I wrote up my review of Firefox 3 about two weeks ago, but I didn’t go into detail about what has been one of Firefox’s best abilities: it’s ability to be extended with extensions and other plugins. Some people like to extend Firefox to the point where it’s more of a swiss army knife than a browser, and others like to go kind of lite on the extensions. I find myself towards the latter side, but it’s nice that Firefox is so easily extensible because it allows me to fix up a few of Firefox’s shortfalls and even throw in a few bonus features that I can find useful. Firefox has a very nice add-ons database that is very cleanly integrated into Firefox that makes it very easy to install reliable add-ons to the browser. I’ve played with a few of these extensions, and here are the ones that I’ve kept for regular use in my Firefox.
Adblock Plus is the best extension available for Firefox for the purpose of blocking banner advertisements. While it’s not quite as slick as the ad-blocking found in OmniWeb, it still works well right out of the box, and uses an open-source list of banner-ad sources and styles to help it identify ads that it needs to block. However, for the advanced blockers out there, it’s really customizable, and possible to disable on a page-by-page or site-by-site basis. An ABP toolbar icon makes it easy to see whether it’s enabled or disabled for a particular page, and allows you to quickly turn it off if needed. The only annoying thing is that it has a tendency to put itty bitty “Block” things next to certain images and Flash animations, which once in awhile get in the way. If anyone knows how to turn those off, let me know.
Delicious Bookmarks is an interesting extension that virtually overhauls your Firefox bookmarks with ones from Delicious and keeps them in sync, so it’s great for people really into Delicious. I’m not one of those people, though, I’m still getting used to Delicious and trying to get myself into the habit. Luckily for people like me, it does have a nice Classic Mode which gives you a nifty Tag button in the toolbar, which clicking on will open a pop-up window to let you add your bookmark to Delicious, so it’s still a bit nicer than those old bookmarklets that Safari has to use.
Google Gears is Google’s extension that lets web applications store stuff and access it from your computer. Right now, I primarily use it to fuel WordPress 2.6’s Turbo feature, which makes my WordPress admin panels move a whole lot faster than they did before the Turbo feature was on. Gears is also what allows Google Docs to work in its offline mode, but that doesn’t seem to be working with Firefox 3 quite yet, but hopefully it will be working soon…
Google Notebook is probably something at least half of you have not heard of before, which is probably because it only recently graduated from Google Labs and hasn’t yet been integrated into the Google Apps suite yet. However, it’s something that I’ll likely find myself using as the school year comes around: it’s a scrapbooking kind of application that lets you take clips and notes of things that you find on the web for you to jot down and come back to later. The Firefox extension adds a Google Notebook button to the right side of Firefox’s status bar, which allows you to quickly clip stuff from the current page into Google Notebook without having to jettison from the page you’re on. This will be a Google feature to keep an eye on in the near future…
History Submenus is an extension that solves one of my few major gripes about Firefox: the fact that its History menu only goes back about 10 or 15 pages. Any further back and you have to open its History window, which is a drag. This extension solves that problem by bringing over a Safari feature; submenus from the past seven days are added to the History menu, letting you go through every single piece of your browser history from the last seven days so you can find and revisit the page you’re looking for. I hope that this is something that finds its way into the Firefox core soon.
Quartz PDF Plugin solves another one of my Firefox gripes: no built-in PDF reader. This Mac-only extension (works only on Tiger and Leopard) uses OS X’s built-in PDFKit SDK to display PDFs in Firefox. It’s not quite as slick as Safari 3 in that it doesn’t give you any viewing options or quick way to download the PDF or open it in Preview, unless you head to the Save panel or right-click on the PDF (it actually acts pretty much the same as the PDF viewer that Safari 2 had), but it’s certainly better than nothing, and it renders PDFs quite nicely, I might add.
TinyUrl Creator is a wonderful little Firefox extension that is crucial for anyone like me who uses TinyURL really, really frequently. What this extension lacks in good looks it makes up for in terms of functionality by quickly letting you generate a TinyURL of the current page or of a link in your clipboard, all without having to go to the TinyURL website. Once it’s obtained the TinyURL, it offers to let you save it or for it to copy it to your clipboard for you. I almost feel like I have my own URL-cleaning butler at my fingertips.
URL Fixer is an extension that I tend to forget that I even have, because it works so quietly in the background, but I’m sure that it’s saved me quite a bit of time. Essentially, whenever you type in a URL, it looks at the URL you typed to see if you happened to make a typo (like .con or .cmo instead of .com, or htp:// instead of http://, or simply forgetting a dot somewhere that you probably should have had one), and if it thinks you made a mistake, it immediately fixes it once you hit return so that you don’t find yourself getting a server not found error, or something like that. It works so transparently you probably wouldn’t even notice when it fixed one of your typos, and as such, saves you quite a bit of time and embarrassment.
Web Developer is a toolbar that I turn on and off every so often, mostly because I don’t spend the majority of my time actually developing websites. But when I do, it can come in quite handy by providing me the option to turn on and off many settings (for doing design debugging) and letting me quickly get access to the source, CSS, and other information that could come in handy. It also provides quick access to sites where I can validate CSS, HTML/XHTML, RSS, Links, WAI, and much more–in short, it’s quite a useful toolbox for die-hard web developers, though like I said, when I’m not actually in the process of developing websites, I go ahead and hide it.
Tags: Adblock Plus, addons, bookmarks, Delicious, developer, extensions, Firefox, Gears, Google, history, Notebook, PDF, submenus, TinyURL, URL, web design
