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Firefox Extensions that I Use

I use a lot of firefox extensions. You might call me a power user. Yeah, that's right, powerful.

Here is the list of my favorites. They are broken down into extensions that make Firefox better, those that make my general life better, things for "geeky stuff" and things for my life as a web developer/sysadmin/competitve webmaster. Yeah, I'm competitive. My stable of sites is better than yours!

Enhanced Firefox

  • Cute Menus - humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
  • Download Statusbar - I want the information compact, in an overview, and readily visible. I hate new windows.
  • Flashblock - I hate flash. It's amazing how much better the internet is without flash.
  • Google Gears - Since I'm in places without internet pretty regularly, it's nice to be able to get my Google feeds in an offline mode.
  • PageStyle2Tab - again, humans recognize colors and images faster than words.
  • Image Zoom - Firefox lets me zoom text, image zoom lets me zoom images. Duh.
  • Locationbar2 - Prettify the URL bar. Also happens to make it safer by clearly identifying the domain and downplaying the importance of subdomains (i.e. the phisher phavorite ebay.com.shadysitestealpasswords.com/enter-username is clearly visible as "www.ebay.com" as a subdomain of "shadysitestealpasswords.com". Whoohoo!

Enhanced Life

  • Google Browser Sync - if you use Firefox on two computers (work + home are separate machines - for the folks who haven't embraced Nomad 2.0 yet) this is great. I turned it off a while ago, but it was pretty nice.
  • PearlCrescent Page Saver Basic - web-page screenshots...but better.
  • FoxClocks - Since Firefox is the application I use 75% of the day and I want clocks for multiple time zones...this is awfully convenient.

Geeky Stuff

  • Operator - handles my microformats and imports them and stuff
  • Skype extension for Firefox - makes phone numbers hyperlinks to launch skype - duh.
  • Tab Mix Plus - new tab, new tab, allow resized popups, Prevent blank tabs when downloading files.
    Sub settings for this very complex extension...
    > Events - Open new tabs next to current one. Change opening order.
    Display - Tab - Highlight Current tab, Unread tabs
    Show tab icons for locked/protected. Porgress meter on tabs. Close tab button on pointed for 50 msec.
    Tab width fits to tab title.

Web Developer Stuff / 'SEO'

  • EC2 UI - Manage EC2 servers.
  • Firebug - if you are a web developer you know this.
  • Live HTTP Headers - is that a 301 redirect or a 302 redirect? Inquiring SEOs want to know.
  • MeasureIt - if I'm going to add a banner to this existing theme, how many pixels do I have?
  • SearchStatus - displays Google PageRank, Alexa, and Compete data about every site you visit (and sends you click stream to those three companies along the way...:( )
  • Tamper Data - For all the 733t (white hat) haxxorz so they can test the integrity of their website applications
  • XPath Checker - For you XML web-scraper types.
  • YSlow - Why oh why is your website slow? This extension tells you cheap and easy ways to fix it.
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Comments

Some of my favorites you might like

Hi Greg,
I was reading about rain skirts (an idea I'd had a while back too, it's good to see your wife on the same wave-length!) and stumbled upon this post. I've used Firefox for a while, and here are a couple of "must have" extensions for me that you might consider checking out:

  • Answers.com - CTRL-Click to get an inline word definition. It's awesome when you're writing online and aren't sure if you're using a word correctly, or if you encounter a word that you don't know the definition of in an article.
  • Diigo.com - A delicious competitor that allows you to highlight sections of pages, and even comment on those highlights! Included is the ability to email a page w/ comments (& highlights) to other people. One of the other cool things is you can right click on selected text and search the web for the phrase, on multiple sites, kind of like a contextual search.
  • Weatherbug / Forecastfox / etc: It's always great to have the weather at your fingertips.