Must Have Firefox Plugins

In response to the recent buzz about the release of Firefox 1.0 and a request from Alan, here are the most useful plugins that I’ve found for use with Firefox. I’m know there are a ton of plugins out there but I’ve tried to keep my use of them to a minimum.

Check the Firefox Must Haves Redux for an updated list

Tabbrowser Extensions
If I was stranded on Mozilla island and could only take one plugin, this would be it. It gives support for close buttons on each tab, tab sessions, tab restoration and many more things to customize your tabbed browsing experience.
Web Developer Extension
Just what it sounds like. If you’re a developer, you’ve got to have this. Lets you control a variety things on the page you are viewing including images and CSS and does handy things like outlining and showing the names of block level elements.
BugMeNot
The remedy for all those annoying sites that require you to register such as The New York Times. When you arrive at a login form, just right-click in the username or password field and select BugMeNot from the menu. A username and password will automatically be entered for you and you’re in!
GMail Notifier
Displays the total number of new messages in your GMail account’s inbox and notifies you of new messages in the browsers status bar. Double clicking the icon takes you right to your inbox.
IEview
For those times when you need to test your pages in that other browser or find a site that uses non-standards compliant code.
Hide Searchbar
Removes the search bar from the browser. I’ve done this because I use the address bar to search with this address bar tweak.

Anyone else use any must have extensions that I’m missing?

Posted: Monday January 3, 2005

Categories: general tech

Comments

4. January 2005

I’m a big fan of Web Developer. BugMeNot and IEView are also in my toolbox.

Here’s a few I’ll recommend:
Spellbound – spell checking in HTML forms, I use primarily to spellcheck before I post in Textpattern
WeatherFox – Weather info in Firefox
DictionarySearch- Pretty self-explanatory, but you can add all sorts of other engines such as Wikipedia

I use a few more, but those are my favorites.

Jeff

5. January 2005

Thanks Jeff. I like that weather plugin. Its now called ForecastFox by the way.

I also found another one today. Disable Target For Downloads will stop those annoying empty tabs from popping up when downloading binary files.

Rob

5. January 2005

The Tabbrowser Extension had too many disclaimers about bugs. There seemed to be a huge amount of text from the Mozilla developers about how this plugin should be avoided at all cost.

Alan

8. January 2005

Rob,

I’ve seen many advocate against the use of TBE in mozillaZine forums. You might want to reconsider its usage.

And, AdBlock is a must extension in my opinion.

Sridhar

8. January 2005

So after receiving some comments on the Tabbrowser Extensions plugin I did some research on the topic and have in fact reconsidered using it.

I’m in the process of updating the list and should have a new one soon.

The only unfortunate thing is that TBE really does some nice things all in one plugin. It will take no less the 5 separate plugins and a couple configuration tweaks to recreate what TBE did for me.

Nevertheless, stay tuned for an update…

Rob Sable

26. May 2005

Well all this would be fine and dandy if I could actually install the extensions even after I have enabled install in options. MY FF is badly borked in that respect.

Root