firefox plugins
A couple of people have asked me about the plugins I use for firefox. I will take this opportunity to tell you that if you are doing something silly like using Internet Explorer, then you should get firefox immediately, and then return here for addon goodness. Otherwise, here is the majority of the addons that I am running. Some of them require a bit of option tweaking before I use them, but you can probably figure that out.
- Add Bookmark Here – This simply adds a link to the bottom of each bookmark menu to give you direct access to add a link at that location. This is particularly helpful in my bookmark system, which I will have to explain another time.
- Tab Mix Plus – Lets you do all kinds of things with tabs and windows. In particular, this lets you revert back to the old way firefox did the close button for tabs (ie. one button on the right instead of the unnecessary button on each tab.)
- Download Statusbar – Shows the download progress in the status bar instead of a separate window. This just makes download less intrusive.
- IE Tab – The unfortunate reality is that some web designers are stupid and intentionally block any browser that isn’t internet explorer. This lets you switch to the IE renderer, thus making those certain pages work, while still staying in the firefox browser. Use with caution however since using IE inside of firefox is just as unsafe as using IE by itself.
- Locationbar – This does some nifty stuff with the location bar like highlighting the domain and making section of the address clickable. This is a preview of sorts of features that will be added to the browser in firefox 3.
- Resizeable Textarea – This lets you make the text area bigger on any webpage you visit, like those annoying blog comment boxes that are way to small.
- Stop-or-Reload – This is admitably a minor cosmetic thing, but it gives you one button for stop and reload instead of two. I like all the screen space I can get.
- Better GCal – If you use Google Calendar, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Better Gmail -If you use Google Mail, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Better GReader – If you use Google Reader, this bundles several helpful greasemonkey scripts together that are useful.
- Google Bookmarks Button – This is one that is indispensable for myself, but probably not useful to that many people out there. Given the fact that in a given day I work on 3 different computers (work, home, and laptop) I find it useful to share a good number of bookmarks between them. This system is far from perfect, but it does me just fine.
- Web Developer – This is an absolute must if you do any designing of web sites. If that fits you and you don’t have this add-on, just go get it.
- Firebug – Here again this is for web designers. It has some overlap with web developer, but I use them both regularly.