there because a screenshot wouldn’t even do it justice:
Seeing that you and all of your friends are probably YouTube junkies it’s best that we forewarn you about PicLens supporting YouTube videos. Yes, you can search and browser through Youtube videos just like you can with images. That’s a good enough reason not to install the extension, because the last thing we need is a reason to spend a few more hours each day on YouTube.
WIth Scrapbook you can actually capture and save any website to your computer. That way you can access a cached version of the page anytime you would like, and what’s even better is that you can mark it up all you want. Highlight a word here, throw a note there… you’re friends will never realize that you can grab a site and morph it into whatever you want.
Do you feel bad about having an outrageous amount of storage in Gmail and letting it all go to waste? With this simple extension you can put your Gmail account to work as a file storage solution. It comes equipped with a spiffy FTP-like interface that couldn’t make transferring files any easier with your Gmail account. Heck, it can even interact with multiple Gmail accounts so that you can create one for documents, another for images, and so on!
I can’t say that this extension serves a valuable purpose, but it will sure catch the attention of your friends . You’ll see the extension in all it’s glory when you go to switch from one tab to another. That’s when the cube-like rotation effect will kick in, and you can watch as your friends’ jaws drop to the floor.It is an very interesting feature so we highly recommend you to download this feature.
This is an extension that your friends may not be impressed with right away, but they will definitely be looking for the download if you use it with one of their favorite sites.
Repagination is a powerful tool that can continuously grab whatever page the “Next” button links to, and it will be concatenated onto the current page. One example of this is being able to grab hundreds of search results pages, and scroll through them all as if they were a single site. It works pretty much anywhere there are page numbers or a next button. It’s especially handy when you’re navigating through pages of photos, such as those on Flickr.
What’s going on in the screenshot below is I scrolled down to the bottom of the Google search results page and right-clicked on the number “2?, which represents the next page in the order. Then I went to Re-Pagination->All and it concatenated 26 more Google search results pages onto the one that I was already viewing. I darkened the concatenated portion in the screenshot below so that you can distinguish where the original results page ends and where the other one begins, but when using the extension it looks like one fluid page. You can also limit how many pages are concatenated which might be a good idea so that it doesn’t add so many.
I know I know, seeing a thumbnail when you hover over a tab is nothing knew. Opera does it out-of-the-box, and to the untrained eye this is really nothing different. Don’t be deceived… this is not just a preview.
With Tab Scope you can fully navigate the small thumbnail that is shown when you hover over a tab. Go forward or back, refresh the page, scroll, or even click on links. It’s way more than just a preview, and it deserves all the attention it gets.
I’m sure your friends would love to be notified when the content of websites change. Just think, they could take MySpace stalking to a whole new level. With Update Scanner it is a no brainer.
Just point it to the URL you want to check for updates, specify the interval at which it should check the page, and tell it roughly how much of the content needs to change before it notifies you. Update Scanner will do all the work in the background, and will popup with a notification whenever a change has been detected.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a better idea of what a hyperlink points to? That’s where Interclue comes into play. When you hover over a link it is capable of showing a crazy amount of data about that specific page. Maybe the number of words the it contains, how many links there are, Digg count, and much more. If the link points to a YouTube video you can even watch it right from the Interclue popup window.
Take the pain out of uploading files to Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Box.net, Facebook, and more by using this uploader tool. It is complete with an FTP-like interface, but you’ll use it to upload/download images and files to your favorite sharing sites. This is also a great way to retrieve images in bulk that you’ve uploaded to a supported online service, but accidentally deleted from your own computer.
The last thing you’ll need to show your friends is how you can navigate your browser’s history in style. Remembering names of the websites you visit is so 2005. With ThumbStrips you can just flip through thumbnails of the sites you recently visited:
If you show your friends all of these things it will surely leave them in awe. Most browsers aren’t capable of doing most (if any) of the things listed here, and if they’re not using Firefox the odds are probably pretty good that they had no idea it was capable of doing such amazing things thanks to the extensions.
Tab Effect- adds a 3D cube transitional effect while switching tabs. It uses Direct X and is only compatible with Windows.
Tab Scope - displays a real time thumbnail preview of a web page you hover over its tab. You can zoom into the thumbnail, navigate to links from inside the thumbnail itself.
Fission - puts the progress bar inside the address bar Safari style. Changing the progress bar’s colour is also possible.
ChromaTabs - colours tabs on Firefox based on a website’s hostname. A similar extension is colorful tabs.
AgingTabs - highlights the selected tab and makes unused tabs fade with time.
Tab Mix Plus - is a must have Firefox addon that can let you manage tabs easily. Tens of features are available and you gotta grab this one.
Speed Dial - can help you quickly access your most visited browsers in Opera style.
Showcase - shows the thumbnails of all open tabs in a single place - be it on a tab, a window or a sidebar for easy management open tabs.
Faviconize Tab - reduces a tab’s with to accomodate only the favicon
LocationBar - parses the URL of a web page, adds the ability to navigate around a domain’s directories - go up a level and down.
HighlightAll - highlights all occurences of the selected text in a web page. Stylish - allows you tweak the style of webpages easily, and this site has a large base of user created styles for you to use.
FoxyTunes - lets you control your media player inside Firefox.
