23rd May 2008
I found I use quite a lot of extensions that make Firefox more useful to me, so I thought I’d list them here and a reason why I use them. So, in no particular order:
- Add block plus – I think I only had adblock before, but adblock plus has a much better list of ads to block, and it works well. I don’t like ads anywhere (unless, of course, they’re actually good ads, but that doesn’t happen very often)
- British English dictionary. Pretty self explanatory, me being British and speaking English.
- Download statusbar – shows your downloads across the bottom of the window, so you can keep an eye on their progress. Much better than having to keep checking the download window.
- Download helper – don’t use this to often, but it’s great for getting videos off places like youtube without any hassles.
- DownThemAll – like this for downloading lots of files at the same time, and although I don’t use it that often, when I do it takes a huge amount of work out of things.
- Feed sidebar – used to use Sage for my RSS feeds but sadly the devlopers seem to have disapeared. This is a pretty good replacement actually, does exactly what I want it to, which is display my RSS feeds. Simple.
- Firebug- The most useful extension I have when desgning websites. I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again because it’s so useful.
- FireFTP – who needs a standalone FTP client when you can just use a fully featured one in the browser?
- Redirect remover – handy for stopping thos annoying sites that try to trap you in frames or send you via an add page on the way out.
- Web Developer Toolbar – Another extremely useful web design tool, allows you to highlight things, turn things on and off and check things are valid
There are a couple that are also warranting a mention, but as yet (23/05/2008) don’t seem to work on Firefox 3:
- Zotero – This saved me through university this year, and I hope it’ll do it next year. Creating references and bibliographies without the tedious hassle, as well as allowing you to keep track of everything you’ve used.
- Greasemonkey – Most of the time I don’t use it, but sometimes you get to a site that just needs a tweak to make it better, which is where this handy tool comes in.