20 Must-have Firefox Extensions

An anonymous reader noted that Computerworld is running a story on the 20 must have Firefox extensions. Several of my favorites are in there so I'm looking forward to playing with the ones I haven't heard of.

Comments

Adblock?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Why isn't adblock mentioned?

*fires up internet explorer, browses tfa*

Oh.

Two flash ads & an animated gif (along with the pop-up). Not surprised they didn't mention ad block plus and filterset g.

Install them & never see another ad again. Ever. (without any sort of configuration).

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there's also an extension(or maybe just a Greasemonkey script?) which automatically clicks "next" links to make articles that have been split up for the purposes of advertising more readable, which this one could benefit from. Does anyone have a link to that?

Re:Adblock?

[Tx]

It may be selfish, but I kind of wish people wouldn't mention those too often. If they get too widely used, it will just mean more annoying, unavoidable ads. Like those ones that make you visit an ad page in order to then get the link to the actual article. Those piss me off.

Re:Adblock?

[zippthorne]

Neither of those are necessary if you use NoScript.

I don't want to see zero ads anyway. I just don't want them to take over my browser.

Re:Adblock?

[wwahammy]

Hmmm maybe its because they like being in business. But that's just a wild guess.

Re:Adblock?

[Yosho]

If you're using AdBlock Plus, I'd recommend that you subscribe to EasyList rather than use Filterset.G. Filterset.G is designed for the original AdBlock, and doesn't take advantage of a number of featues that AdBlock Plus has; for example, it features automatic subscription updating, so you don't need another extension just to update it. Also, the Filterset.G updater will blow away any customizations you've made to the block list when it updates, while EasyList won't. For more info, read the FAQ.

Re:Adblock?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

It may be selfish, but I kind of wish people wouldn't mention those too often. If they get too widely used, it will just mean more annoying, unavoidable ads.

I don't know, I think that if it comes to an arms race between the ad makers & the ad blockers, the ad blockers would win. For example, the TV stations had to do deals with tivo et al to stop ad-skipping tech.

It's easier for people to control what's displayed on their computer than most think.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't installed AdBlock and Firefox (2.0 something) prevents the ads from TFA's site to open automagically.

Re:Adblock?

[maxume]

Keeping quiet is still the selfish thing to do, if you like free, ad free content anyway.

I guess people are also good at controlling what is available on their servers.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's easier for people to control what's displayed on their computer than most think."

Of course it is.

And they have every right to do so. But when some of us are providing others resources where the power users are blocking the ads, and these are the only things that are keeping these resources running, they are shooting themselves AND EVERYONE ELSE THAT DEPENDS ON THEM in the foot.

Personally, I don't even care if someone ever clicks on an advertisement on any of my sites. I never wanted to advertise on any of my sites until costs got to be a few hundred a month just to keep the servers online (let alone taking up a good deal of my time that I could be doing other things...I love doing this stuff, but not when it requires time away from other activities that I find just as important...but the users don't see it that way...a lot of them are counting on these services).

Just like if Tivo were to be the norm, costs will be either directed straight toward the user -- which I'd actually prefer, but at the same time would I want to spend $5 a month on something vs. seeing a simple advertisement that I can ignore -- or the advertising will be built into the product where its not so easy to block and lowers the value of the product to both the owner and the customers of it. I've stopped trusting most review sites out there because you can see that that products they advertise are also the ones rated the highest without any bad ratings (how does that work???)

I've seen how this integrated advertising use to work in the early days of television. And there is a real reason it isn't used today. Occasionally, it makes a comeback and people complain and it goes away...but every idiot thinks its a novel idea that no one else had and tries it before failing.

Anyhow...as someone that provides several webservices, you can either agree to view the ads, pay not to or not use the service at all. Why is that so hard to understand. Just because technology exists to do something, this doesn't make it morally right (even if I understand the rational behind wanting to do so). Personally, I just don't go back to sites that barrage me with advertisement.

Re:Adblock?

[Inda]

Yes, true, because banner ads in the middle of TV programmes are so much better.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also hope they don't get too widely used, but for a different reason. Is it just me, or is it ironic that people are advocating the blocking of ads on Slashdot, which is quite clearly (at least in part) supported by banner advertising? Had you considered that perhaps some of your favourite sites use advertising to keep on top of the high cost of running a website? Don't get me wrong, I hate popups and intrusive advertising, but I'm personally happy to put up with a couple of banner ads and maybe a click through ad if it means that the websites who provide me with a free service on a daily basis, are able to keep that service free.

Re:Adblock?

[GetSource]

In a way, I agree -- but more about people blocking *all* ads in general.

However, while I don't mind people mentioning Adblock, I do mind people mentioning Filterset.g. For me, though, it's because ads are what make the internet run: if it weren't for ads, we wouldn't have near the amount of free sites that we do. Heck, Google would probably not even exist anymore.

The reason that I *do* like Adblock is that it allows you to get rid of the ads that should have never existed in the first place: Shaking/blinking ads, video ads that eat up all your bandwidth, and ads with blaring auto-starting sound.

What I generally do ... is leave most ads on, then block the ones that are especially irritating. This allows places to continue to have revenue, but only stunts the growth of the companies that produce ads that are more obtrusive/use more resources than an ad should.

It's a little hypocritical, perhaps, but I think that when choosing an ad provider, a site should think about the users' comfort at their site as well as about ad revenue.

Re:Adblock?

[jtdennis]

I have yet to see that on Tivo. Their "thumbs up for more info" during ads is actually pretty useful too.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understood the grandparent's point. He's talking about the ads that appear/flash/scroll across the bottom of the television screen during a program. Tivo can't block those. It's not even technically possible to block those except to replace them with a black band or something.

Re:Adblock?

[Idbar]

Personally, I do what Spybot does, I add a line:
127.0.0.1 ad.site.com
in my hosts file.

Re:Adblock?

[cyclop]

I fully agree. I started to use AdSense, and I feel it's quite nice -it's unobtrusive but not deceiving, and integrates nicely with the page. I'm happy with it because I know I don't feel bad when looking at other sites using AdSense. OTOH, any kind of advertisers using flashy irritating popup should just die without a chance. They are not doing advertising, they are blocking me from the content with their advertising. I just don't understand how can people want to buy something advertised by an idiotic Flash-based popup. But oh well, spam somehow works too, so...

Re:Adblock?

[cheater512]

I prefer blocking them at the transparent proxy level. Good old squid does the job well.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

My top extension:

Adblock+
Flashbock
Noscript
QuickProxy (for turning Tor on and off)
WebDeveloper
FastVideoDownload
DownThemAll

Re:Adblock?

[AxelBoldt]

Ads increase demand and therefore increase everybody's prices. Using adblock is the ethical thing to do.

Re:Adblock?

[AxelBoldt]

Is it just me, or is it ironic that people are advocating the blocking of ads on Slashdot, which is quite clearly (at least in part) supported by banner advertising?

It is just you. In capitalism everybody is supposed to act egotistically. You are not supposed to feel the pain of other players, you are supposed to harm them with everything you've got. They will try to extract as much money/attention out of you as they can, and you will try to give them as little money/attention as you can get away with.

Furthermore, ads increase demand and therefore increase everybody's prices, so ad blocking is clearly the ethical thing to do.

Re:Adblock?

[evilviper]

Neither of those are necessary if you use NoScript.

Yes they are. NoScript is great, and stops both annoying/dangerous javascript and Flash, but it certainly doesn't block animated GIFs, or any other ads that take up ridiculous amounts of page real-estate.

Re:Adblock?

[NeMon'ess]

Okay, but what about sites like fark, slashdot, and IMDB? I don't want to pay money every month or year to support them to avoid ads. Unless it was only a dollar a year per site or something really, really low like that. If everybody blocks ads, the only way for them to keep offering free content is if users pay for it.

Re:Adblock?

[Achromatic1978]

Sounds like someone has a thing for downloading copious amounts of illegal porn. Let's see, no ads, no scripting (just the kind of sites that are likely to shoot you some malware to 'opt you in' to their botnet), use of Tor, and extensions for quickly snarfing images and video from same.

The only question now is, "is your fetish child porn, or bestiality?"

Re:Adblock?

[aussie_a]

If you like ad free content, go to websites that don't have ads. Then again, I can hardly talk as I have a pop-up blocker.

Re:Adblock?

[CodeBuster]

The argument that you have put forward in favor of ads (i.e no ads then no content) is a common one among marketers and other people in the advertising business, but my response to them is and will always be, "Welcome to the free market". If people really want your content then they will buy a subscription. The government does not and cannot protect everyone from the rigors of competition. I have to compete everyday with software engineers in India and China who are getting better all of the time and work for much cheaper than I am able to. My message to you and all of the others who complain when the rules of the game change is, "Get used to it...adapt or die and let your competition step over your corpse". The world does not owe you a living and if technology changes or allows people to break your business model then tough. The world got along fine for generations before marketing and advertising, and it will be fine, indeed much better, without it. I use adblock to block everything that I don't want to see all of the time and I have absolutely no qualms about doing it. You may ask where my sense of sympathy or mercy went, well all I can say is that it was beaten out of my during long months of unemployment following the dot-com bust. I have no illusions now and neither should anyone else.

Re:Adblock?

[CodeBuster]

If their programs suck or if I don't like the "guerilla ads" then I will simply tune them out. I can live just fine without the constant barrage of pop-culture bullshit that television has become in recent years. If they make it unwatchable and say, "take it or leave it," then I will vote with my feet and my off switch.

Re:Adblock?

[maxume]

The only content filtering/editing that I have running(on top of popup blocking) is Flashblock.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/433/

I also have nuke anything enhanced:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951/

and plain text links:

http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/textlink/

installed, in addition to a bunch of bookmarklets:

http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/
http://1024k.de/bookmarklets/video-bookmarklets.ht ml

Flash is annoying, and I like to be able to edit what I am looking at in lots of ways, but I don't like the feeling I get of not seeing what is being presented when automatic filtering goes on. I experimented with privoxy at one point, had the same feeling, and also got sick of it breaking things. So yes, I mostly avoid ads by avoiding sites that run ads, and as a result, I see lots of ads.

Re:Adblock?

[andy_t_roo]

"The government does not and cannot protect everyone from the rigors of competition."
you obviously don't follow what the mpaa has been up to - i believe that should be:
"The government does not and cannot protect everyone from the rigors of competition without a sufficiently large financial incentive"

Re:Adblock?

[Kanasta]

For the unwashed, what makes Filterset.g need mentioning vs the 'builtin' 4 filters?
For that matter, what's the diff on those 4 filters?

Re:Adblock?

[isomeme]

Is it just me, or is it ironic that people are advocating the blocking of ads on Slashdot, which is quite clearly (at least in part) supported by banner advertising?

Slashdot has ads?

...Oh, right. I blocked them with adblock two years ago.

Re:Adblock?

[Emetophobe]

From wikipedia:

Filterset.G is a third-party set of filters for the popular Adblock extensions for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The filterset contains pre-made and regularly updated filters that remove ads from many common ad providers, such as DoubleClick. The filters are based primarily on regular expressions. Unlike Adblock and Mozilla Firefox, Filterset.G is not open-source; the filters are only free for personal, non-commercial use, and redistribution of it is not permitted.

(emphasis mine)

Adblock doesn't download a list of updated filters by itself, you need filterset.G for that.

Re:Adblock?

[General Wesc]

The argument that you have put forward in favor of ads (i.e no ads then no content) is a common one among marketers and other people in the advertising business, but my response to them is and will always be, "Welcome to the free market". If people really want your content then they will buy a subscription.

Yeah, but some of us would rather just see the ads. If you use Adblock, please edit your useragent header so websites can require you to pay a subscription while allowing me to continue accessing their content in exchange for viewing a few ads. If you don't change your useragent, they'll have to demand a subscription from both of us, and I don't wanna pay money.

Re:Adblock?

[iNetRunner]

I thought the GP really meant the Adblock Plus, with it's four built in, selectable, filter set subscriptions. They update automatically, no need for filterset.G (and for the stale-ish Adblock).

Re:Adblock?

[zippthorne]

If the site chooses to spend that much of it's precious real estate on stilted, poorly dithered ugliness, they probably aren't worth visiting in the first place. If they pay for their content through ads, and I think their content is worthwhile, I want to see the ads.

Re:Adblock?

[Kanasta]

Hmm, my brand new Adblock says 'get subscriptions' with a box 'auto update'
thus the query.

Re:Adblock?

[rmerry72]

If you use Adblock, please edit your useragent header so websites can require you to pay a subscription while allowing me to continue accessing their content in exchange for viewing a few ads.

I would except ... wait for it ... I don't give a fuck about how you view the suites you visit nor how they make money, if at all. There is no commercial agreement in place between me and the site owners to view their adverts when I view their site. They are expecting me to view them, hell maybe even to click on 'em, but I don't have to if I choose not too. And technology gives me that choice.

Same rule with television and radio. You put it out on they are waves or the Net and allow me access I may view your content. If you lace it with adds and I can remove those adds before they hit my eyeballs and ears then I might just do that. That's the risk you run in allowing your precious content to be unleashed over the ether.

And if that means that the industry moves away from ad-supported sites to subscription-based content then bloody excellent. Less noise for my ad-block filters to remove all round. I'll pay for content I want to read/view/listen. Don't through "free" shit at me if you expect me to care about your ads.

Re:Adblock?

[Emetophobe]

That's Adblock Plus which is an updated version of Adblock.

Re:Adblock?

[BrokenHalo]

Indeed. Adblock is actually the only extension I use, and I consider it essential.

Apart from that, my preference is to keep Firefox as simple as possible. Maybe I'm just getting old (OK, I am), but I find too many bells and whistles just get in the way. I just want to see the content, without having to right-click on anything to diddle with it.

Re:Adblock?

[evilviper]

If the site chooses to spend that much of it's precious real estate on stilted, poorly dithered ugliness, they probably aren't worth visiting in the first place.

And yet here you are, reading /.

Re:Adblock?

[nospam007]

I don't know, I think that if it comes to an arms race between the ad makers & the ad blockers, the ad blockers would win.
--
They'd just go for product placement like the movies/TV.
James Bond doing stunts with his BMW, or whoever pays more, drinking Moët et Chandon, Cuvée Dom Perignon etc.
No way to distinguish content from ads.

Re:Adblock?

[iamstretchypanda]

I was about to agree with you until i read "The only way for them to keep offering free content is if users pay for it"

Wtf? I try not to pay for my 'free content.'

Re:Adblock?

[Kanasta]

I see, in that case this updated version removes the need for a separate plug-in assuming subscriptions are of similar quality

Re:Adblock?

[DreamerFi]

Changing the user agent would in effect make me responsible for the success of their business model, and I am not, nor will I ever be. They'll have to find a way to be successful without my cooperation.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tivo fucked it up for everybody so now we have to have the annoying ads while we watch the show now.

Re:Adblock?

[Jekler]

Ads do not make the internet run. The internet was running just fine before banner ads.

We may not have the same amount of free sites that we do, but quantity is not something the internet is short on. Anyone intelligent enough to have something worthwhile to say would be intelligent enough to find a way to do it without ad revenue.

The signal to noise ration is very low on the internet, thanks largely in part to the number of freely available resources. Every jack-ass with some drivel that popped into his head is free to jabber away until he's blue in the face (Note: I do not exclude myself). It makes finding useful, accurate information a very time consuming process. If people actually had to pay to disseminate information on the internet, people would make sure their message was actually worth communicating.

The ad-model only seems like such a good plan because it's the only one 95% of the internet population is aware of. Love the enemy you know.

Re:Adblock?

[Soban]

This should have been named as 20 most useless extensions. except for one or two, all of them are pretty useless or the better extensions are available. use download them all for downloading in bulk documents etc. from one page. IE tab and colorful tabs. uppity to go one step up in the web pages (not back but one level up in the directory). clearURLButton URL Link : just highlight the address and select go on the right click option and you will be directed to highlighted address. No more cut and paste routine. View Source chart : this helps the programers in viewing the code blocks clearly. Image browser : this is one of the my favorite extension. it allows u to chose a portion in url that increases in a serial. so once you have selected it, all you have to do is just click next button and you will be taken to next page in the series. and it will continue as long as their is a page to show.

Re:Adblock?

[AaronLawrence]

I don't want to pay money every month or year to support them to avoid ads.

Why not?

If you say "it's not worth it" - how long do you spend reading or posting on slashdot?

Slashdot does actually have a quite good system to pay to remove ads, with good options. And it's cheap. Some other sites assume that there are only "freeloaders" and "premium professionals" and therefore offer only overpriced subscriptions (like IMDB) that are not worthwhile to casual users, but slashdot is not one of those sites.

Re:Adblock?

[NeMon'ess]

I did pay /. five dollars, but it was for the extra journal options, not for ads. I don't block any ads from pages so my subscription won't expire.

Like you say, other sites only offer premium services that cost at least $15 a year. I simply do not feel the site is worth that much to me. Not even $5 for all but a handful of sites, because I have debts and not a lot of income.

More importantly, I don't click on enough ads to bring those sites $5 a year in revenue, so I don't think I should pay them directly more than I bring them from ad clicks. This is the most important point as far as I'm concerned. If I bring a site $1 a year in ad revenue, I don't think I'd pay them more than $2 a year to avoid ads.

Re:Adblock?

[NeMon'ess]

If you're picking on my choice of words, good for you, I barely care.

Otherwise, either the site is going to have to pay for users' bandwidth, or some users will pay for the bandwidth. Perhaps what you're pointing out is that only some users could pay to support the site? In which case it would be like Fark.com, but without the ads. My point remains that someone is going to have to pay.

Re:Adblock?

[Dan Ost]

Go into your slashdot homepage preferences and check 'Simple Design', 'Low Bandwidth', and 'No Icons'. Does wonders for removing clutter from Slashdot. Once you get used to it, it's painful to see Slashdot before you've logged in.

Re:Adblock?

[Ticklemonster]

Static image adds are okay if they stay ON THE PAGE and don't float around in front of the page, or have video, I agree with you on that!

It's the pop ups that I would like to see totally done away with on the internet without having to use special software to defeat them. DO NOT take over my machine and make it do things I don't specifically say it should do!!!

I was disappointed that adblock and no script weren't mentioned, neither was forecastfox! The three I use the most.

Re:Adblock?

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Furthermore, ads increase demand and therefore increase everybody's prices, so ad blocking is clearly the ethical thing to do. Ethically speaking, we should advertise more the ad-blocking.

Re:Adblock?

[Sax Maniac]

Any trust in advertisers has repeatedly been broken. Every time I give them a chance and turn off adblocking even for one minute, I am assaulted with animation. Anything that takes my attention off my task at hand is gone.

I used to spend a lot of time maintaining manual blocklists, but with filterset.G I rarely have to do anything. This is pre-Firefox days with Privoxy or, even further back, Junkbuster.

It should be no surprise that the only I will not block and occassionaly actually use: Google text ads. I'm sure if it bugged me I could figure out a way to block it with Greasemonkey or something similar, but why bother?

Re:Adblock?

[Slashdot Parent]

If you're using adblock plus, you can use both filtersets. You just have to update filterset.g manually from time to time.

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used that last year for a bit and it wasn't ready for primetime. Any font's that ended a page were applied to the rest of the pages in the sequence which made for difficult reading. Probably more a symptom of the pages coding quality, but still in the end makes it hard to use.

Re:Adblock?

[Saeger]

I still use privoxy instead of AdBlock, since privoxy acts as a proxy for ANY browser (like Opera & Konqueror), while AdBlock's FireFox-only.

Re:Adblock?

[General Wesc]

Changing the user agent would in effect make me responsible for the success of their business model, and I am not, nor will I ever be. They'll have to find a way to be successful without my cooperation.

Not being responsible for the success of business model means it's okay to try to circumvent their attempts to charge you for their product? If I shoplift, is that okay because I'm not responsible for the success of their bizarre 'put products where I can get to them but charge me money to use or take them' business model? Seriously, grow up.

Re:Adblock?

[jonadab]

Yeah. I don't use adblock even.

I do block popups (whether they are ads or not, and whether they result from a user action or not -- basically anything that the website wants to open in a separate window for any reason is blocked, period), and I limit GIF animations to one playthrough (no repeats), and I use FlashBlock (if I even have Flash installed, which I frequently don't, because even setting aside advertisements, most of what it's used for is far more annoying than the "get the plugin" placeholder you see if it's not installed). And Javascript is not allowed to dork around in non-page-content areas, such as the statusbar. (I used to surf with Javascript disabled entirely, until I discovered capability policies.) Oh, and I haven't surfed the web with page colors enabled since the late nineties, except when I'm testing my own sites. (Everything shows in my system colors. Always.) And I frequently turn off page fonts, too (so that everything uses the fonts I have chosen). And my web browser isn't generally set up to play sounds, either.

For me, the web is about information. Basically it's hypertext, with graphics, and file downloads. Stuff that gets in the way or distracts me is superfluous dross, and I treat it as such. Whether it's an advertisement or not.

So I don't block advertisements *as such*, but I do block some of the more annoying technologies that some advertisers like to use to distract me from reading the web pages I'm trying to read. (Advertisers aren't the only people who abuse these technologies. When I first started limiting looping GIF animations to one play-through, it wasn't because of adverts so much as those annoying email-me and page-under-construction animations. Yeah, you remember them. Blinky flashy banner adverts came along a few months later, but by then I'd already taken the hex editor to navigator.exe and changed the magic string so that the loop-forever flag wouldn't be recognized. These days of course we have an about:config entry for this.)

This isn't Digg, we don't need this crap here

[Anonymous Coward]

I go to /. to avoid the baggage of useless "OMG FF EXTENSIONS!1111" articles. Come on CmdrTaco, we can do better.

Re:This isn't Digg, we don't need this crap here

[Raypeso]

Agreed. I'm so tired of all these list articles. I'd rather see some actual news for a change.

Re:This isn't Digg, we don't need this crap here

[(Robo_Bro)]

PCWORLD ran a similar article six months ago http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122099-page,2-c, plugins/article.html... can we expect to see pathetic FF extension opinions updated regularly?

Re: 20 Must-have Firefox Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

20 Must-have Firefox Extensions

or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bloat.

20 is too many

[Mostly a lurker]

Based on my experience, Firefox often becomes unstable when too many extensions are included. The problem is that extensions can conflict with each other. This risk is low with a small number of extensions but increases as the number of extensions increases. Extensions are a great feature of Firefox, but it is best to select the 10 or so that really increase your productivity and let the rest go.

Re:20 is too many

[gEvil (beta)]

Extensions are a great feature of Firefox, but it is best to select the 10 or so that really increase your productivity and let the rest go.

Agreed. After trying a fair number of extensions, the ones I've found most useful for casual surfing are AdBlock Plus, All-in-One Gestures, Download Statusbar, and User Agent Switcher. Throw ForecaseFox in there if you live somewhere where the weather changes often.

Re:20 is too many

[master811]

Although I've not generally had stability issues with too many extension, I have found that certain ones do conflict and can makes FF amazingly efficient RAM usage become even more efficient. /sarcasm

But yeah too many does it make it more bloated and often will make it eat even more RAM that it does normally, its a shame cos there are some great extensions out there, but they need to be tested a lot more with others so that they conflict less and don't cause even more memory leaks.

Re:20 is too many

[Falesh]

I must say that is what I like about Opera. It has a good core set of features e.g. sessions, mouse gestures, integrated search, content blocking, ad blocking, integrated email, spell checking, etc. Since these are core features I know there will be no compatibility problems with them. It also now has Widgets though they can't alter the browser as much as Firefox extensions can.

Before I'm modded as a troll I'm not saying "Opera rulez, FF sucks", there are features that are superior to Firefox too, like the kick ass Web Developer extension. I just think it would do better to have certain key extensions brought into the core browser.

Re:20 is too many

[Matt Perry]

Based on my experience, Firefox often becomes unstable when too many extensions are included.

I've found that it depends on what extensions you use. Some extensions are poorly written. I have 29 extensions installed in my daily Firefox profile and have no problems with speed or stability. I created separate Firefox profiles for other purposes and installed different extensions in those profiles:

• default - set to run by default and has my daily surfing setup and bookmarks
  
• school - I have a different set of tools for school-related web surfing. Different bookmarks, extension configuration, etc.
  
• webdev - has bookmarks to programming reference sites and manuals. Has Firebug, Web Developer, CSSViewer extensions installed, etc.
  
• test - a test profile. If I'm curious about an extension, or not sure if it's going to play nice or uninstall itself properly, I can try it out in this stock profile.
  

I have separate icons for Firefox on my toolbar. I change the command for the icon to launch the appropriate profile. For example, when doing web development the webdev icon runs: firefox -p webdev

Re:20 is too many

[ZwJGR]

Not true.
I am currently running 47 extensions in Firefox 1.5.0.10 on WinXPSP2.
Firefox almost never crashes, the only time I have problems is when I visit sites with crappy javascript or broken java applets, and then its merely extreme sluggishness.
More firefox extensions does not equal instability.
It equals a HUGE performance penalty on startup (and opening a new window) of about 4-5 seconds, especially if you run a 1.6GHz P4 like I do...
Javascript is not the speediest of script languages, especially compared to precompiled code.
It would be nice if you could precompile/preparse your browser chrome scripts...

Re:20 is too many

[ScrewMaster]

I agree, but I think that if you ask a hundred users what their "key" features would be, you'd probably get 101 different answers.

Re:20 is too many

[Idbar]

And you tell me that just after I installed several extensions :S

I liked the minimize to tray. Although, I'm not sure if there is a firefox memory leak or simply if keeps too much data. But the memory consumed by firefox increases with time and amount of visited pages. The processing though, seems to be extremely related to "ajax" based pages.

Re:20 is too many

[mdfst13]

I agree, but I think that if you ask a hundred users what their "key" features would be, you'd probably get 101 different answers. Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core? I don't like them and it is currently impossible to turn them completely off (for example, install an add-on and restart firefox; home page, current page, and add-on page come up in tabs). I'd also currently like to remove the password manager functionality, as the current version is insecure (it can be fooled into sending passwords to other web sites than the one for which the password was saved).

Rather than putting things in the core, what about two classes of extensions: core extensions, which are heavily cross validated and unit tested by core developers; and add-ons, which are what they are now -- a collection of random itches that people scratched. This would allow a set of stable extensions that almost everyone uses, flexibility for those who don't want to use core extensions (since they can be removed), and the current ability to scratch an itch with a less thoroughly tested extension or even just an extension with very narrow use (e.g. only with a single website).

Re:20 is too many

[rainman_bc]

Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core? I don't like them and it is currently impossible to turn them completely off

Then don't use them?? Seriously, why not hit ctrl-n instead of ctrl-t?

Maybe taking it out won't make the code base any more efficient - it's like comparing sdi vs mdi.

You're probably the only user on the plant who hates tabs, as it's a fewture native now to IE, Opera and FF. As well as epiphany, Konqueror and Safari.

You're an island amongst yourself. If there was a desire for a non-tabbed browser, then someone would have forked firefox to have one.

Re:20 is too many

[ngdbsdmn]

Based on my experience instability is not in issue with a large number of extensions (I have ~50 active all the time).

Performance degradation is an issue, however. Opening a new window (not a tab) does take a few seconds and RAM consumption is ~200Mb. On my current PC (AMD64 4000+, 2Gb RAM) the performance hit is not noticeable and about 25 of my 50 extensions are realted to web development. I think the magic number may be somewhere around 30.

I don't know why but some pages/sites do crash Firefox. The most notable one is the beta AJAX interface for Yahoo email. The best solution was to give up Yahoo completely for GMail.

Re:20 is too many

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an island amongst yourself. If there was a desire for a non-tabbed browser, then someone would have forked firefox to have one.

Don't be a cock.

Many if not most extensions exist to fulfill a niche desire. Forking Firefox isn't neccesary.

I believe tab mix plus offers a "no tabs" mode.

Re:20 is too many

[superpulpsicle]

I am shocked nobody here mentioned Foxlingo. It lets you read any international website in english.

Re:20 is too many

[boingo82]

I'm the other island then. I hate tabs. I like to open tons of windows and move them around. What happens if I need to look at 2 tabs in the same window simultaneously? I can't. I hate them. I can't understand why people like them. Apparently it's not just me, there's one other guy on teh intarweb who agrees.

Re:20 is too many

[LordSnooty]

Heheh, you need the Duplicate Tab extension, which can create a new window from an existing tab.

Re:20 is too many

[jonadab]

If I'd had to limit myself to ten extensions, I never would have switched to Firefox (from the Mozilla suite) in the first place. I had to install a solid dozen extensions just to get back the features that *should* have been included out of the box, but weren't -- features that Mozilla 1.x had, and in one case a feature that even Navigotor 3 and 4 had. Firefox was so stripped down, I would never had been able to switch to it if not for these extensions. Then if I wanted to actually add any cool new functionality (e.g., Greasemonkey), that's extra.

The new edit-friendly about:config has helped a bit with this: several of the extensions that I used to rely on were for adding things into the preferences dialog that *needed* to be configurable (e.g., whether to loop GIF animations forever and ever or stop them after one play-through), and these days I just use about:config for that stuff. But still, I don't know if I could get my list of must-have extensions down to ten. I definitely can't live without DOM Inspector and Web Developer. I suppose if you're not a web developer you might not need them, but for me they're essential. The stylesheet switcher and user-agent switcher are also quite critically important. I guess I could live without ColorZilla in a pinch, though it's quite handy, but without Copy Plain Text I'd be pulling my hair out in notime flat, and I could do without FlashBlock only if the Flash plugin were not installed at all. The Gmail Notifier is convenient, but I could survive without it at a pinch, but History Menu ought to just be standard, and HashColouredTabs is really important too. Greasemonkey is another one that ought to be built-in these days: there are several user scripts I don't want to surf the web without. Image Zoom and Page Zoom ought to be built in functionality, and I definitely am not willing to do without Nuke Anything Enhanced. (I particularly like the "remove selection" feature. That's really a must-have for sure.) I guess I could live without Platypus, but it sure is nice to have. SubmitToTab ought to be standard. So should RefreshBlocker. Oops, I think I'm well over ten.

Installing a lot of extensions is a hazard inherent to using Firefox, as far as I'm concerned. If I couldn't have my extensions, I'd be switching to another browser, *fast*.

Re:20 is too many

[jonadab]

> Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core?

I think what you want is a completely different web browser. Tabs are such a fundamental feature of the interface, IMO, that if you don't want them, you don't really want Firefox. (I won't presume to tell you which one you do want, but there are a number of options.)

The password manager can be easily turned off (and I do that when I deploy it on public stations at the library where I work).

But turning things like tabbed browsing and password management into extensions is, IMO, heading in the wrong direction. You'd end up with practically *nothing* in core. Bookmarks? Some people don't use them. HTTPS? Some people don't use it. Download manager? A *lot* of people don't use it. The find-in-page feature is another one a lot of people don't use (or even know about), so that could be an extension too. Home button? I've seen people argue for its removal, so maybe it should be an extension. Indeed, some people use all keyboard shortcuts, and hide the toolbars altogether, so maybe the toolbars should be an extension... In short, that way lies madness.

Installation is bad enough now, what with all the extensions I already have to install to get a usable browser. If I had to install extensions for each and every little basic feature, it would take hours to hunt down everything I need. (Hmm... RenderXML, RenderHTML4, ParseCSS, ShowGIF, ShowJPEG, ShowPNG, ... do I need ShowSVG too? Then I want the UnderlineHyperlinks extension and FormPOST and Scrollbars and StatusBar and MenuBar...) At some point the browser makers have to draw a line and say, "This is useful enough to a large enough percentage of the userbase that we're going to include it." You can argue about _how_ useful it needs to be and _what_ percentage of the userbase needs to find it useful, and by setting different values you'll end up with either a pretty slim browser or else a pretty full-featured one, but making *everything* an extension is not practical.

I mean, if you really want practically no features at all, just go use Lynx and leave Firefox alone. Even Lynx has some features that not everyone uses.

But that's not what you want. It's not what (hardly) anyone wants. We want something with enough features that we can actually, you know, *use* it. And not everyone wants exactly the same features, so yeah, that means in addition to the ones you want there are going to be some you don't care about. There are always going to be some features that not everyone uses. That's the nature of software.

Re:20 is too many

[mdfst13]

Then don't use them?? Seriously, why not hit ctrl-n instead of ctrl-t? I don't get them through ctrl-t -- I get them at random times due to the way that Firefox works. For example, install an extension and allow it to restart Firefox at the end. Net result is that it opens a set of tabs for the extension, the home page, and whatever page you were viewing prior to requesting the update. Also, when I hit the context menu, Open in New Tab is right next to the Open in New Window -- sometimes I hit the wrong one.

While I don't disagree that my viewpoint is rare, there's a not very good extension/add-on to remove tabs. I suspect that someone will finish a proper one eventually. Especially now that there is no real way to avoid tabs (they're everywhere). It's not a unique viewpoint, just uncommon.

Re:20 is too many

[mdfst13]

Installation is bad enough now, what with all the extensions I already have to install to get a usable browser. If I had to install extensions for each and every little basic feature, it would take hours to hunt down everything I need. I'd be perfectly happy if the core extensions came installed by default so long as I could uninstall them afterwards. What I want is not fewer features but flexibility. This might actually help with your issue, as it would presumably be easier to add a core extension to the default install than it is to add a feature to the browser. If people don't like it, they can always uninstall it. With a feature, you don't have that option.

I find tabs annoying because they pop up at times when I don't want them. I wouldn't have the same issue with most other features, as they aren't as obtrusive.

IMO, the Download Manager is a great example of something that would be better as an extension that was installed by default. Then when someone installs a replacement like FlashGot, it could replace the Download Manager entirely rather than try to work around it.

Huh?

[Sukhbir]

Haven't we already had too many of such articles in the past?

Re:Huh?

[davidbrit2]

Pretty soon we'll be able to have a 20 Must-read Firefox Extension Articles article. Looking forward to it.

What about unplug? What about flashgot?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2254/

It allows you to rip streaming content easily from websites. It can handle everything from flash movies (.flv) on youtube to mp3 data streamed to your web browser. Paired with the Flashgot plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/220/

You can download all of the links on a webpage, just like certain download managers used to. Its a great combo.

Re:What about unplug? What about flashgot?

[JamesTRexx]

Talking about streaming content, I noticed I get download links at Google video in Konqueror, but not in FF, so now I set the FF agent to Konqueror on the Windows laptop when I want to download from Google video on that one. All that embedded crap, bah.

Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[bconway]

The idea that the browser isn't feature-complete unless you install 20 add-ons is certain to scare some people away. I know there isn't much fun in reading an article about the 5 "essential" add-ons, but you can probably get the best of what's missing. I'm down to only two (AdBlock Plus w/ Easylist, and Flashblock for limiting/customizing non-ad content) and quite happy with my experience.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[HalAtWork]

The idea that the browser isn't feature-complete unless you install 20 add-ons is certain to scare some people away

What about IE? They weren't even going to include tabs in IE7 originally. The evolution of IE has been mostly in its core rendering and ActiveX, and not the interface or functionality of the application. Internet Explorer has basically always been just a bare shell for MS's HTML handling engine. It's the bare minimum!

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The article is mistitled ("essential" should be "most interesting) but I think it helps to show how powerful Firefox is, it's basically a platform to itself now.

I don't run many add-ons either because of speed and stability problems that arise with too many add-ons. Adblocking too many things also seems to slow down Firefox too. Flashblock helps too because ads are too CPU hungry, if I have a motion flash ad in a window going, it will generally always take 5% of my CPU, not something I want when trying to conserve battery power.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[suv4x4]

The idea that the browser isn't feature-complete unless you install 20 add-ons is certain to scare some people away.

Especially if people are being told that "must have" extensions for Firefox include rainbow colored tabs, "more neat than actually useful" (quoting TFA) popup page previews, and weather forecast gadgets.

Another 4-5 of those "must haves" are strictly for developers (ex. FireBug/WebDev toolbar - I have those, my grandma doesn't need them).

Are you surprised? Shiny title on a worthless article? What a shock.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[jZnat]

Well, a counter-example to IE would be Konqueror: it's just a shell for KHTML, but it also includes tons of features that you can't exactly put in the HTML/CSS and JavaScript engines (e.g. Konqueror has a built-in AdBlock, auto-refresh, download manager (via KGet), web page translation, web page validation, user agent changer, flashblock (via plugin settings), and more). Other applications can embed KHTML (e.g. Akregator does this for viewing webpages from RSS feeds, or KMail in order to view HTML emails).

You could also say that Firefox is just a shell for Gecko (including its XUL, XBL, etc. parsing and renderring), and most of that is written using XUL, XBL, and JavaScript (Gecko is in C++ and allows for COM-like functionality via XPCOM).

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[jZnat]

Another 4-5 of those "must haves" are strictly for developers (ex. FireBug/WebDev toolbar - I have those, my grandma doesn't need them). My grandmother is a web developer you insensitive clod!

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[suv4x4]

My grandmother is a web developer you insensitive clod!

I'm talking about mine: she's a nuclear fusion rocket scientist.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[dvice_null]

I wonder how could anyone live without colored tabs. Yes, those sure are "must-have" extensions.

You really need only mouse gestures, addblock, web developer, html validator, downthemall, flashblock, linkification and phpbb user hide, if you are reading phpbb forums. That's only 8.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[Chris1051]

Right but any fool reading the article will see the opening sentence will learn that this is the superior browser.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[Short Circuit]

I tried mouse gestures back when Firefox was called Phoenix. I wondered why the browser navigated randomly, until I realized that I follow my read point with my mouse.

That was really annoying. And don't get me started on the "radial menu" overnight fad. I tried that, too, and it seemed totally pointless, requiring extra effort to figure out where each of the context menu items were.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent was saying that Firefox might scare off users because it's so bare, but I was saying IE is even more bare and it has the greatest market share, so parent's point is invalid.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[dvice_null]

All-In-One-Gestures work in a way that you have to hold down the right mouse button while you do the gesture, and it draws a red line whichs shows you what kind of a gesture you are making. I don't know what you have tried, but I seriously suggest you to try again. I never understood what mouse gestures are good for untill I tried it myself. My wife was even more skeptic, untill she tried, and even she likes it!

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[aussie_a]

I haven't used a single extension in months, possibly a year. It definitely isn't must haves, they're "like to haves." So while it might scare some away, for others that actually read the article they'll probably decide "why would I want that? I can simply look out my window" and "oh wow! My current browser doesn't have that and I never imagined I'd ever want something like that. I'll definitely get that one."

So yes, for those that only read the heading, it might be scary. For those that actually RTFA it's a good advertisement.

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[StikyPad]

My grandmother was a web developer you insensitive clod!

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[rtb61]

Most of the extensions were non-essentials, the only one that is of any great interest was stumble upon, and a more pernicious consumer of time does not exist, just one more click of the button and then some sleep ;).

Re:Aren't articles like this bad for Firefox?

[Rakishi]

*shrug* Extensions seems like pretty much the only thing FF has going for it now. IE has ubiquity while opera covers built in features, speed and memory footprint. The only reason I use FF is the extensions but I'm starting to wonder if FF will last all that long on just that.

Extensions development for beginners is akin to bashing your head against a brick wall for 2 weeks (there is no good documentation and questions to the community go unanswered), people simply get fed up after a while and give up. That is probably hurting the community a lot but no one who can actually do something seems to cares.

And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[cliveholloway]

Flashblock makes sites browsable again. Stop autoplay falls into the same category :) And No script is just plain sensible.

Other simple extensions that make life saner include copy as plain text (A life-saver in this "MS-we-know-what-you're trying-to-do" world) and the BugMeNot extension.

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[el americano]

I used to use bugmenot extensively, but then I just decided to avoid those sites that require a free sign-up. For news sites, everyone has the same news as the NY Times, so they are not missed. When I absolutely can't forego a sign-up, I use Trashmail, but places are starting to catch on.

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I use Trashmail, but places are starting to catch on."

What i dont get is why they want to farm the email addresses of people that obviously dont want their spam. I mean, of course we're going to give them false names & junk addresses... what do they expect us to do?!?

I guess for every 10,000 computer geeks out there that put in no@mail.com there is a granny who doesnt know any better.

But lets be honest here, the *only* reason im reading your content at all in the first place is because its FREE on the INTERNET. There isnt the slightest chance of me subscribing to your dead-tree version, no amount of promotional emails will ever change that. Even if i had todays copy right here in my lap, id be using it as a mousepad to browse news on the internet.

If the ONLY way to read NYT articles was to subscribe to the NYT, i would never have read anything they ever printed... im simply not that insterested. Its too easy to get elsewhere. I presume the only reason they put it on the web for free is because they know this, & perhaps they want to keep their position as an important figure in news-reporting in a world where the new media is killing the old.

Its an interesting conundrum, but in the meantime whenever NYT says "name & password" I go elsewhere.

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[Todamont]

NoScript is completely indispensable for me and should be #1 on this list. Browser scripting attacks are becoming more common so I usually put this on any new computer I install as a safety measure. I also LOVE forecastfox, which did get mentioned. I wouldn't surf withoout Adblock Plus, and FasterFox is worth a look if you don't already have it.

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Well, I, for one, use my real address *on purpose* when posting to Usenet (just like I did in early 90's when I first found out about the Internet) and on web sites I'm in charge of. SpamAssassin takes care of almost all the spam I get (some 200+ mails a day). I refuse to hinder other people contacting me just because of some scumbag address harvesting bastards!

I am also pissed because of what happened to the Internet, but I guess it was just a question of *when*, not *if*.

Of course, if I see a benefit of staying anonymous, I do so - but for other reasons than address harvesters. See /. for example. :-)

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[Fujisawa Sensei]

Lets hear it of Flashblock!

If Adobe would give end users a little more control over their Flash apps, like a way of turning off the volume, I wouldn't bother.

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you mean Copy As Plain Text is a livesaver with Open Office - it kills me how badly OO can munge up what's an effortless cut and paste operation in MS Office. OO is far, far worse in the we-know-what-you're-trying-to-do world:

For example, copy a snippet of from Firefox with Ctrl+C. Open OO, and paste with Ctrl+V - more times than not, you'll get the surrounding tables, formatting, broken links and picture placeholder graphic. If you try to edit this text, a huge pause will ensue followed by braindead screen clipping or what can only be described as a 1991-style frame buffer cat vomit.

I know, I know - I'm knocking OO and praising Office. Go ahead and get your zealot on by modding this post of truth and angst troll or flaimbait.

Re:And add in flashblock while you're at it.

[jc42]

Flashblock makes sites browsable again.

Indeed. One example I discovered soon after installing it: The Daily Show's web site at comedycentral.com is pretty much unusable on any computer I've tried it on. The main reason is the flock of flash ads that compete with the video clip. Somehow, they've arranged things so that the ads have priority over the video, meaning that the video often can't run at all. Flashblock lets you select only the video clip, and the ads are blank, so the video clip runs normally.

There are a number of other web sites like this, that supply flash ads that compete with their actual content, often slowing it down to unusability. Killing the flash ads makes these sites usable.

I heard a rumor that someone was working on a plugin that would save a video (or audio?) file to disk. I wonder if it's possible yet? I've seen some horrible kludges to do the job, mostly things that work on only a few sites and fail with others. A general tool saying "Write this one to this disk file" would be really useful at times, if you want to watch/hear something more than once (or wait until it's fully downloaded before viewing it so as to avoid those long pauses when the net's congested).

JS blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about javascript blocker? I feel a lot more secure with that extension; in fact, it's the only one that keeps me from going to opera.

Re:JS blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about javascript blocker? I feel a lot more secure with that extension; in fact, it's the only one that keeps me from going to opera. It's built into opera, so if that's the only thing keeping you from switching, switch away.

Re:JS blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the top banner ads on their site is broken by knocking out js - probably gives us a clue as to why they don't want it disabled.

For those without Adblock

[Spad]

As the site has been Slashdotted already, have a Coralised, Printer-friendly version.

Re:For those without Adblock

[pla]

As the site has been Slashdotted already, have a Coralised, Printer-friendly version.

Oh, for shame! Such an easy chance to plug something on-topic, yet another FF extension... ;-)

Resurrect Pages lets you check all the major internet cache sites for dead content.

Re:For those without Adblock

[bazorg]

People who really like these printer-friendly versions might like to make other websites "reader-friendly" by using re-pagination to have TFA load all at once instead of having 5 separate pages.

Re:For those without Adblock

[zxsqkty]

Perhaps even more on topic for this site is the Slashdotter extension, which not only automatically adds the various cache links to article links, but tells you when you have mod points.

Does other cool stuff for slashbots too...

Just two

[Anonymous Coward]

SeaMonkey and Flashblock.

If they are "must have"

[tomstdenis]

Why don't they come standard with firefox?

Zing!

Re:If they are "must have"

[pravuil]

Think of extensions as a testing ground for features in later releases. That's what happened with version 2.0 which adopted a lot of ideas from user submitted extensions for version 1.x

Zing!

Re:If they are "must have"

[tomstdenis]

Then they are "must try" not have.

Zing! (can't believe I got banned from fark.com ... arrrg....)

Re:If they are "must have"

[Sloppy]

Some of them of very specialized. If you don't use gmail, then your browser doesn't need code in it that treats gmail's pages as a special case that needs to be manipulated.

Some of them, such as adblock, work only due to not being mainstream. If they get too popular, there will be countermeasures.

And some of them have subjective value. So they're "must have" for Person A, but annoying to Person B.

Re:If they are "must have"

[Rachel Lucid]

Extensions allow you to turn on and off features at will.

For example, I use:
- Forecastfox (Great when you can't use the weather channel)
- Morning Coffee (Excellent if you read a lot of webcomics or other weekly features)
- Download Statusbar (I find it less intrusive than the downloads window thing, but remembering what you picked up half an hour ago is harder)
- ChromaTabs (Just picked it up a few minutes ago to see the colors, but the added distinction between tabs is a plus - I wish the damn thing let you set the colors yourself though. I don't mind colorful tabs, but a lot of stuff is in the same shade of green.)

Not everyone WANTS colorful tabs though, or an icon that lets them read webcomics, or even to know what the forecast outside is. This way, everyone can get the user experience they want.

Re:If they are "must have"

[backwardMechanic]

The day Firefox comes with multicoloured tabs and a weather forecast built in is the day I switch back to Opera.

Re:If they are "must have"

[trewornan]

Because to provide all the options in the default install would bloat firefox (download size, memory usage, startup, etc). This way you get the best of all possible worlds - everybody can have all the features they like without having to download the features other people want but they don't. How many people really want a browser to be able to translate a web page into "Swedish Chef"? With the addon system, those that want it can have it without affecting the rest of us.

Re:If they are "must have"

[tomstdenis]

Then they're not "must have," they're just neato top rated extensions. I'm not arguing the usefulness, I'm arguing the headline because it's stupid and I hate stupid sensationalist headlines.

If they were truly "must have" they would be part of the damn download. Like Firefox "must have" PNG support. It's not "nice to have," it "must have" it.

And I "must have" supper soon, peace!

Tom

Re:If they are "must have"

[StikyPad]

I, fur oone-a, velcume-a oooor Nurdeec Cooleenery ooferlurds. Um gesh dee bork, bork!

Re:If they are "must have"

[MrNiceguy_KS]

How many people really want a browser to be able to translate a web page into "Swedish Chef"?

I don't use that one in Firefox, but it's my favorite Thunderbird extension. It actually makes me enjoy cleaning out my Junk Mail folder.

Might have been just me . . .

[OverlordQ]

. . but I just dont see why many of those are 'Must have'. I mean how often do I need to measure stuff?

sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

IAAFPS and i call bs on this one


if this list were anywhere near accurate it should have included these extensions:

• Navigation
  • Thumbs - Shows the first thumbnail from each linked gallery, letting you skip galleries that don't look interesting.
  • Linky - Open all links in tabs, etc.
  • firefusk - view all images from galleries with numerically named image files.
  • Browse Images - Use the Forward button or Alt+Shift+Right to go to the next image.
  • Location Navigator - Select a portion of a URL that varies, then navigate up or down.
  • Digger - Navigate to parent directories in URLs, etc.
  • refspoof - Modify your HTTP Referer to gain access to sites that use insecure login mechanisms.
• Downloading and saving
  • DownThemAll - Download all the links to images/movies on a page at once.
  • FlashGot - Download all the links on a page at once using an external download manager.
  • Download sort - Save files to folders based on extension or download date.
  • spiderzilla - Download entire web sites.
  • Super DragAndGo - Drag a link to open it in a new tab; drag an image to save it.
• Videos
  • Launchy - Open links to video files in an external player, streaming, so you can watch a video without waiting to download it. (Note that not all video players support streaming video; for example, WinAmp 5.111 hangs. VLC works well. Here's my launchy.xml for VLC.)
  • MediaPlayerConnectivity - Open embedded video in an external player, so you can use features like Full Screen.
• Images
  • Image Zoom - Convenient shortcuts for zooming images.
  • mozImage - Browse images on hard drive or view them in a slideshow.

Most of the authors of these extensions are not yet members of the Pornzilla project.

Re:sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of that looks like it is not for making regular internet viewing easier, but for streamlining the viewing of internet porn (not saying net porn viewing isn't normal, but there is a distinction between using the net and using the net for porn). Kinda freaky what you can tell about someone from what extensions they have installed...

Re:sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably going to need some sort of braille plugin after a few years of using those.

Re:sensationalism

[djSpinMonkey]

IAAFPS and i call bs on this one

You are a first person shooter?

Re:sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly recommend Batch Download 1.1.4.
The 'Download all images' can be particularly useful.

Re:sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost as freaky as what we can tell about you by what you can tell about that other person. ;)

Re:sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

>>IAAFPS and i call bs on this one

>You are a first person shooter?

A former Porn Star, obviously.

Re:sensationalism

[greenguy]

I never understood the phrase "first-person shooter." What else could it be? If it wasn't first person, it wouldn't be a game. It would be television.

Re:sensationalism

[alfarid]

mod parent up! hahaha how do you know he wanted to capture porn??? Maybe he wanted his version of StrongBad!

Re:sensationalism

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm, third person shooter maybe?

Re:sensationalism

[Darundal]

Perhaps the connection was made when the parent said that most of the devs of those extensions were not yet members of the Pornzilla project...

Re:sensationalism

[Mike1024]

FPSes have a 'first person view', i.e. doom.

An example of a shooter-like-game with a third person view is Tomb Raider. Also resident evil, GTA3, and so on.

Re:sensationalism

[morie]

Indeed. It is generally wiser to shoot the third (or even second) person, but not yourself.

First person shooters are just morons. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...

Re:sensationalism

[PetoskeyGuy]

IAAFPS and i call bs on this one
You are a first person shooter?

I agree with the other posters that the extensions he has makes it look like he views a lot of porn. So in that respect he's being truthful.

He's a First Person Shooter.

Re:sensationalism

[Alsee]

Kinda freaky what you can tell about someone from what extensions they have installed...

The only extension I have is IE Tab.

I use it on every single page I load.

An obvious sign of a hardcore Sado-Masochism fetish.

-

20 must have?

[Ash-Fox]

I had absolutely no use for 19 of those extensions.

So far, my 'must-have' extension list:

• Google browser sync
• Fasterfox

That's my 'must-have' list, I can cope without other extensions...

Re:20 must have?

[h2g2bob]

Yes, why did this make slashdot? There are billions (ok, 27,300 according to google) of these "Top 20 Firefox Extensions", and most of them have better extensions, and manage to list them all on one page.

Re:20 must have?

[slack_prad]

Google browser sync

Foxmarks is less intrusive.

Re:20 must have?

[Ash-Fox]

Where is the cookie and password syncing (which are optional in Google browser sync)?

And what's less intrusive about it making all your bookmarks searchable for everyone?

Re:20 must have?

[slack_prad]

Sorry, it's just for bookmarking. I didn't really find use for/ wanted cookie sync.
The intrusive part is the 5 sec 'sync' time Google sync consumes everytime you open/close FF. And the browser seemed to be less responsive with it.
Foxmarks is lightweight and runs in the background. And no, the bookmarks stored are not searchable.

Ehehehe

[nnn0]

No Adblock, no NoScript, no CookieSafe. Those would be on top on my list :)

Re:Ehehehe

[Anonymous Coward]

CookieSafe, eh? Not from me... All your cookies are belong to us... mmmmm... cookies...

Flergh!

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I wanted to read this article, but I can't make any sense of it. There is junk text all over the place which seems to be linking to other stuff posted to day. How the hell am I ment to make sense of 10 different blocks of text when all I want to read is 1 clean and simple article?

Addons memory usage

[secolactico]

Is there a way to see how much memory is each extension using?

Re:Addons memory usage

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

Firefox extensions are generally simple JavaScript and XML files that are effectively appended directly to the core JavaScript and XML files that make up the browser. (Obviously I'm oversimplifying a bit here.)

In any case, because extensions just add on to the general browser in the same namespace, there's no way to separate what memory is used by one extension and what memory is used by another or what memory is being used by the core browser itself. They're all in the same namespace. This can cause conflicts with extensions, of course: if two extensions make different use of the same variable (or XML id) they'll conflict and the results will be unpredictable.

But in short: no, it's not possible, because the extensions are effectively loaded as if they were part of the browser, and there's no way to tell when something is part of an extension or part of the core browser.

Re:Addons memory usage

[textstring]

if you really must know,
memory used by firefox with extension - memory used by firefox w/o extension ~= memory used by extension

Re:Addons memory usage

[Trogre]

Or even better, how much memory/CPU a given tab is using. I often have upwards of 120 tabs open in any given session, and any one of them could be causing the 99% processor usage I often see.

Re:Addons memory usage

[StikyPad]

Burn the extensions and weigh the ashes.

Re:Addons memory usage

[Legion303]

Flashblock made that problem go away for me on 3 computers. It stops all flash content until you click on the flash element to enable it, and has a built-in whitelist manager that I really should start using for youtube.

Re:Addons memory usage

[Trogre]

Amen to that. I've been using Flashblock ever since it's been available and it's my #1 addon by far.

In this case though it's not flash content that's causing my problem, since Flashblock has put laid to that. The only other addon I use heavily is Tab Mix Plus, which I still prefer to the FF2.0 session manager.

All I use...

[Cctoide]

... is the Web Developer Toolbar (useful for hiding images, making some sites slightly more SFW), Adblock Plus, Tab Mix Plus and the del.icio.us plugin. Other extensions I also use, but could do without, are Forecastfox and Download Statusbar.

Extensions

[JohnyDog]

Well most of them aren't really 'must-have' at all, and half of them are tied to some specific service. Anyway, as everybody will be posting they're favourite extensions, i'll add few less popular ones, that i found really useful for daily work:

DownThemAll! 0.9.9.7 - can download all files from page (both links and directly embeddeded) with settable filter, custom renaming and all other features you'd expect form download accelerator

Image Zoom 0.2.7 - zooming images (and only images) - i found it very needed for high-dpi displays, or where the OS-specific zoom-tool isn't enough.

MR Tech Local Install 5.3.2.3 - nice tool for managing extensions - can make any older extension compatible on one click (simple change of required firefox version), also can generate installed extension list like this one you're reading now, either in text, HTML or BBcode

Remove It Permanently 1.0.6.3 - more useful version of NukeIt - shows you what content is actually being removed in red outline, can remove parent widget of what you're hovering over, or 'all similar items', on per-page,per-domain,per-website basis;useful for pages heavily infested with ads

Tiny Menu 1.4.2 - the whole menu is compacted to one button 'Menu' which you can drag on your address toolbar (it's actually the other way round), saving needed screen space

Unread Tabs 0.3 - shows opened-but-yet-unread tabs with Italics

Re:Extensions

[NeMon'ess]

Tiny Menu is a really good idea, unless you've got FoxyTunes to control your music player. I think FoxyTunes defaults to the bottom of the browser window. Well I don't like that because I'm too likely to pop up the Start menu bar by accident. So I dragged FoxyTunes up to fill all that space next to Firefox's menu.

Instead of Unread Tabs, I suggest Tab Mix Plus. It adds lots of Tab functionality, and it lets the font of unread tabs be any color the user wants. I find italics are harder to read, but Tab Mix Plus would let me do that if I wanted to, along with Bold, and Underline as well.

Re:Extensions

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

Tiny Menu [arantius.com] 1.4.2 - the whole menu is compacted to one button 'Menu' which you can drag on your address toolbar (it's actually the other way round), saving needed screen space FireFox does not allow install dialog of this one... Tiny Menu, what have you been up to?

Tabbrowser Extension?

[Malc]

I've been using the Tabbrowser extension for years. It seems to have fallen by the way-side, but it has some functionality that I miss:

• Tabs at the side - it could put the window tabs down the side of the browser window. I can read them faster here, and with a lot open, still see the labels without having to put the mouse over them to see the tooltip
• Grouped tabs - with the tabs down the side, it would use indentation to maintain tab groups. Pop-up windows would thus be associated with the window they came from, rather than appear somewhere unrelated on the tab bar. Then I can close them all in one go, hide all the pop-up windows or move them all to a new location on the tab bar in one go
• Better control over new windows - basically every window operation can be forced in to a tab, or new window as desired. Nice
• Session management - Firefox seems to restore my session after it crashes or is killed. Otherwise on normal exit it just tells me that it's closing the tabs. This extension always restores the session with each tab's browse history. It looks like the extension in article for session management actively requires saving the session - true?

If anybody knows how I can get these again, especially the grouped tabs down the side, I'd love to hear about it.

Re:Tabbrowser Extension?

[GenKreton]

For session management in firefox >= 2.0.x.x, enter about:config, search for "browser.startup.page" and set it to "3." Restart firefox and watch the magic happen.

Re:Tabbrowser Extension?

[Rakishi]

Tabs at the side - it could put the window tabs down the side of the browser window. I can read them faster here, and with a lot open, still see the labels without having to put the mouse over them to see the tooltip

Google for this, I've seen a few methods and I think one extension that does this.

Grouped tabs - with the tabs down the side, it would use indentation to maintain tab groups. Pop-up windows would thus be associated with the window they came from, rather than appear somewhere unrelated on the tab bar. Then I can close them all in one go, hide all the pop-up windows or move them all to a new location on the tab bar in one go

Tab Groups is the closest one to real tab grouping but the current version is very minimal (but free of major bugs), and probably doesn't really do what you want. They'll be another version in mid-April likely and probably a faster release schedule after that.

Better control over new windows - basically every window operation can be forced in to a tab, or new window as desired. Nice

Look at Tab Mix Plus.

Session management - Firefox seems to restore my session after it crashes or is killed. Otherwise on normal exit it just tells me that it's closing the tabs. This extension always restores the session with each tab's browse history. It looks like the extension in article for session management actively requires saving the session - true?

Session Manager or Tab Mix Plus will do what you want.

Must-have?

[TikiTDO]

Not only have we already seen plenty of these articles, but a lot of the add-ons included in the article are at best superfluous and at worst plain useless not to mention outdated.

For instance take the Gmail/Yahoo notifiers; while both are a good idea, a lot of people might have a mail application open to check their company/school email as well as the free variety. Most of the eye candy certainly looks nice, but will just serve to increase your crash rate while occasionally being used to showcase all the purdy features to your friends. All-in-One gestures provides several services that are already implemented in the browser, and done a lot better there, I would suggest Mouse Gestures instead. As for the Answers add-on, there's a search bar built in to the browser for a reason.

There is also a several popular add-ons missing from the list; Adblock, NoScript, VideoDownloader, not to mention any developer add-ons such as Web Developer and Firebug. Though these are not included for obvious reasons the list feels woefully incomplete without.

Re:Must-have?

[bigstrat2003]

Er... Firebug is totally on the list.

Re:Must-have?

[TikiTDO]

Ahh, perhaps it is. I was so disappointed with the article I did not actually notice there was still a page to go.

APT-get Extensions?

[Doc Ruby]

I wish these extensions would register when installed with my APT repository. That way it's easier to upgrade along with the rest of my system, especially after an OS upgrade (every 6 months with Ubuntu). And easier to clone to a new machine.

The APT dependency management would also make it easier to install, say, a GreaseMonkey script and automatically install GreaseMonkey, because it's the script I want and GreaseMonkey is incidental.

A reverse dependency tool in Firefox would let me install FireFox on a host, then get suggestions of all the extensions I have installed elsewhere. But that's more of a reach than just including the extensions installs in APT packages.

Re:APT-get Extensions?

[progprog]

I wish these extensions would register when installed with my APT repository. That way it's easier to upgrade along with the rest of my system, especially after an OS upgrade (every 6 months with Ubuntu). And easier to clone to a new machine.

It's very straightforward to duplicate extensions as is -- just copy your profile directory over. And you could set up /home on a different partition and not have to bother with restoring it when you upgrade your OS, try a different distro, etc.

Re:APT-get Extensions?

[Doc Ruby]

And the same is true with each different kind of installed component of every system.

The point of APT is that it's all collected, centralized and manageable. Including dependencies, the nightmare for upgrades (and downgrades).

Now, if there is an APT tool that can import a directory or files into the DB, registering any files, then that's great. For example, Perl has it's -MCPAN installer, but it's much better to use the APT wrapper. Maybe the way to do it is just to wrap the extensions into .deb packages for APT to use. Maybe the extensions are already distributed as .debs.

Re:APT-get Extensions?

[Seraphim_72]

FEBE is your friend.

Re:APT-get Extensions?

[Doc Ruby]

That's pretty friendly. A great friend would then package them into .debs, so APT could manage everything. My best friend would then run APT for me.

Re:APT-get Extensions?

[Seraphim_72]

does your friend also get you a beer and cook dinner? ;)

Must be sunday.

[ericdfields]

That's when pseudo-news makes the front page. All that's fit to print, here on dot

The 2 I use the most

[aplusjimages]

I use Jeteye and Foxytunes a lot. Jeteye is a great bookmarking tool that you can use from one computer to the next. We use it at work as a way to allow everyone to have access to useful sites.

CookieSafe

[metamatic]

Yeah, CookieSafe makes cookies work the way they should do. It ought to be standard.

Re:Might have been just me . . .

[conradov]

Because 'Must have' is great link baiting. I found most of the extensions interesting, but not all suitable for me. Most people will probably just use the best subset fitting for them.

I need to get this of my chest.

[Anonymous Coward]

When the FUCK are we going to get "whole word" searching in Firefox?!

FEBE and CLEO

[Ngarrang]

I have found FEBE and CLEO to be invaluable.

Re:Might have been just me . . .

[J0nne]

If you're a web developer, 'measure it' is essential (so is Firebug, and 'colourzilla').

i don't see why anyone else would need those extensions, though.

Conquery & Linkification

[De Lemming]

My two favorite extensions aren't mentioned in the article. They are:

• Conquery - let's you select any text on a web page, and in the right click menu you have an option to send this text to search engines and other sites (Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Urban Dictionary, Google Images,...). The list is of course customizable, and you can use the standard Firefox search plugins.
• Linkification - converts plain text links to clickable links, very useful on forums like Slashdot. Has a lot of options.

Re:Conquery & Linkification

[Burlador]

Linkification - converts plain text links to clickable links Just double click and then middle click the link. No extension needed!

auto-complete bookmarks?

[superfast-scooter]

Anyone know of any extensions to auto-complete your bookmarked URL's the way Safari does?

Venkman debugger

[John Guilt]

Persnicketty, inadequate, but essential to my (undesired) javascript work---unless by now Firebug has accumulated

• programmable breakpoints ("break iff f(x0,x1,...)==true")
• watchable expressions ("display this.fnord()")
• line for executing expressions after debugging's stopped

Of course, being able to start it up more than once/firefox_session (the fix for 1.5 is buggy, and I can't use 2.x for testing reasons) would be a good idea, and being able to edit the source-file from within Venkman would be double-plus-favourite....

Missing extension

[J0nne]

Dragdropupload . If you have to upload files regularly, you'll enjoy this extension, as you just need to drag a file from your desktop/explorer/nautilus into the upload box, you you don't have to type the path manually, or navigate through one of those sucky 'open file' dialogs.

Slow News Day

[Anonymous Coward]

I could have sworn I typed slashdot.org but it looks like I'm on digg.com.

Wow

[HalAtWork]

Someone takes their porn browsing seriously!

Re:Wow

[ArAgost]

You betcha.

We get eight of these a week.

[Anonymous Coward]

> How the hell am I ment to make sense of 10 different blocks of text when all I want to read is 1 clean and simple article?

Welcome to Slashdot! Your request has been taken into consideration and filed in /dev/null where a sysadmin will grok it shortly. You may be interested in our newsprint edition, offering full 0.75 inch margins in which to write reader comments. Please pass the copy to the next person in line when finished.

-Stay cool, space cowboy...

PrefBar and LiveHTTPHeaders

[hweimer]

I have only encountered two really useful extensions so far, the rest usually being too bloated or insecure to install them.

The first is the PrefBar, which allows to quickly change browser options.
For example, enable or disable Cookies, Java(Script) with a single click. Or choose from different proxies, which is very useful in combination with Tor.

For web developers, LiveHTTPHeaders is a must. It allows you to track redirects, view Cookies or view and manipulate POST requests.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wah. Copied. from copy.

[Transcendor]

quite an identical article was printed about 2 month ago in German computer magazine c't. Computerworld is really not very fast to translate it into English.
Nothing to see here, move along, btw.

I wish Firefox had this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

An extension to tell me at what speed my page is loading would be good. Earlier incarnations of Firefox/phoenix and the Netscape browser would display speed in kb/s on the lower left part of the browser status bar while loading the page.

All that we see now is "...Waiting for "site name...", "...Transferring data from "...site name..." and "...Done..." once the page has been loaded.

Problem is: I do not have the skill set to write an extension. All my programming knowledge is in VB and PHP.

Re:I wish Firefox had this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Extended Statusbar does this.

Not really must-have

[jlherren]

I always feel like I'm the only one that thinks this way, but I'm mostly happy with FF without any extensions. (And my past experiences have shown that this is the stablest combination to have.)

20 Extensions but they missed the most obvious one

[Adeptus_Luminati]

Where's the extension that allows me to use firefox in a 3D fashion just like I.E. in Vista? Then I would really have no usefulness for Vista (not that I do now).

And yes I know, I'm comparing a browser to an OS... but hey, if they can make 3D surfing windows with transparency & it all works in XP, that'd be sweet. Cube browsing would earn them bonus points.

http://www.pctuning.cz/ilustrace2/Teuzz/Vista2/Mov ie-cube_maly.jpg

Adeptus
PS. Can you tell I'm not a programmer?

What is this shit?

[linvir]

Firefox extensions? What a fucking joke. Seriously, if this is the kind of shit we're going to have now, OSTG may as well shut Slashdot down and just tell the editors to go create Digg accounts.

Tomorrow on Slashdot.

• AWESOME pics of the new ipod!!
• 10 must-have Firefox extensions!!
• WOW! Steve Jobs took a shit!!
• George Bush outlaws oxygen (FO REAL YO)
• Top 10 consumer electronics items

Re:What is this shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so true. I wish I had mod points to mod you up!

Re:What is this shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

"WOW! Steve Jobs took a shit!!"

Given how anal-retentive he is, that would be news indeed!

Re:What is this shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.

Colorful Tabs?

[Khaed]

I don't think changing the tab color is really a "must have" extension. In fact, it strikes me as a pretty useless extension.

The ones I use that I consider "must have": Adblock (of course) and the filterset.g updater, forecastfox and target alert. And I'm not even sure about Forecast Fox. It just saves me having to open a weather webpage. I also like StopAutoPlay, Download Embedded, and the Download Manager Tweak so I can make it load in a tab.

Google browser sync

[oohshiny]

I've had problems with it not doing the right thing when used from several computers or when used with other extensions that use bookmarks. It also seems to slow down some operations significantly. In the end, I removed it; I think it still needs work.

Re:Google browser sync

[Ash-Fox]

I've had problems with it not doing the right thing when used from several computers

I have several computers with Firefox installed, not suffered issues with bookmark syncing (I barely add more bookmarks -- could be a reason). I'm particularly pleased with how well it syncs passwords and cookies.

It also seems to slow down some operations significantly.

It slows down the startup of the browser here. But that's mainly because it's asking for the password to access my encrypted password store. Other than that. Not noticed any slow downs.

In the end, I removed it; I think it still needs work.

Maybe you should raise your concerns with Google? Provide them feedback.

Re:Google browser sync

[oohshiny]

I have several computers with Firefox installed, not suffered issues with bookmark syncing (I barely add more bookmarks -- could be a reason). I'm particularly pleased with how well it syncs passwords and cookies.

Well, I have several thousand bookmarks and I change them frequently. I've ended up with duplications, deletions, and other problems.

I don't synchronize passwords or cookies; that's really a privacy issue to me.

Maybe you should raise your concerns with Google? Provide them feedback.

I have, but there has been no response.

I think the most useful change to Google Browser Sync would be to select synchronization per-folder. I really only want a small set of common bookmarks synchronized.

Re:Google browser sync

[Ash-Fox]

I don't synchronize passwords or cookies; that's really a privacy issue to me.

It's a privacy issue for me too.. That's why I encrypt them. I encrypt the passwords and cookies locally on the computer and I enable encryption on Google browser sync, so Google can't read it as plain text (though they could in theory bruteforce the data until they get the right pin).

Re:Google browser sync

[oohshiny]

Have you verified that the encryption and synchronization protocol are designed correctly?

Re:Google browser sync

[Ash-Fox]

Have you verified that the encryption and synchronization protocol are designed correctly

I looked at the sourcecode of the extension a while back out of curiosity (just extract the xpi file -- it's a zip file), it seemed the encryption was doing what it was meant todo.

I didn't really look too hard at the synchronization protocol because it was and is working fine for me.

Re:Google browser sync

[gozar]

I've had problems with it not doing the right thing when used from several computers or when used with other extensions that use bookmarks. It also seems to slow down some operations significantly. In the end, I removed it; I think it still needs work.

I used to have issues, but it seems to be working better in the last few months. Google Browser Sync does keep backups of each bookmark file, so if it does trash them, you can get them back. Look in your Profile folder for bookmarksbackup.

The plugin I always wanted..

[alexhard]

But has never come out: the ability to group tabs, sort of like what windows XP does to windows of the same type...I always operate with 30+ tabs open and it would be nice to have similar tabs (such as torrent trackers) grouped under a single one, with a list of the tabs appearing when I mouse over..

Re:The plugin I always wanted..

[kcbnac]

I do this automagically - I have one Window represent a "site" or "topic" then the tabs within all relate. If I find a link that is interesting, but unrelated, I spawn it in another window.

Also makes it easy to bookmark one window-session for later - "Oh, I better focus on XYZ because of the deadline...I'll bookmark this stuff on ABC for later."

Re:The plugin I always wanted..

[XahXhaX]

At the very least does Firefox allow you to drag your tabs in order to rearrange them? I know Opera permits it and that's basically my solution for organized tab browsing.

Re:The plugin I always wanted..

[deragon]

Since Firefox 2.0, you can reorder your tabs.

Re:The plugin I always wanted..

[Rakishi]

Tab Groups does this to some degree.

Re:The plugin I always wanted..

[alexhard]

heh, thanks for that one..not sure if I can live with losing the pixels the bar takes up, and considering the extra click it would need to get to stuff it's probably not very productive...still, a step in the right direction :)

Quicky

[Anonymous Coward]

Downthemall ... This is an open-source add-on that is amazing at downloading. Sure, it's a download manager/accelerator, but it will also do entire page pictures. Got a site that does not all hot linking? Downthemall will pull it all off with out a hitch.

Moderation Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's supposed to read "inciteful".

Re:Moderation Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're a piece of shit.

The complete list

[Anonymous Coward]

Tools for taming the Web
StumbleUpon
Yahoo Mail Notifier
Gmail Manager
Greasemonkey

Visual Improvements
Firefox Showcase
Cooliris Previews
Colorful Tabs
ChromaTabs

Matters of convenience
Google Browser Sync
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
Session Manager
All-in-One Gestures
IE Tab
Download Statusbar
Download Sort
Nuke Anything Enhanced

Information gatherers
Forecastfox
Answers

Web developer essentials
FireFTP
Firebug
Web Developer
MeasureIt
ColorZilla

Yes, there are more than twenty, but 20 sounds better, doesn't it? By the way, please skip the IE tab. If you are using Firefox, it is in your best interest to abandon sites that only support Internet Explorer. I should go on to say something more, because I apparently don't have enough characters per line: more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more more

Re:The complete list

[JensenDied]

IE tab is still useful so that you do not even need to use IE to visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Then again if you just use the basic automatic updates on windows machines IE tab is completely worthless.

Re:The complete list

[tylernt]

By the way, please skip the IE tab. If you are using Firefox, it is in your best interest to abandon sites that only support Internet Explorer.

Maybe that works for surfing pr0n in your mother's basement, but those of us living in the real world have to use IE for things like online learning, internal corporate websites, paying bills, etc. I'd love to be so self-righteous that I never use IE-only websites, but I'd kind of like to finish my degree, keep my job, and keep the lights on, thank you very much.

Re:The complete list

[Miseph]

While I agree that we should all avoid sites that require IE, the simple truth is that many of us can't. There are many critical business apps out there that absolutely require IE, and contacting them requesting Firefox support results in a "no, you need IE for security reasons". You'd think it would be enough to just tell them that they're wrong, and that many of the most secure sites in the world are entirely standards compliant and render just fine in any browser, but you'd be wrong. I personally have one such site, and I have witnessed several others. Many MLS services that are required by any real estate agent wishing to do business in this century, for example, require IE to work properly, and the only choices are to suck it up or do business in a different area with a different system.

Believe it or not, there area lot of things that take priority over ideological opposition to "IE reqired" websites, and sometimes there just isn't any choice.

IE Tab is absolutely a must-have.

Re:The complete list

[rainman_bc]

paying bills, etc

I dump my bank if it doesn't support Firefox.

Honestly, it's become stupid to write IE only sites, as you're now alienating 20% of the population...

if a site requires IE it's just ignorant project managers that made it so.

Besides, forge your headers - the site will probably work anyway in Firefox.

Re:The complete list

[c_forq]

It might not be the bank, it might be the electric company. My electric company supports online bill paying, but I have yet to try it out. And at least in my are you don't get a choice in electric companies, either you are on the grid or you aren't.

Re:The complete list

[rainman_bc]

FWIW, my bank lets me pay my electric, gas, credit cards, and even property taxes... I haven't mailed off a payment in over two years - it's all done online...

I feel your plight though, but still, if you bark enough and explain that you have a Mac and that the project manager who made the choice to only support IE is a tool who's living in 1999...

Re:The complete list

[maxwell demon]

Well, they are exactly 23. No wonder that he didn't spell out the exact number. Beware! Those are Illuminati extensions!

Re:The complete list

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

By the way, please skip the IE tab. If you are using Firefox, it is in your best interest to abandon sites that only support Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately, as others have noted, that just isn't practical. For example, the following sites that I use regularly require IE to function properly:

• the corporate intranet at work (uses custom stuff involving ActiveX, amongst other things)
• some of the financial companies I use
• Windows Update

None of those is expendable, and there is little chance of most of them supporting other browsers fully in the near future. (Unlike some people around here, I care more about the benefits of the financial services provided by my financial services companies than I do about have to use IE to access their web sites.)

Re:The complete list

[JonasH]

It's fine that you're fine with making pretty major decisions like switching banks based on quite inconsequential matters such as browser compatibility, but a lot of people value browsers pretty low on their priority list.

Besides, IE-only sites do not alienate 20% of the population. First of all, I doubt 20% is a correct number anyway, but that's not my point. It alienates the small percentage (I'd guess it's 1.0%) of the population that doesn't simply go "oh, I must use IE for this site", and switches to IE.

And no, last I heard Firefox didn't support IE tech such as for example ActiveX, which I believe a bunch of online banking sites use. Mine does anyway.

Re:The complete list

[CrankyOldBastard]

I find IETab very useful for a quick check on how a website I'm working on renders in IE. I don't like having lots of conditional comments or "jumps through hoops" javascript to ensure the sites work in IE and FF, so this gives me a two click way of viwing a page in IE and then back to FF.

Re:The complete list

[Negadecimal]

I find IETab very useful for a quick check on how a website I'm working on renders in IE.

Here Here. For developers whose sites are visited primarily by IE users (like mine), it'd be foolish to reject the IE view. IE Tab is especially handy because it preserves session state while showing an IE rendering.

Re:The complete list

[stony3k]

These days only the rare banks do not support Firefox. And those can normally be fooled by changing your headers. Also, if your bank uses ActiveX, then you really need to rethink your banking decisions. With all the security issues associated with ActiveX, its surprising that your bank still continues to use it. I'd probably block ActiveX even in IE.

Re:The complete list

[BrokenHalo]

It's fine that you're fine with making pretty major decisions like switching banks based on quite inconsequential matters such as browser compatibility

Hmmm. I would be pretty pissed off if I had to dump Linux and use Windows to do my banking, especially since I am always nervous about carrying out any sort of financial transaction on an OS known to have more ho^W^W^W be totally insecure.

Maybe you are wealthy enough to consider such a matter "inconsequential", but I'm not.

FWIW, though, most banks here (Australia) are now browser-agnostic. I haven't heard of one that insists on IE for something like 5 years now.

Re:The complete list

[killjoe]

If it's a public utility you can complain to the state. The state isn't supposed to force you to choose one corporations products.

Re:The complete list

[killjoe]

If a bank is so incompetent that they can't build a web site that works with any browser why would I trust my money with them.

Re:The complete list

[Random832]

Only the extra 3 are Illuminati. fnord.

Re:The complete list

[Gr8Apes]

Who updates windows? Get a stable installation w/ SP1 or later for XP, and then forget it.

Don't run IE or any other MS software and be behind an external blocking firewall. 99.9% of your potential issues disappear. That last 0.01% of issues can be handled by not visiting pr0n sites and using a smidgin of common sense when deciding what email to view in their HTML glory.

Re:The complete list

[rainman_bc]

The only problem I've had is with opera, and that's because they've called something a security hole that isn't.

My bank, upon logging in, opens a frame in a subdomain and that frame has some javascript in it to mvoe the top frame too. Kludgy yes, but neither FF nor IE call it a hole. Opera insists that allowing subdomains is too hard, and that it's the banks fault.

So I stopped using Opera :)

They should have coded it to allow subdomains to redirect.

Re:The complete list

[pugugly]

Yeah, why would I base my decision on the core competence and customer service of the bank. By the same token I won't use an electrician that can't change my oil and my car mechanic absolutely has to how to write video drivers.

Pug

Meh, 1 man's enhancement is another man's tacky...

[XahXhaX]

feature (or should that be tacked-on?) All I see are things either that I don't want or need, or that Opera already does and has been doing for the years I've used it, reinforcing my realization that I just don't need steak #2 when I've been enjoying steak #1 for some time. The only thing that still bothers me about Opera are _other people_--sites that refuse to work with Opera but almost certainly would if they didn't block you upfront for not using IE or Firefox.

Nothing like Adblock and VideoDownloader

[Soiden]

I only have 5 and I don't want to add more... But there are a few that I know I'm missing... It's this article's fault! And what about Auto Copy? Tab Mix Plus? These are better and more useful than ColorTabs... And, some like Adblock and VideoDownloader are just GODS.

how about just being able to install the plugins.

[plasmacutter]

so i tried to install some firefox plugins to allow me to say.. grab flv streams from google video/youtube w/o having to mess around with the activity window(safari) or trace down the spidering they use to forcibly coerce you into giving them page hits... and the things wont install on the mac version of firefox.

This is probably some security feature.. but actually having installable mac versions might persuade me to dump safari as my primary browser for firefox.

URLParams and Console2

[JPyObjC Dude]

Many of my faves are already covered but URLParams and Console2 are both handy additions to the developers toolbox.

URLParams is very handy for breaking down get params for web page calls which speeds up debugging of complex calls. I use this almost every day becuase the 3rd party app that I need to extend is heavy on get params.

Console2 is necessary to filter out many annoying css warnings that come out by default since FireFox 1.5.

Cheers,
JsD

lget

[loconet]

This is another must have extensions I usually install. It modifies the firefox download manager to allow you to directly specify a URL to download without opening the file in the browser first. It is handy for when you get sent URLS on e-mails, ims, etc and just want firefox have it download it directly without opening it (ie: similar to wget) without the need of an external downloader. ;)

My favourite Firefox "extension"...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the uninstaller.
Combined with Opera's installer you get a faster, more secure browser with more features. And it looks better. And it's got included clients for IRC and Mail (if you need them). And it kinda does everything firefox does with about 25 plugins. And it's not leaking memory. And it works on more platforms than the fx.

threat level

[magarity]

Those plugins are all very cute, but the plugin I rely on most is the one that displays the Homeland Security department's current threat level.

Re:threat level

[DragonTHC]

I still have a hard time believing that anyone who is smart enough to understand /. could be dumb enough to buy the load of shit being peddled by the bush administration.

that being said, how smart do you have to be to understand /. ??

Re:threat level

[Spacezilla]

Dude...

No, on second thought I think I'll let someone else make that cute ASCII drawing this time. :)

Re:threat level

[StikyPad]

that being said, how smart do you have to be to understand /. ??

At least 1 IQ point higher than you, apparently.

Re:threat level

[Alsee]

The best part is, each time it goes Green EVERYONE GETS LAID!

-

Make *browsing* better vs. make *browser* better

[InsurgentGeek]

Take a look at Gnosis (http://gnosis.clearforest.com/ or @ Mozilla add-ons site). Gnosis makes you smarter by adding people, company, organization and geography based navigation to any web page. Reading the news and want to find out about a person or company - just hover and click! It's quite cool and a very different kind of tool to those mentioned here. They focus on making your browser better - Gnosis tries to make browsing better

Opera does most of these anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Half these functionality Opera has natively without plugins, and its still smaller and faster then Firefox.
Firefox is great compared to IE, but people should really try a few browsers before settling on one they like.

Plugins are great in theory, but the less stable the app becomes the more you have,

Re:Opera does most of these anyway.

[LoverOfJoy]

So what are the top 10-20 Opera widgets? I enjoy opera but their widget feature is entirely unused by me. The last time I checked there was nothing worthwhile.

Screw em

[Anonymous Coward]

"Had you considered that perhaps some of your favourite sites use advertising to keep on top of the high cost of running a website?"

Screw em, if they fold another website will pop up in their place. I used to read salon.com.... but now that you cant get to any of their content without clicking through ads & enabling a bunch of nasty scripting... it is impossible for me to get in. Havent been to salon.com in ages, & i dont miss it a bit. Lots of my (former) favorite internet hangouts have disappeared (or been retooled into something useless) over the years, you just move on, its not a big deal.

If your website is dying because noone wants to punch the monkey, good riddance to ya! /old enough to remember when the web didnt have ads

Re:Screw em

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you try to visit only ad-free web sites, just for a week or two? I think you are a bit naive if you think that a free site would always just "pop up" to replace something like, say, google or any other major search engine. And what would you do without slashdot?

old enough to remember when the web didnt have ads

...and when the web had only a tiny fraction of the content it has today.

Re:Screw em

[Diamondback]

So, without ads, where do they get the money to stay online?

That's the obvious question. Do people just volunteer and donate all their time and money? Have you ever done that to help something else?

Re:Screw em

[Anonymous Coward]

>> old enough to remember when the web didnt have ads

> ...and when the web had only a tiny fraction of the content it has today.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I was on the internet for about 15 years before the first commercial ad appeared.

Maybe it had a "tiny fraction of the content", but you know what? It was *good* content. Very little crap. I much preferred that internet to the one we have today, run by big money and big companies who want to turn it into TV 2.0.

So yes, if all the ad-supported crap that's infested today's internet were to disappear tomorrow, I would not shed a tear. Gimme the internet of the 80's, and I'm happy. It all went to s**t starting in about 93-4. Before that there was no spam, no astroturfing, essentially no malware, no popup crap, no blinking crap (ok, no web :) ), and a far, far higher level of average user intelligence. You could post your cleartext email addr on usenet, or have it in your finger profile, and it wouldn't get "harvested".

So yeah, I'm 100% fine with getting all the ad-supported crap off the internet and taking it back to the spirit it had in the 80's.

Re:Screw em

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't everything so much better when it's only for the elites? If only there were a way that supersmart people like you could be in charge of everything so we poor masses could have appropriate guidance in our daily lives. Ah, utopia, where only the inner circle can be in charge.

Elitist prick.

Re:Screw em

[Anonymous Coward]

> Isn't everything so much better when it's only for the elites?

Well, it's much better when it's only for people who don't act to ruin it, yes.

If not harvesting email addys and spamming them to death makes one "elite", if not trying to jack unsecure machines into botnets makes one "elite", then yes, the internet was much better when it was only for the elites.

Re:Screw em

[DreamerFi]

So, without ads, where do they get the money to stay online?

I'm sorry, I'm not being paid to come up with another business model, they'll have to figure it out for themselves.

wtf!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone heard of Advanced Dork? It's hard to believe it didn't make this list.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2144/

20 Must-have Firefox Extensions

[Kuvter]

"Must-have" I don't think you know what that word means.

Re: 20 Must-have Firefox Extensions

[Silver Gryphon]

I'm running Windows anyway. It was hungry, so I fed it 8 of these. Windows is happy now.
I'm about to restart FireFox to install them... It's like I just fed my computer ice cream, sushi and Pine Sol. Could get interesting.

Re: 20 Must-have Firefox Extensions

[QuantumPion]

Dr. Strangespam: When one only wishes to bury ads, there's no limit to the amount of bandwidth they consume!

General: Mr. CEO, we cannot allow a flash-ad gap!

What I want...

[ebcdic]

... is an adblock that follows the links, so it costs the advertisers money.

Re:What I want...

[el americano]

Exactly! Although my motivations are for my favorite sites to not lose revenue, and so that they can't detect that I haven't read it. Seriously, how long is it until servers check which elements I have downloaded and warn me to turn off my adblocker?

Re:What I want...

[CodeBuster]

Seriously, how long is it until servers check which elements I have downloaded and warn me to turn off my adblocker?

or what? they wont show you their content? If they do that then F them because their competition is just a click away. If the advertisers and marketers hadn't been so damn greedy in the early days and abused every feature for advertising gain (i.e. pop-up, pop-under, dancing flash always on top ads, and the rest) then people wouldn't have so quick to develop such powerful counter-measures and blocking tools to shut them up. They poisoned the water hole and they can damn well drink from it now that the tables have turned.

Re:What I want...

[Firehawke]

Already exists. A few years back (not sure if it's true anymore) VG-Network had their downloads section linked to an ad blocking checking system. If you had an adblocker of any kind it could detect, you'd be told you couldn't proceed without turning it off.

Re:What I want...

[LunaticTippy]

Wish I'd saved a modpoint. You are absolutely right. If the ad-bastards had shown even a glimmer of respect for their product I would not feel so angry and self-righteous about blocking everything except text ads all the time.

The whole mentality is wrong. They'd rather have a million extra angry eyeballs who hate their ad than lose even the chance of a single sale.

I just wish there was a way to adblock in real life. I'm getting scared of the more and more ad-infested world we live in. Ads in airplanes and lightrail are the latest abominations. The sad thing is they aren't even making that much money from them. I'd gladly pay an extra $0.30 for an ad-free airplane ride but I'm not given the choice.

Oh well, once we're all wearing total-immersion VR suits 24/7 adblocking the realworld will be trivial.

Re:Might have been just me . . .

[fm6]

Firebug and Colourzilla sound interesting. But what's the point of measureit? Relying on fixed-size elements is a bad practice.

must-have?

[TuomasK]

Why are they must-have? What do they offer for my Opera browser?

Does it work with Tab Mix Plus?

[merikari]

I know, I like to tweak until something breaks. Any idea, if this extension would cause problems with Tab Mix Plus?

Re:Does it work with Tab Mix Plus?

[Rakishi]

1. It doesn't work with FF 2+
2. Probably, hell it may cause problems all on it's own. I mean let me quote it's webpage "This extension strongly unrecommended. Tab Mix is recommended instead of this, because it is stable, light, and it covers most useful features of this."

Re:The complete list -- MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual article is worthless and shameless advertising. This list is, more or less, the entire article's worth of information.

Here's a list of mine...

[hacker]

I've posted my list back about a year ago, and I still use every single one of them every day... (I also describe how to get around a "bug" in FF that forbids non-standard port connections). Check it out here. I also spoke at my local LUG about the same thing in January.

Here's a list of the extensions I'm currently using in my Firefox build (you can see how I have it tricked out with all of my theming and extensions over here):

• Sage, a really slick and fast rss aggregator/reader for Firefox. It docks on the sidebar and is visible with a simple Alt-S keystroke. Very nice, and easy for me to catch up on some quick headlines when I need to.
• AdBlock Plus with the AdBlock Filterset G Updater to stop the flood of useless ads from coming at me. I did have to add one small rule for Google's ads, because I do actually like the recommendations they provide from time to time, and it helps out sites I visit with a little revenue. That regex looks like this: @@*.googlesyndication.com/*
• Web Developer, a very useful and slick toolbar/menu driven suite that allows me to do all kinds of things to websites I'm viewing, including validation, showing where their css classes are, manipulating forms, cookies, images, and dozens of other features. Hands-down, the most-useful extension I have as a developer/tweaker of web content.
• PrefBar, another powerful extension I use every single day. This one allows me to change the capabilities of my browser with a simple click of a checkbox. Want Java enabled? Click. Sick of popups? Click. I have Colors, Images, Javascript, Java, Flash, Popups, Proxies, Pipelining, Referers, Cache on my bar. Its completely customizable, and very well-done.
• SwitchProxy lets me manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations quickly and easily. I can also use it as an anonymizer to protect my system from prying eyes. I have Squid, Squid + Privoxy, Privoxy + Tor and i2p enabled in my configuration at the moment. Quick and easy, and one status-bar dropdown lets me change from one to another.
• FasterFox gives me a little boost by auto-configuring some parameters for faster browsing, such as link prefetching, pipelining, DNS cache, paint delay, and others.
• ForecastFox, weather.. in my status bar. I've changed the icons a bit with a separate icon pack called Lansing, which is nice adn small and out of the way. Minimal is the way to go on my toolbars and status bars.
• Linky lets me open or download all or selected links in a page, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows. A simple right-click on any link or web address, and away I go.
• Google PageRank Status gives me a quick overview of the PR of a site in the current view. This is useful as I do a lot of web work, and knowing what kind of sites get a decent or poor PR is useful information.
• SearchStatus is another SEO toolbar fo

Tabmix, Geckotip and others

[pcause]

Here are some I find must haves:

- Tab Mix Plus: Gives you a lot more control of and functionality for your tabs, including multi-level undo for close.

- Videodownloader: Get a local copy of a YouTube video.

- GeckoTip: I have a tablet PC and if you do you MUST get this

- Firebug: Did he include this? If not best way to see what you have open in your tabs.

Aardvark

[Forget4it]

Aardvark is great to prepare a page before print out Use RIght Click: Start_aardvark Highlight the area of the page you want then CNTL-I nukes the rest. http://karmatics.com/aardvark/

Needed: Nuke Everything Else

[srobert]

I need something like Nuke Anything Enhanced, except that I want to eliminate everything else except the content I'm interested in. I have a small laptop with a 10-inch screen. I resize the fonts in Firefox so that my tired old eyes can see them. If there are 4 columns in the page, one with content and 3 with menus and ads, then with the enlarged font, the content column may have only 3 to 5 words per line. This leads to lots of scrolling. But with a "Nuke Everything Else" extension, the content would fill out the page. Another way to do the same would be an extension that opened up the one item in a separate tab or window by itself.

Re:Needed: Nuke Everything Else

[dabrepus]

There is a plugin that might help you: Aardvark.

It has an 'isolate' option, that will let you do what you are mentioning.

You can try it out here: http://karmatics.com/aardvark/


Cheers.

Re:Needed: Nuke Everything Else

[evilviper]

there are 4 columns in the page, one with content and 3 with menus and ads, then with the enlarged font, the content column may have only 3 to 5 words per line. This leads to lots of scrolling.

Go to View -> Page Style -> No Style

Viola, no page formatting at all (no columns), you just have to scroll down to the start of the content you want to see.

Re:Needed: Nuke Everything Else

[dog_surfer]

Another alternative for content display is the GreaseMonkey extension, coupled with Platypus. Using the Platypus Remove and Set-Style buttons allows you to remove/resize text & images, in effect redesigning the web page to suite your needs.
GreaseMonkey
Platypus

Re:Needed: Nuke Everything Else

[Superfluid Blob]

aardvark does this.

My personal blog about what extentions i use

[sharperguy]

Extensions I need: AdBlock+ Extensions I like and use: Google-Browser-Sync DownThemAll StumbleApon I have no idea why colorful tabs is a "must have" extension, or measurement for that matter. If I want the weather in my area I can watch it on TV or look out the window, besides none of them support my area within 100miles at least.

If you don't want to click a million "Next"s...

[amrittuladhar]

...here is a list of the extensions from TFA:
StumbleUpon Yahoo! Mail Notifier Gmail Manager Greasemonkey
Firefox Showcase Cooliris Previews Colorful Tabs
Chroma Tabs Google Browser Sync Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer Session Manager
All-in-One Gestures IE Tab Download Statusbar Download Sort
Nuke Anything Enhanced ForecastFox Answers FireFTP
Firebug Web Developer MeasureIt
ColorZilla

Why does Firefox redirect google.com to google.de?

[angel'o'sphere]

Last version of firefox had a "bug" in the search bar, it would not honour my google settings but force me to use google.de and also restricted me to search for german web pages. This I could fix by googeling around, finding people with the same problem.

Now I have problem when I type "google.com" into the address bar, google is redirecting me to google.de. That only happends with firefox though, and yes I'm logged on to google so google knows who am I and should have no reason to redirect me.

I only found one hint how to fix this, but that advice does not work for me. So: what's wrong with firefox? And frankly: Firefox is 100 times better than IE, no doubt, but sooooooo many options I need to tweak are only available via about:config, and it has so maaaaany bugs. I only use it on Ajax sides that won't render good in Safari.

angel'o'sphere

Speaking of "Next"...

[phozz bare]

Could someone write an extension that causes Firefox to automatically precache all links containing the word "next"? or ">"? or if the link is an image, check if it's named "right" (like a right arrow), or if its ALT tag says "next".... That way, the next page would always load while the user is reading the current page, eliminating the wait - especially when on a slow connection or if the site is undergoing a slashdotting.

Am I the only one who thinks this would be a good idea?

-phozz

Re:Speaking of "Next"...

[magerquark.de]

In 1998, I did parts of my diploma thesis about such a thing - page pre-caching for web pages coming within mpeg2 transport streams onto a set-top-box (with rather limited amount of RAM).

Re:Speaking of "Next"...

[LordSnooty]

Am I the only one who thinks this would be a good idea?

No

Re:Might have been just me . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Relying on fixed-size elements is a bad practice.

Making sweeping generalizations like that one is an even worse practice.

Good luck building your web page graphics in ems or inches.

Noscript

[Travoltus]

I'm shocked and awed that this so-called guru didn't mention noscript.

That's far more important than anything - except adblock, that is.

Noscript + adblock = respect my securitaaaaah!

Aardvark

[FlynnMP3]

http://karmatics.com/aardvark/

It allows easy and quick modification of the page you are looking at. Most often use I have for it, is to 'Isolate' an article so I don't have to look at all the banners/advertisements/pop-up divs/annoyingly narrow width main content.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

How about a list of Must-Not_Haves

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a list of Must-Not-Haves?

Personally, I'd like to do away with the built in adware - that Google search box.
I'd also like some of the rather glaring security holes fixed - like that restore last session option.

My must haves

[muridae]

Moji and Moji-en Japanese dictionary in Firefox.
ASpellFox My spelling sucks, before FF2.0 this was my best way to avoid misspelling 'the' every other post.
BugMeNot This really should be built into the browser now.
NoScript White list for javascript, everything is default blocked till you tell it otherwise.
User Agent Switcher Fun for masquerading as a Nintendo Wii, or any other browser.
Leet Key Ever been around a usenet group where ROT13ing Cisco was a safe way to not announce where you work at? Me either, but this has some fun uses.
Close Button I prefer the single 'close the current focused tab' button from FF 1.6
DOM Inspector andWeb Developer If you either develop webpages, or visit really buggy ones, these can be very useful.

Thank god!

[Seumas]

Phew. I was worried for a moment. It has been almost ten minutes since Digg or Slashdot posted another list of "must-have firefox extensions". Don't scare me like that, again. I need a new list of such items at least every other minute!

Also, more interesting would be a top list of GREASEMONKEY PLATYPUS scripts.

Copy as plain text

[HomelessInLaJolla]

A life-saver in this "MS-we-know-what-you're trying-to-do" world I felt an enormous sigh of relief, as if a thousand pounds of stress had just left me, when I read that at least one other person in the world has experienced this.

Whenever I'm forced to use Windows I often have Notepad open just as a sanitizer for my copy/paste buffer because, under the hood of the MS proprietary in-home Big Brother spy system, there's no telling what extra crap is pulled along with every copy and paste.

Re:Copy as plain text

[Anonymous Coward]

I felt an enormous sigh of relief, as if a thousand pounds of stress had just left me, when I read that at least one other person in the world has experienced this. If you mean to avoid picking up HTML formatting - which is what I think you mean, and what the GP meant - yeah, except it's usually done at the 'paste' end: Paste Special, Unformatted Unicode Text. All apps should support that, I think it's one of MS's guidelines.

However that last bit almost reads "I'm paranoid my apps are passing secret messages to each other through the clipboard" - if that what you meant then no, that's probably just you.

meh.

[VorpalEdge]

I wish most of these extensions worked on the firefox 3 alphas. I'm actually having a much better experience with 3.0 alphas than I did with earlier versions, but the main problem is a dearth of extensions that are any good. Right now I'm running NoScript and Adblock Plus... and while I certainly don't need anything more, some of the extensions listed in the article would have been pretty nice if I could, I don't know, use them?

Time to take a quick peek through addons.mozilla.org again... hopefully they have something now.

Heh, flashgot got updated.

Blocking Websites With Custom Messages

[aussie_a]

I just had a dig at someone for using ad blocker and not supporting the websites they visit while I myself use a pop-up blocker. So I've disabled my pop-up blocker in favour of only visiting websites that don't have unwanted pop-ups. However as a university student I often google for information without paying attention to the website I found the information at, so I'd be prone to visiting the same 10 websites that have pop-ups. Is there an extension to block a particular domain with a custom message (so I can tell the difference between pages that don't exist and pages I've blocked)?

Because one size does not fit all

[knorthern knight]

Consider also, MS Word. It's got tons of "features" which you or I don't want need. But a few people somewhere need each one. They probably complain about "unnecessary stuff" that you or I consider essential. You can't satisfy everybody with one set of features. The best approach is to make a basic browser, and let people add in whatever extensions they want.

***GOOGLE*** redirects you to localized sites

[knorthern knight]

It happens whether you use Firefox or IE. Google use your IP address to make the decision. This allows them to sell ads to German companies, and know that only people in Germany will see those ads. I'm in Canada, and Google re-directs www.google.com to www.ggogle.ca. You can over-ride local re-direction by going to http://www.google.com/intl/en/

Re:***GOOGLE*** redirects you to localized sites

[angel'o'sphere]

I have overwritten that!

In Safari google honours it, with Firefox it does not. So it certainly is a Firefox issue.

angel'o'sphere

Re:***GOOGLE*** redirects you to localized sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, you need to acquire a clue. Works fine for me in Firefox.

Re:20 Extensions but they missed the most obvious

[digitalchinky]

Cube. You mean Beryl yes? You can set that up so windows are interactive in most all positions. You have a use for vista?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_(window_manager )

and on the home front /. becomes digg

[Sebastopol]

can we have a rule: No N-Best Of Lists on /. Ever.

Re:and on the home front /. becomes digg

[oringo]

dugg

Gah

[Greyfox]

Where are NoScript, CustomizeGoogle and CookieSafe? Those are the three I install every single time I install Firefox somewhere. NoScript blocks scripts (Including flash) by default and allows you to enable them on a site-by-site basis. CookieSafe does the same thing for cookies. And CustomizeGoogle lets you filter out those damn experts-exchange hits from your searches so you don't waste time going to their site. Those three reduce the web's obnoxious by a huge degree. Don't leave home without them.

Re:Gah

[LordSnooty]

So many sites put JS at the heart of their code that unblocking sites for NoScript quickly became a chore. So much so that I had to remove the extension. I'd rather run whatever risk NoScript is protecting me from and continue to observe safe browsing practices. I get the feeling that NS is for the ultra-paranoid.

Re:Gah

[Greyfox]

I just don't like animation on a web page so I end up blocking all avenues that it comes in on. Noscript blocks Javascript and Flash and I set animated GIFs not to play. I guess I don't really browse out to a lot of pages on an average day so it really isn't a bother to enable the few sites that I want to have scripts work on. It's really a small price to pay for not having sites mess with my browser.

Web developer list

[dcam]

Console2 - improved javascript error console
Greasemonkey - inject your own javascript
livehttpheaders - capture headers
WebDeveloper - major toolbox
HtmlValidator - based on HTML Tidy, validates HTML as your view pages

Needs some config options

[swb]

Google Browser Sync seems to do a good job on passwords and cookies, but it does a *weird* job on bookmarks.

I organizized my bookmarks shortly after installing it and made the mistake of doing a full refresh, thinking it would somehow sync up my bookmarks the way I had just organized them on my home PC. Instead, it totally *trashed* my bookmarks. But strangely they kind of half-recovered about a month or so later.

What GBS needs is a way to to config sync for each item it syncs. I'd like to have multiple RW, RO relationships, conflict resolution rules (perhaps with some browser considered the winner always), and a way to specify what a refresh should do -- push out changes or pull down changes.

Since my bookmarks have stabilized it seems better, though.

gestures is the only one worth a damn

[Anonymous Coward]

the other ones are for kids to troll myspace

Re:Might have been just me . . .

[Eric Pierce]

. . but I just dont see why many of those are 'Must have'. I mean how often do I need to measure stuff? Not to mention that the Web Developer toolbar now has a ruler (under Misc.) that is a better implementation as it doesn't jerk when you move the measured area around.

Cookiepie: different webmail accounts in your tabs

[nektra]

http://www.nektra.com/oss/firefox/extensions/cooki epie/

Re:Who needs Firefox?

[Dark_Lord_Prime]

Funny, my experience is exactly reversed.

Firefox 2 runs fine, with multiple extensions installed and active.

IE7 somehow fills up my physical AND virtual RAM, sitting idle. And bogs down badly, for no apparent reason. And crashes regularly. And usually takes the desktop down with it.

Devloper Extension

[Anonymous Coward]

This was posted on digg a week ago. I thought it lacked to outline the developer extensions in firefox. So Ive posted my own Top 10 web developer extensions for firefox hopefully that might be a useful resource!

Why thank you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm honored!

.
      \|||/
      (0 o)
,--ooO-(_)---------,
|``````` A++ ``````|
|```` TOP TROLL ```|
| WOULD FEED AGAIN |
'------------Ooo---'
      |__|__|
      || ||
      ooO Ooo

Somehow it doesn't look quite right, but it took ages just to get past the lameness filter.

Other ones

[zobier]

Other good ones are GraphicsEx, which lets you save a page as an image - like a screen grab but it gets the whole page - really useful for web designers/developers and text/plain that let's you highlight a URL in text and open it in another tab/window.

Good bad and useless

[Dragonlord_Warlock]

I may be wrong, since this is a user preference thing. But a lot of their "Must Haves", I can do without. Where the good stuff such as MR Tech Local Install, Image Zoom, Picture This, Google Notebook, etc. They are much better than crap such as IE Tab, etc. Some they did mention are good, such as GMail Notifier (when it working), Google Browser Sync, etc. But some of them are total crap and give you no real functionality, other than bloat.

Noscript kicks ass!

[turing_m]

It's probably the number one way to prevent malware entering your system, other than being careful what you click on with your email. I have no idea why it's not on the list.

Re:Noscript kicks ass!

[kalirion]

Not only that, but I've noticed many pages loading much quicker with this extension - most likely due to all those ad scripts being blocked from doing their thing.

Re:Might have been just me . . .

[J0nne]

Measuring margins, padding, etc.

Besides if you're going to use images, you're pretty much forced to at least take pixel sizes into consideration.

Add Nuke Anything Enhanced to that list

[DongleFondle]

. . . and if some little annoying item should happen to make it through all of those filters, just nuke it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/951/

Here are my usability add ons

[gelfling]

Note they're for Seamonkey 1.1.1 not FF:

Adblock plus
Dutchblock
IE Tab
Clear Data
Extension manager
Extension uninstaller API
Spellbound & US dictionary

All-In-one gestures vs Mouse Gestures

[Dan Ost]

I quit using All-in-one gestures some time ago when I got frustrated with the fact that it didn't allow me to use gestures until the page was loaded. It would never allow me to use gestures to close empty tabs (like when you open a link in another tab and the link turns out to be a download).

Mouse gestures doesn't have these limitations, but it's missing some features that I like from all-in-one.

Anyone know if all-in-one has fixed these limitations in recent releases?

Use flashblock instead

[Pigeon451]

I use flashblock and pageanimator, which disables animated gifs. EVERY page I visit is static, without crazy bouncing animations and flashing signs.

If I want to view an animation, I just put my mouse over the image and it will start animating. If I want to view the flash item, I can click the static flash image or disable flash for the page at the click of a button.

I had to use IE once to load a page, and was horrified to see what kind of crap people put up with these days...

major gaps

[DocForbin]

In addition to adblock plus, drag de go and tab mix plus should be on any essential extension list.

Mouseless Browsing

[CedarPlank]

A lifesaver if you have RSI and are trying to avoid the mouse...

Mouseless Browsing
Injects little CSS number boxes to the right of each link, which you can open with the numberpad. Add a (+) after the number to open in a new tab.

Next Please
Also nice... watches for Previous and Next links on the bottoms of pages and assigns a hotkey to them (Control+Shift Left Right, I think)

That's why Firefox is my 4th choice

[Sithgunner]

Just one word, does Firefox need to install 20 extensions to make it comfortable?

At least if Firefox is much lighter (like, starts up in 1 second) and is as fast as Opera's rendering, then it is proper that it is a stripped down browser as a default layout. And then again, many many developers and just because the source is open in FOSS way never means the software is great too. And yes, IE, it's worse.

That's why I use IE wrappers (which usually has almost all of nice features built in) or Opera (nice features are mostly all built in too) or even Safari (which somehow has enough features, though apparently it lacks enough features to be complately comfortable).

All these times, a bunch of paid but reliable worker is better than million hobby programmers. Who is going to actually understand the source code in all those big FOSS projects? no one. no documents, no nothing with immature developers here and there.

slow!

[cdn-programmer]

I installed the new firefox and installed a selection of tools I thought would be quite useful. Now the browser seems slow.

Is there a way to toggle these tools on and off?

The one that I think might be the problem is the JaJah interface. It works... but seems akward. There are things like you have to type in the number you want to call yet JaJah has a phone number list. The issue is that the browser interface doesn't seem to know about the phone number list so you get caught in a catch-22.

I am under the impression that it might be the JaJah code that is slowing the browser down because their website seems to really slow things down.

Thanks for the Responses

[srobert]

I tried out a few of them. Aardvark seems to best fit what I was looking for. Now I can read smirkingchimp.com with the text blown up large and spread across the entire screen width.
Thanks.

Filterset.G no longer relelvant.

[Kadin2048]

Adblock Plus "subscribes" to various blocklists, which at least last time I checked, does not include Filterset.G (due to licensing problems -- the maintainer of Filterset.G doesn't allow redistribution).

ABP's blocklists are similar to Filterset.G and I think in time, the 'real' Filterset.G will fade from significance. Using ABP's auto-updated blocklists, I basically don't see any ads at all, except every once in a while on a foreign page (I subscribe, obviously, to the English-language block lists, which don't target foreign servers as heavily).

So anyway, the short version is, there's no reason to care about Filterset.G if you have Adblock Plus (which is what you should have if you want adblocking).

SpamGourmet is your friend.

[Kadin2048]

Spamgourmet is your solution for sign-up email addresses.

You go to their site once, and give them your real email address, and create a handle. Then, you can go to web sites and create addresses of the form [someword].[handle]@spamgourmet.com where [someword] is any character string you want, generally something that has to do with the site you're signing up for. The address will work for a set number of messages, and then disable itself, eating anything that's sent. (By 'eating' it means deleted without any confirmation or response.)

You can control the number of emails that the address will work for (if you want to override the default that you can set), by making an address of the form [someword].[integer].[handle]@spamgourmet.com, where the integer can be anything from 1 to 20, I think.

They also have some advanced features you can use, like specifying particular senders that are OK globally (so messages from them don't count against the number-before-kill on an address), either by address or domain name, or "exclusive senders" who are only OK when they send to a particular address. The latter feature is really good for mailing lists.

And the best part is that they have an absolute slew of domain names. If a site won't let you register with a "spamgourmet.com" address, you can just use one of their many other domains with the same address. They own some pretty innocuous-seeming ones, like "xoxy.net", so if you're smart about constructing the address, it's very hard for anyone to tell that you're using a one-shot addy.

I've been using them for a few years now, and the volume of spam they've saved me from is just staggering. Every once in a while I log in and look at the number of "eaten" messages ... on some addresses, there are literally tens of thousands of spam messages that have been blocked.

There one of a select number of free services that I would pay money for, but (at least last time I checked) they seem to have sufficient funding so that they're not even soliciting donations. Truly a remarkable service.