My favorite Firefox extensions / add-ons 2008

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..