The Hyperlogos

One of the most useful features of Firefox is its open, extensible plugin architecture, which allows major customizations to its behavior. Listed below are the firefox extensions that I have installed. (Note 20061024: This document applies to Firefox 1.5 - 2.0 has just been released yesterday. Stay tuned for an updated version.)

AdBlock Plus is an ad-blocker that actually removes items from web pages. Not only do you not see the ad, but in most cases, you don't even have a hole in the spot from which the ad was removed. Since it's never loaded, no bandwidth is used by the ad, either.

AdBlock Filterset.G Updater: Filterset.G is a third-party (not made by the creators of Adblock) set of rules for Adblock (or Adblock Plus) that will block most of the ads that you might be seeing on the web. The updater automatically downloads it and puts the rules into Adblock. It works best with Adblock Plus (above.)

The All-In-One Sidebar puts a lot of common functionality into a sidebar, instead of pop-up windows. It's most suitable for users with high screen resolution. History, bookmarks, downloads, extensions, themes... I find it to be much more convenient, although you do occasionally find yourself resizing it to get access to some of the buttons.

The (Link not found) uses the BugMeNot website, which provides you passwords for websites that have free registration, so you don't have to bother signing up for an account, and provide your personal information. The primary example is the New York Times.

del.icio.us extension: del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. When you "tag" a site (the alternative to a bookmark) you assign various descriptive tags to it. You can then search for bookmarks using the same tags, later. If the site has been tagged by other users, then you will automatically see the tags they used, and can assign your own. This plugin allows you to more easily tag new sites.

Download Embedded It's horribly annoying when you can't download content that displays in a webpage. Flash videos like google and youtube are the worst. This allows you to download many of those embedded videos and the like.

DownThemAll! (or "DTA") is a download manager that's loaded right into firefox. Somewhere along the line, Firefox seems to have lost its ability to resume downloads; I don't think it even tries any more. DTA not only supports retries, but also all kinds of other neat stuff (like deferred-schedule downloads, and queueing.) FlashGot is broken anyway (it causes memory leaks) so this is far better than using an external download manager.

Fasterfox speeds up firefox, mostly by creating more connections to webservers than Firefox does by default. It's not a very good option for modem users, but works well on a network. It also has a prefetching mode, which doesn't work properly :) Make sure to set it to optimized mode, not turbo, or you may have problems.

Flashblock is the websurfer's best friend. Any flash movie is replaced with a box with a play button in it. If you press the button, the movie is displayed. If not, then it's never even loaded, saving you bandwidth, and saving you from even loading the flash player.

Gmail File Space (gspace) is a cross-platform extension (Windows, Linux) that allows you to store files in a gmail account, from your browser. Very handy for mobile users, esp. those portable firefox types. Download to the local drive's temp directory, then upload to gmail, and you can pull it out later. We don't all have lots of room on our flash drives. The best part? It looks and acts just like a FTP application with a queue.

Google Browser Sync synchronizes your browser settings to your google account; it both provides crash recovery (returning you to your previously-loaded pages) but also keeps your browser settings synchronized across all computers upon which you use this extension. I formerly used Session Manager which provides the crash recovery, but doesn't synchronize.

Greasemonkey allows you to load javascripts into firefox and use them to do things like rewrite the contents of webpages. In particular I use one that works with del.icio.us and provides a substantially superior interface to your bookmarks.

IE View Lite: I used to use the IE Tab extension to display content in IE inside a firefox tab but it has memory leak problems. This will spawn links in an external IE, and you can configure the path to be something other than the default, so you can use it to load a different version of IE.

Scrapbook: Internet explorer has MHT files, which are basically webpages saved as the MIME portion of a MIME email. Firefox, with this extension, has scrapbooks. Either way, it's a way to easily save a webpage as a single package.

Spellbound SpellBound is a spell checker that allows you to check the contents of text fields and text areas in web forms. It's extremely handy for things like web e-mail. You also have to install dictionaries, which you can get from http://dictionaries.mozdev.org/installation.html.

Tab No X When firefox first got tabs, there was one close button on the far right of the tab area. Later, they changed this behavior, so that the close gadget is on the tab. This was considered so stupid by the community that several extensions immediately appeared that move it back to the original location. (It's a bad idea, because it eliminates your ability to use muscle memory to find the close box.)

Talkback: This is the extension that sends error reports to the Mozilla foundation. I mention it here simply because it will appear in your list unless you explicitly elect to disable it during installation, or later.

Targetalert shows you the type of content of a link when you mouse over it, by popping up an icon at the end of the link. This is very handy for things like avoiding accidentally loading PDFs, which load much faster in an Acrobat Reader window (or others) than in the same program embedded into firefox.

VideoDownloader: Another program to allow you to download content embedded into webpages, this one focuses on video, and gets things that Download Embedded doesn't. In particular it does a much better job on YouTube and Google Video.

Expert Tools

These plugins are for advanced users. Most people will never need any of these.

ChromEdit (http://cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit/)
ChromEdit is a user configuration file editor. You should never ever install this unless you really know what you are doing!

Firebug (http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/)
This is a better javascript debugger - for one, it's a debugger, and not just an error log. For two, it's a better error log, too.

Nightly Tester Tools (http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/buildid/nightly.html)
The Nightly Tester Tools plugin most significantly allows you to install plugins which are not marked as working with your version of Firefox. This can potentially have disastrous results.

Web Developer (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=60)
If you are developing web pages, you need this extension. It can hide or mark various web page items like graphics and so on. It can show you the outlines of tables and their cells. It resizes web browsers to given sizes in order to emulate the effects of having a particular screen resolution. It has menus that change the behavior of cookies, CSS, and a number of other features.