Jay’s Brainfart

I keep seeing these blogs with their top 10 Firefox extensions, and I always wonder why there are certain ones missing that I consider absolutely indispensibile… so I thought I’d write my own list.

I’m a techie, but I don’t do anything overly-complicated with Firefox at home, or work. I prettymuch just browse, email, blog etc… just like normal consumers… so thats who I’m going to write this list for.

These extensions are in no particular order…

1.) Download Statusbar

This extension is a must - you get a little toolbar at the bottom of your browser window that shows the status of all your downloads.

Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them.

3.) Video Downloader

Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion and other 60+ video sites as well as all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc).

4.) FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

5.) IE Tab

For when you have no choice but to use Internet Explorer, this little extension lets you open a site within firefox using the IE rendering engine, effectively embedding IE within Firefox.

6.) del.icio.us Bookmarks

If you’re on the net, you really need to use del.icio.us for your bookmarking needs. So simplistic, yet so effective. This extension replaces the standard bookmarks in Firefox with your delicious bookmarks, and allows you to tag and save bookmarks as well.

7.) Fasterfox

We all know the Firefox is faster at loading pages than IE… but do you want to make it faster? This extension allows you to tweak Firefox’s rendering settings to make your pages load quicker.

8.) Greasemonkey

This is my new favorite extension. Its a little techie-orientated I admit, but so useful! Greasemonkey allows you to install website-specific scripts from sites like userscripts.org. These scripts can do anything from removing adverts on MySpace, optimising & re-skinning gmail or customising the way your google searches to display in two columns. Truely awesome.

9.) Yoono

Yoono instantly suggests similar sites, blog notes and people sharing the same interests while you are surfing, for each page you open.

10.) Tab Effects

This is purely cosmetic, and I wouldn’t say essential, but it definitely adds a little flair to Firefox. It applies an Ubuntu-esque cube effect when you switch tabs.

11.) Mouse Gestures

Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard.

12.) Foxlingo

The ultimate language tool. This extension allows you to translate the current webpage . There are currently over 1,000 different language pairs. The extension can be set to automatically translate a page based on its domain too.

13.) Tab Catalog

Shows thumbnail-style catalog of tabs, as you see below:

14.) Split Browser

This splits the content area of the browser window anyway you want to - above, below and to the left and right. Extremely useful if you want to keep tabs on a particular webpage at all times (your email for example) without switching tabs.

15.) CTRL Tab Preview

This is an extension that replaces the behavior of Ctrl+Tab. Instead of directly changing tab it works some thing like Alt+Tab on windows. It views preview of the tab and you can change directly to the tab you want to or just go through all tabs to see what you got in them.

Ok well thats the end of my little list. I hope you find these useful!

Please feel free to post a comment and let me know what you think, if certain extensions should be added etc. :)