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"Everything counts a little more than we think..."

24 November 2008 Monday

My favorite Firefox extensions / add-ons 2008

slated in consumed at 10:51 pm

Firefox 3.0.3 and 3.0.4 (work and home)

Essential

  • All-in-One Sidebar opens bookmarks, add-ons, history, etc. in sidebar. I don’t know why this isn’t built-in functionality.
  • Tab Mix Plus has the essential undo-close-tab functionality, session-saver, control of tabs — open new tabs next to the current one, etc..
  • Mouse Gestures Redox lets me roll the mouse buttons/use mouse gestures for navigation. Mouse gestures are totally necessary.
  • Download Statusbar sends downloads to an unobtrusive horizontal bar.. seems really basic but I find it indispensable.
  • Fast Dial is the best menu/homepage of favorite/most-used sites. Very customizable. I advise black background and a smart use of transparency for hover effects.
  • Tree Style Tab makes tabs vertical rather than horizontal. This gives you more vertical space, which is what we’re usually lacking when viewing websites (especially if you have a good-sized monitor/high res), and you can open many more tabs and see them all at once. also allows for heirarchy/child tabs, etc. The default settings were not great for me, but easily changed and beautiful once in place.
  • Greasemonkey is essential for expandability/site-specific tweaks.
  • Stylish is also for site-specific tweaks, etc.
  • Better Gmail 2 is essential for heavy gmail users.. folders4gmail, etc.

Also:

  • Tiny Menu picks up the common menu (File, Edit, View, etc..) and drops them into one dropdown button.
  • Better GCal provides tweaks for GoogleCalendar.
  • Google Redesigned is the best gmail theme ever, although the new Google themes dynamically change according to the time of day (on some of the themes.. I like the one with the cute critters & Japanese garden at bottom), which is just fun. This dark theme is also healthier for your eyes than light/bright.. and implements offers some features that are otherwise covered in BetterGmail2
  • GooglePreview puts screenshot thumbnails on Google search results. Quite quick and efficient.
  • Lazarus Form Discovery recovers form contents.
  • LastFM for scrobbling Pandora
  • sixtyone for scrobbling thesixtyone
  • Web of Trust WOT is pretty good at providing quick judgement (particularly on search restults) on whether a site is safe or not. I used to use McAfee SiteAdvisor, but WOT encourages user feedback/participation — which you can avoid altogether, but it simply makes for a more adaptable product.
  • PDF Download is quite essential if you often open or save PDFs.
  • Read It Later is for “temporary bookmarks”.. It’s very thorough, simple, efficient. Very easy to mark something as “to read later”, searchable, can be integrated with GoogleReader.
  • DownThemAll Effective download manager/can grab all particular filetype from a webpage.
  • AdBlock Plus I’m not sure I actually need this one, but I know many swear by it.. It blocks ads/media content, automatically or at-will.

At work:

  • IE Tab Renders the website in the given tab with IE’s engine, without ever having to open IE externally. can set to automatically open particular site in “IE” tabs.
  • TabRenamizer Disguises tabs at will.
  • TimeTracker Tells me how much time I’ve spent “off task”.

Before I was using Tree-style tab, these were essential/important for me:

  • FaviconizeTab condenses a tab to just its favicon (saves space on the tab bar)
  • Aging Tabs changes the tab colors according to how long they’ve been sitting idle..
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