My Most-Useful Firefox Add-ons

IT SEEMS like everyone else has had their say on this subject so why shouldn't I?

To make it onto my list of most-useful add-ons, the extension has to be something I use pretty much every day when I launch my favourite web browser.

There are almost as many Firefox extensions as there are Firefox users but some of those extensions seem a little esoteric to me: It is like someone has looked through the list of existing add-ons and thought "What's missing, what can I do that no one else has done?".

While I admire the creativity behind that thinking - it is part of what makes the Free/Open Source Software world so vibrant - it does not really add a great deal in terms of improving the functionality of Firefox.

Anyway, in no particular order, here are the add-ons I like and use the most.

Foxmarks
Regular readers of this blog will have realised by now that I am something of a distro-hopper - it goes with the reviewing territory. What frequently changing your Linux/FOSS operating system means is that you are constantly having to import your Firefox bookmarks into your new setup. Well, register with Foxmarks (it is free and quite painless) and you no longer have to do that. You need the Foxmarks add-on installed on all the browsers on all your machines, and an account on the Foxmarks website (http://www.foxmarks.com/) and then it is just a case of choosing which machine to synchronise them all from. It works wonderfully well and saves all that messing around with exporting bookmarks onto USB memory sticks.

AdBlock Plus
A surefire way of speeding up your web experience is to have AdBlock Plus prevent all those annoying adverts loading - you know, the ones you never look at anyway. There are various lists of advert servers to choose from - I use the American EasyList selection - and it is actually quite easy to blacklist advertisers as you go about your daily surfing by right mouse clicking over the offending advert and selecting 'Adblock image'. You will be surprised how much doing this can speed up your web page loading.

Screen grab
As a reviewer of Linux/FOSS I do quite a lot of screengrabbing, and this add-on enables me to grab whole web pages in .png or .jpeg format. Invaluable.



Google Preview
Inserts preview images (thumbnails) and popularity ranks of websites into the Google and Yahoo search results pages. The GooglePreview thumbnail system currently consists of 8 dedicated servers and generates 8TB of traffic per month. When you have GooglePreview previews enabled and click on an amazon.com result in the Google or Yahoo search results and actually purchase a product, you support the further development of GooglePreview and help cover the server and traffic costs. On a more practical note, this is a really neat add-on if you have kids - you get a glimpse of page contents before you load the actual page.

Video Download Helper
Great tool for downloading and converting video clips from sites like YouTube. It converts the flash-based video into .avi format, which I can then save onto an SD storage card in my HP Ipaq H5550 and watch using the TCPMP multimedia program.

Forecastfox
Because I am British, and because I live in one of the rainiest, greyest parts of Britain, I am somewhat obsessed with the weather. Forecastfox is a neat little add-on which connects to the Accuweather.com servers and gives me a three-day forecast. You are able to place the forecast in your main toolbar, in the status bar at the bottom of Firefox or even in your personal toolbar. Not an essential add-on, but nice nonetheless.

I would add FireFTP to that list except that it requires the user to be running Firefox 3.0 or above, whereas all the add-ons in my list will work on Firefox 2.0 or above, and I am currently using FF 2.0 in a USB flash drive version of Puppy Linux 4.1 - watch this space for more on this particular man's new best friend.

As I said earlier, there are hundreds if not thousands more Firefox extensions available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ - why not have a look through the recommended ones and try them for yourselves.

They are as easy to uninstall as they are to install, so the most you can lose is a couple of minutes of your time and you might just stumble upon the one add-on that makes your online life so much easier or better.