For the record, here are the Firefox extensions that I cannot live without like to use. I went through a bit of a culling, and realized that while some of the add-ons were desert-island favorites, and others were just kinda cool.
This is assuming that the desert island has wireless, of course.
Gotta Have:
- Greasemonkey: Completely and utterly required on every installation of Firefox on every computer I use. Why? Because it lets me install user scripts like:
- Mihai Parparita’s GMail Macro: Mihai works at The Google, on the Google Reader team, and they use Gmail internally. He has written a kick-ass user script that shortcut-keys the hell out of Gmail, which means that I can live the dream of never having to lift my fingers off the keyboard while I process my inbox. A million thanks, Mihai. Note: I used the gmail-macrosMK.user.js version.
- Gmail Spam-count Hide: Their headline says it all: “Never see how much spam you have, since you don’t care about it anyways.” Damn straight. Let Gmail delete it for you.
- View Cookies: This puts a nifty tab on the Page Info dialog that shows all cookies associated with the current webpage. Great for web development, when I’m trying to figure out how Google Analytics is setting its cookies on various sites.
- Web Developer: This gives you an awesome toolbar for checking CSS, HTML, and JavaScript validation. Lots of other nifty tools, too, for developers.
- ColorZilla: Get a color swatch from any point in the browser, zoom into the page and measure distances, use the DOM spy to gather info on DOM elements. Great for graphic design stuff.
- del.icio.us: Complete integration with the del.icio.us social bookmarking system. Two toolbar buttons are all you need to add and view your bookmarks. They’ve set it up so you don’t have to replace Firefox’s built-in bookmarks, which is kinda cool.
- BugMeNot Extension: Bypass compulsory web registration via Firefox’s right-click context menu. Compatible with Mozilla and current Firefox releases. Visit bugmenot.com for full details of their service.
Pretty Cool:
- Live IP Address: Grabs your IP address and sticks in in Firefox’s status bar. Great for development purposes, and for setting internal IP filters in your favorite web analytics utility. I know my IP addresses by heart now, so I got rid of this one to de-clutter. Still, it’s great for what it does.
- CoComment: This nifty little extension captures comments you make on blogs all over the Internet (most of the major ones have built-in support) and saves them in your CoComment account. You can then reference these comments on your own blog, or just keep track of them privately from within CoComment. It’s cute, but a combination of slow-down and incompatibility with some other faves has dropped this one to the “Nice But Not Necessary” list.
- VideoDownloader: Download the videos on YouTube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion, and a ton of other video sites. Pretty much any embedded object in a webpage is forfeit, including mp3s, flash, etc.
Makes you wonder why anyone would want to use anything but Firefox.
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