Quick, straightforward, and powerful, Mozilla Firefox is a top-notch, open source web browser.
One of the great features of Firefox is that it is a great browser out of the box that does one thing very well - web browsing. It has a clean interface, and lets you get where you want to go, without needless features to get in your way, and slow down performance. However, not wishing to deliver any less than people expect, a versatile plugin system was built into Firefox. Software components written by others, called Extensions, allow for the functionality of Firefox to be extended, or even dramatically altered. The following are extensions that I use on a day to day basis, solving a variety of needs.
Largely a note to myself...but this is a list of all the extensions I currently have loaded. Once I start testing Firefox 2.0 alpha 3 (Bon Echo), I may weed out this list a bit, and document how I use some of these extensions.
Chris Pederick's incredible extension is not just for 'web developers' - it's for anyone who ever wanted to tinker with a web page, and examine various aspects of it. If you have ever dug through HTML looking for <form> tag information, would like to quickly turn off images while keeping the spacing right, or validate HTML/XHTML/CSS/Section 508/you-name-it in 2 clicks, this extension is for you. @UMO
FoxyTunes is an extension that "just works," and works very well. Not just for iTunes, it can control a multitude of media players (across many platforms, no less) - but when you've got the best app out there, why bother with any others? True, it probably won't handle this task yet on Linux, unless you've got some really well hacked setup, along with Codeweavers Crossover Office, but when you can use mp3player.pl, I can't even see the need for FoxyTunes. Matching Firefox's clean interface, it can be tucked away into a nice little auto-expanding icon in the tray, and best of all, binds a few keyboard shortcuts to the browser. One quick Ctrl+-> whilst browsing, and you're onto the next track. It's so handy that I often switch to Firefox if I've minimized iTunes to the tray. (OS X's ability to hit the arrow keys while minimized removes this need.) @UMO
It might be an overly idealistic description, but Greasemonkey democratizes Javascript - it gives users and developers the option to override and/or add functionality to Javascript present in web pages. One such developer wrote a "User script" that I thought might take me hours upons hours to write, if I were to make an extension of it - a GMail "Smart Delete" button. Some absolutely brilliant user scripts have been written to 'tweak' websites - including an MBTA map overlay for Google Maps (i.e. Boston's "T"). I don't know how long this extension will last before some of the webmasters of the world rebel (it can break some pages in rare cases, and one developer found a way to disable it with specially crafted Javascript). Get it while the getting is good! @UMO
I mainly use: Google Reader Auto Read, Gmail Font Toggle.
"Live Bookmarks" are considered to be a very "cool" feature of Firefox 1.0 - using the Really Simple Syndication ("RSS") system to update bookmarks with current news and the like. To be honest, this never did much for me - it was a cute feature, but I didn't understand what all the buzz was about - I'd seen some of the source of these feeds, and it certainly looked like there was more information to be had, but Firefox just put menu items in the Bookmarks folder. One day, I read a review of various RSS reader extensions for Firefox, and this one looked quite nice to me. Once I purged all of the old Live Bookmarks, and created some new ones for Habari XenuSage, I've been keeping up with various news sources on a daily basis, simplifying my web surfing a bit. @UMO
Also by Chris Pederick, this extension is quite handy for poorly writen sites. @UMO
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