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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

FireFox Extensions – Updated

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As it has been over a year since I initially posted my list of Firefox extensions, I think it is time for an update. I have added and removed many in that time, and while I can’t remember them all, here is my current list of active extensions for your perusal. I hope to keep this list up to date as I modify my usage, though I haven’t decided exactly how as of yet. Perhaps I will make use of InfoLister‘s ability to upload the information, but I don’t know how I will be able to associate comments with each item. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Also, if you know of any killer extension please let me know as I would love to try ’em out!

Firefox Extensions

Note 1: All of the links point to the home page for the extension which can be problematic at times. If you run into issues finding or installing an extension, you may want to search for that extension on the official Firefox extensions site.

Note 2: At the time of writing, several extensions have yet to be updated to be usable within Firefox 1.5. There are a couple of hacks that may solve this problem for some extenions, but some plugins will require updates to the core code.

General Web Browsing

  • Adblock – Provides the ability to block advertisements – not just pop-ups, you can block the ads displayed in the middle of a news story too. The best part about it, is the fact that you can set up blocks using wild cards, so after some configuration, you discover that the vast majority of the sites you browse are now ad-free. As the blocking happens within your browser, the site still generates revenue from the ads, which is a nice bonus – well, for everyone but the advertisers I guess. This is a must have!
  • SpellBound with the Mozilla SpellCheck Libraries – A straight forward, but feature-rich spell checker for form fields. Check out the screen shots to see it in action. A Must have for anyone who leaves comments, posts to forums or runs a blog!
  • Google Toolbar – Adds a toolbar to Firefox, which provides the ability to search the currently viewed site, search word/phrase highlighting within the page, access to a cached copy of the page, the ability to navigate the directory tree, spell check and word translation.
  • Bookmarks Synchronizer– Allows you to synchronize your bookmarks across multiple machines, even across operating systems. I have set it up to automatically synchronize my local bookmarks with a copy on my Web server each time I open and close Firefox, ensuring I have a backup. Sadly, the developer takes a while to update the extension after new releases, often forcing me to implement a hack. As of 1.5, the hacks don’t seem to work either.
  • Nuke Anything Enhanced – While Adblock does an amazing job of removing adveritisements from a site, there are times when you really want to eliminate other pieces of a page. Enter Nuke Anything. Don’t want to see the sidebar, you can Nuke it. Want to be rid of the looping demo, but don’t want it included within Adblock? Nuke it.
  • Forecastfox – Provides the current weather, forecasts, severe weather alerts and a lot of other weather-related information in a compact and unobtrusive package.
  • InfoLister – The handy extension that made it possible for me to create this post so quickly. It generates a file with all of your installed extensions and themes, which makes upgrades of Firefox as well as moving to a new machine quite easy.
  • IE View – A super simple, but very useful extension. IE View adds an item to the right-click menu which lets you open the current page in Internet Explorer. Some sites are poorly developed, and only work with Internet Explorer, so you can use this extension to quickly switch to IE for viewing. For those of us in Web development, it speeds up cross-browser.
  • IE Tab – A new addition to my extension list, which provides similar functionality to IE View (above), though it opens Internet Explorer within a Firefox tab, instead of opening IE in a new window. This redundancy will most likely push one of these two extensions off of my list, but that will require some time to test the two.
  • Tab Preview – “shows a preview of tab contents when you move your mouse over a background tab.” I’ve just installed it and will post an update after I’ve used it for a bit. It looks exciting though!

Web Development

  • Web Developer – An amazing set of tools for Web developers. Indispensible for Web Developers.
  • Image Zoom – Provides the ability to zoom in on an image within the Web page, saving the trouble of saving the image and opening it with a different application.
  • ColorZilla – A handy color picker that sits in the status bar of the browser and provides an easy way to select a color from the page being viewed. Extremely useful for Web designers and developers.
  • MeasureIt – Adds a ruler to the tools available within your browser. It also servers quite nicely as a straight-edge for those times when you aren’t quite sure if two borders are truly aligned, or one pixel off.
  • SpellBound with the Mozilla SpellCheck Libraries – A straight forward, but feature-rich spell checker for form fields. Check out the screen shots to see it in action. A Must have for anyone who leaves comments, posts to forums or runs a blog!
  • User Agent Switcher – Useful for Web development, and getting around sites that require a specific browser, this extension let’s you spoof the site into thinking you are using a different Web browser and/or operating system.
  • IE View – A super simple, but very useful extension. IE View adds an item to the right-click menu which lets you open the current page in Internet Explorer. Some sites are poorly developed, and only work with Internet Explorer, so you can use this extension to quickly switch to IE for viewing. For those of us in Web development, it speeds up cross-browser.
  • IE Tab – A new addition to my extension list, which provides similar functionality to IE View (above), though it opens Internet Explorer within a Firefox tab, instead of opening IE in a new window. This redundancy will most likely push one of these two extensions off of my list, but that will require some time to test the two.
  • CookieCuller – Provides additional control of the cookies placed on your machine by Web sites.
  • DOM Inspector (comes with Firefox – choose custom installation, and ensure ‘Developer Tools’ is checked) – Extremely helpful for Web developers