For my first product review on this site, I decided to share the Firefox extensions I find most useful. If you have not switched to Firefox already as your primary browser, I would be curious to know why not. In any event, one of the benefits of Firefox is all the incredible free extensions that are available. Here are the extensions I like with the links to download them. And please feeel free to comment if I left out any outstanding ones. There are so many and I am sure I have only discovered a small handful!
- downTHEMall! This is a useful for downloading multiple items, pictures, etc. from a single webpage in one shot. If this did not exist, I would have written it myself. When you need this, you need this, it can save huge amounts of time.
- MouseGestures. This extension saves you a tremendous amount of time navigating through web sites. The functionality is deep, and it is extensible, but in a nutshell you can go forward and backward through pages by just using your mouse. Very simple to use, MouseGestures is a huge efficiency gainer.
- Wayback. Adds the useful ability to go back in time and see what a web site looked like in the past. I don't use it that often, but it is incredible that archive.org is keeping this repository.
- Adblock. Names says it all.
- Customize Google. Ads useful extra links to your Google search results.
- del.icio.us toolbar. This is a must have. I have been using del.icio.us for the past few months and it is super useful social bookmarking tool., Later on this site, I have planned to publish a feed of del.icio.us links.
- PDF download. Adds the useful capability to open PDF files in a new tab which is not the Firefox default.
- Alexa Sidebar Again. Not as nearly useful as the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer (which rocks), nevertheless it has some value. If you don't use Alexa already to get info on web sites, it provides a lot of useful information. Someone needs to make an Alexa toolbar for Firefox soon.
- Yahoo! Toolbar. Has tons of functionality, but I don't use Yahoo! that much and I needed toolbar space, so I have this toolbar hidden by default.
- Google Toolbar for Firefox. This and the del.icio.us toolbar are my two most frequently used toolbars. Since Google is the place to search, I consider this pretty much required.
- Search Status. Displays Google page rank and Alexa rankings in the bottom corner of the browser window.
- Web Developer. If you are an aspiring XHTML and CSS geek, like me, go get this toolbar now! It adds incredibly useful features for looking at web pages. You can outline elements, look at tags, IDs, etc.