Huddled Masses

This is an update on my original list of Critical Extensions for FireFox, I’m actually adding a few essentials, and replacing one on my list. I gotta say, at this point, I’m pretty happy with FireFox, except when I have to install it on a new computer and I have to come here to find my list of all the extensions I need. [:-|] The fact that I need a dozen of these to feel comfortable seems to indicate that Firefox might be stripped down just a bit too much. I wonder how hard it would be to make an “extension pack” where I could create a one-click installer that would give you several extensions. I know the Spellcheck extension installs two extensions, so it’s probably possible …

The bottom line is: we need an easier way to find and install these, and particularly, we need a better way to get to the ones we want when we know what we want. The Mozilla Update site is out of date, is missing many extensions (just try finding the ones listed below, half of them aren’t there), and it lacks a search feature or even the ability to sort extensions by downloads. It’s “best” lists are cluttered with stupid extensions in the “humor” category which really needs to be removed completely from the official website. I’ve taken to using the extensions mirror which is searchable and current, or even the Mozilla Developers extension room which lists them all on one page.

Anyway, for now, and for you, the best option is just to read on and get all of these, [;)] I’ll have to see about adding direct “install” links via the extensions mirror.

1. The first extension you have to install is always the one that fixes the tabs to the way you want them, for me, that’s the Tabbed Browsing Extensions – Perennially missing from the official site, this extension is the single biggest (and thus, potentially problematic) extension there is. It even has it’s own prefferences dialog, with more choices than you can shake a stick at. Some highlights: The ability to put the tab bar on the bottom, the way my wife likes it. One-Window surfing; no matter what, everything else opens in a tab (thank you! I can even “View Source” in a tab, if I want). New tabs immediately to the right of the current one, instead of 10 tabs over at the right end. New tabs open in the background, so I can keep reading this page while I want for them to finish loading. Now, I’m trying to replace this with Tabbrowser Preferences because most of the Firefox developers seem to feel that it’s always responsible when you have a problem with your browser. Of course, to fully replace the functionality of it, I’m also using miniT and undoCloseTab and session saver, and I still can’t get tabs to open immediately on to the right of the current tab, and I occasionally have a link open a new window instead of a tab.
2. Super Drag-n-Go has to be the second thing you install, much better than the Paste and Go extension I mentioned previously, it lets you automatically search with whatever search engine you have selected by just dragging the text a half-inch or so. You can download images the same way, and open plain-text URLs.
3. Download Status Bar is probably my next favorite extension, since it stops the annoying “download status” and “download finished” windows from popping up, and corrals my active and finished downloads on a thin bar at the bottom of the browser.
4. Link Toolbar and LinkIt provide easy navigation within sequences of pages (e.g. Web comics, blogs, forums, or technical specs), and digs up RSS feeds and other “alternative” view of pages, as well as providing the “up” button that the Google toolbar emulates, giving me the ability to go up one folder level in a website with just my mouse.
5. ConQuery comes in handy for searching too, since it puts all my search engines in a sub-menu whenever I right-click text on a page.
6. IEView sadly made it onto my essentials list, because there are some pages that just refuse to work with FireFox, including, most frustratingly, my dlink router’s admin page.
7. Disable Targets for downloads is a really nice extension that simply hides some of those extra empty windows you get on downloading.

1. Add Bookmark Here is crucial, allowing me to add bookmarks several levels deeply MUCH easier than before.

There’s a few others that I really like, but which are clearly not essentials:

1. Bookmarks Synchronizer is a different sort of plugin that most people will have no use for. It allows me to store a copy of my bookmarks on my webserver, so that I can keep my home and work bookmarks synchronized. Anything I bookmark at home shows up at work, and vice-versa. To me, that’s priceless [:)]
2. Scrapbook lets me collect data from the web in several different ways, write notes about them, highlight them, and even edit them. Among the other uses I find for this is storing copies of receipts from on-line merchants.
3. SpellBound is a spell checker which will interactively spellcheck any text you type in a web form. I’m trying to remember to always use it to spell-check my posts here, for instance.
4. TargetAlert shows a little file-type icon next to links that point to files that aren’t plain html. That is, it doesn’t mark php or asp, but it marks PDF files and ZIP files, so I know without “scrubbing” the links whether they are going to cause me to download something …
5. Diggler lets me look up a page in Google’s cache or Archive.org when I hit a 404.
6. The Web Developer tool bar is another one of those special case tools. If you’re not a web developer, just ignore it. If you are, you’re really going to want it: with the ability to disable styles, referrer logging, and Javascript from a toolbar menu, it provides easy ways to test your site designs. The “outline block level objects” feature has saved me hours of debugging style sheets by helping me figure out where that extra white space is coming from, and the validation, images, and information tools are worth the download on their own.

1. AdBlock Alphabetically first in the official list, this plugin is another I feel I need to get proper control over what get’s blocked and what doesn’t. The ability to block objectionable advertisers is high on my list, but more importantly, I have control over what gets blocked, and when.

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