Cool FireFox Extensions

Let me back up a step: In case you didn't know, FireFox is one of the best, most critically acclaimed web browsers in existence. Quality-wise, it blows Internet Explorer right out of the water. It has several cool features that IE doesn't, such as a built-in, high-quality pop up blocker, the ability to look at several webpages in one window using "tabs," and, most importantly of all, immunity to most kinds of spyware. Really, you need to at least *try* it. You can download it here. It's great software, and it's *FREE*.

Now, one of the other cool features that it has is that it supports "Extensions," which are extra features that aren't built into the browser, but that some third-party creates and that you can install. For example, I have AdBlock, an extension that lets me right click on a banner advertisement and prevent it from *EVER* *LOADING* *AGAIN* on the website that I'm looking at. (Actually, this works for any image or flash dialog.) My mom finds this to be very useful, as she finds those flashing banners to be very irritating to the eye. So she just gets rid of them.

Anyways, the Acts of Volition site lists several great extensions that I hadn't encountered before. So, I thought I'd list and describe all the great extensions that I have installed now. Just open up the extended entry, and we'll get started.

UPDATE: There's a few more extensions listed at Mounty's Corner.

These are listed in the order they appear in my "Extensions" Dialog:

Tabbrowser Extensions: Adds all kinds of features that *should* have been in FireFox in the first place. You can change tab colors, drag tabs around to change the order, double click on an empty part of the tab bar to create a new, empty tab, and do all kinds of cool stuff.

AdBlock: As I mentioned before, this lets you block any particular image or set of images (using the wildcard *) or flash plugins. You can either hide them, or you can do what I do: remove them so that they never load, saving you the time of loading something you never wanted to see in the first place.

BugMeNot: Don't you really, really hate getting a link to a news article and being forced to submit to a free registration process before reading the article? I do. So, I use BugMeNot: Just right-click on the password field and click "BugMeNot," and the program will look up a name and password from BugMeNot.com. Voila! You can now read the article without the hassle of lying to the newspaper publisher about you age and household income.

Copy Plain Text: Does what it says: Highlight some text on a webpage, right click, and click "Copy Plain Text." Now you have just the text you wanted, and not the hyperlinks, colors, or fonts from the original webpage. This is handy for pasting text into Word.

SwitchProxy Tool: This is handy for BJU students who use a different proxy server (or no proxy server) when using the Internet off-campus: You can save different proxy server settings and switch between them. So, when I'm on campus, I right-click on a webpage and switch to BJU Proxy; when I'm at home, I switch to my Proxomitron proxy filter, which I use as a profanity filter.

Context Search: Highlight some text, then right-click on it. You can now choose to search Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Creative Commons, Amazon, or eBay for the highlighted text. I actually don't use this much, preferring to go to the web address bar at the top of the screen and type in "google [search term]" or "ebay [search term]" so that I use some Quick Search bookmarks.

Reload Every: Automatically reload a webpage every so often, such as every minute, every half-hour, or whatever. Handy when you're expecting a webpage to be updated soon.

WeatherFox/ForecastFox: Puts a weather forecast in the browser. I have mine set to put a 3-day weather forecast in the top-right hand corner of FireFox, just beside the page-loading indicator.

Now, stuff I found via the link at the top of the page:

McSearch Preview: Enhances Google by putting screenshots of the search results next to the text links. (It gets the screenshots from some site called Alexa.) The site I linked shows what it looks like. It's pretty cool.

CuteMenus: Puts various icons next to the built-in components of FireFox, making them easier to find. Another one of those that should have been included with FireFox in the first place.

Linky: Lets you download a big group of links all at once. Say there's a site like GameSpy that has a bunch of screenshots you want to see, but you've got to click on a bunch of thumbnails. Before: Click on each one, then click back, click on the next thumbnail, etc. After: Load them all at the same time in different tabs and scroll through the tabs (Ctrl-PgUp and PgDn)

Web Developer: Lets you do all kinds of helpful things when developing a website. Very feature rich; I haven't really begun exploring it yet. One example: You can have it resize the browser to simulate a 800x600 monitor, so you can make sure that everything still looks good for people who need to buy new monitors.

Lastly: The powerful Download Manager Tweak: I use this to move FireFox's download manager from its own window to a sidebar, like the BookMarks and History sidebars. Much, much, much cleaner-looking and less irritating. Very nice.

That's all for now; if I find anything else particularly good, I'll let you know.

Posted by Blog Jones at December 4, 2004 11:57 PM | Category: Technology