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| My Top 10 Favorite Firefox Extensions |
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News & Views March 2005 • Vol.3 Issue 3 |
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My Top 10 Favorite Firefox Extensions Scot's Take Commentary by Scot Finnie |
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.htm#review1). By far the easiest way to customize Firefox, though, is by installing any of literally scores of small add-on modifications called Extensions. Firefox provides the Extensions manager for this purpose. To open it, click the Tools menu, choose Extensions, and click Get More Extensions at the bottom. That opens the Mozilla Firefox Extensions Web site. At press time, there were almost 200 Firefox extensions, with many others under development. Most extensions are very small in size (under 50K) and install quickly and easily. You have to close Firefox and restart the browser for newly installed extensions to take effect. Many Firefox extensions add small bits of functionality or control, providing an improved user interface. But others are small programs that do things like read RSS (Rich Site Summary) news feeds, play music, display live weather data, and so on. I've been through the entire list of Firefox extensions and tried a great many of them. Here are my top 10 favorite Firefox extensions: 10. xMirror (www.meatme.net/publish) The Mozilla.org extension list doesn't represent all the extensions out there, and it's also not always as up-to-date as it should be. There are two things you need to know as a result of that: First, nearly all extensions have their own home pages. Most of the time, that's the best place to get the latest version of the extension. (Extensions are supposed to update online, but that functionality is not always enabled.) Secondly, there are at least three other extension sites in addition to the Mozilla.org site. That's where xMirror comes in. It provides access to the three other extension sites from within the Firefox Extension manager, and should be the first extension you install. 9. ChromEdit (cdn.mozdev.org/chromedit) This simple tool adds the "Edit User Files" menu item to Firefox's Tools menu. When you open the program, it provides access to the four files Firefox provides for user customizations—user.js, prefs.js, userChrome.css, and userContent.jss. For more information about customizing, see the Mozilla Firefox Tips & Tricks page (www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips). 8. SessionSaver (www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=166) SessionSaver is a highly useful older extension that provides two primary features: It saves all open browser tabs in the event of a crash, recovering them the next time you launch the browser (or when you select File and then Restore Session), and also lets you save and name sets of tabs and recall them at will. The user interface is divided between the File menu and the Tools, SessionSaver menu, which is a little strange. The extension also has not been significantly updated since March 2004. But I've tested it extensively under Firefox 1.0, and it works fine. Unless it's been updated more recently, I recommend the 0.2d2 nightly23 build of SessionSaver (available only from the link above). 7. Tab Clicking Options (twanno.mozdev.org) Double-clicking any blank area of Firefox's tab area opens a new tab browser. But double-clicking any existing tab has no effect. Tab Clicking Options let's you configure functionality for keyboard and mouse-click combinations related to Firefox's tabs. For example, you can configure it to close any open tab by double-clicking the tab label. And you could configure CTRL-double-click to duplicate any tab and its contents. The program is easy to install and configure and well worth the couple of minutes needed to get it going. 6. DeskCut (deskcut.mozdev.org) If you were an IE user, you may well have saved shortcuts as Favorites to your desktop by right-clicking anywhere on the open Web page and choosing Create Shortcut from the pop-up menu. Firefox doesn't have that functionality, even though its bookmarks are perfectly capable of functioning exactly like Windows Favorites. DeskCut adds a "Create deskCut" item on the context menu for all Web pages that functions exactly like IE's Create Shortcut feature. It even ditches the silly OK box that Microsoft makes you click in Internet Explorer. 5. Resize Search Box (dragtotab.mozdev.org/resizesearchbox) This is one of the slickest little extensions I've seen so far for Firefox, and it only does one small thing: It creates a drag-and-drop resizable version of the search-engine search box for your Firefox toolbars. For many people this search box is too small for comfortably entering search strings. After you install Resize Search Box, drag the double-vertical Resizer icon from the Customize Toolbar palette and place it next to your Search box. Resize Search Box's functionality should be included in a future version of Firefox. 4. FireFTP (fireftp.mozdev.org) FTP (File Transfer Protocol) programs are odd ducks. No two of them works quite the same, even though the feature set is mature across the board. There are several paradigms and variations—and many of the features are overkill. FireFTP is a very sensible implementation in a lightweight Firefox-extension form. In almost every regard, it gives you what you need, while cutting out the chaff. And it works like a champ. FireFTP's only shortcoming is that it doesn't offer a way to create, name, and save connections that include both local and remote directory locations. It is able to save past successful connections (on a most-recently used drop-down menu), but it does so only to the root directory; FireFTP doesn't save the directories you navigated to or let you name them. In all other regards, FireFTP is perfectly usable and delightfully lightweight. 3. ForecastFox (forecastfox.mozdev.org) When you live in a part of the country with oft-changing weather, as I do, knowing at a glance whether it's 60 degrees or 33 degrees outside is more than just a novelty. Until recently, I was a WeatherBug user, a program that displays the local temperature next to the System Tray clock. It also has a program window that gives forecasts but, unfortunately, over the last year or so has become prone to spawning pop-up windows and flashing ads all over the place. And about every two weeks, it insists that you choose a new sponsor. There is a professional version you can pay for, of course, but the product has never delivered value worth paying for. Ten minutes after I installed the ForecastFox extension for Firefox (previously called WeatherFox), I found myself gleefully uninstalling WeatherBug. ForecastFox, which is powered by data from Weather.com, takes a tad of configuring. But it didn't take me long to have it set up to display the current temperature and forecasted temps for tonight and tomorrow in the browser status bar. It also shows images that tell you what the weather is supposed to be like (sunny, rainy, cloudy, etc.). When I pause the mouse over these bits of info, a pop-up appears with more detailed info. ForecastFox just works—and doesn't get in your way. 2. FoxyTunes (www.foxytunes.org/firefox) FoxyTunes is like the steering-wheel mounted controls that newer luxury autos offer for their audio systems. This well-done Firefox extension provides status-bar-mounted controls and read-outs for your favorite media player. It supports a wide range of software players for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, including Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Musicmatch, RealPlayer—about 30 players in all. FoxyTunes isn't actually a media player itself; it remotely controls the media player you select from its settings. If you select a media player that isn't installed on your computer, it just doesn't work. It's a bit more ambitious and complex than most Firefox extensions, but it's also clearly one of the very best ones I've tried. 1. Sage (sage.mozdev.org) There's a reason why Sage is my number one extension: I use it all the time. Firefox comes with its own built-in RSS Reader, called Live Bookmarks, but Sage, while very basic, is notably superior. The biggest difference is Sage's overview page, which presents all the most recent entries from any given read. And while that page is exceedingly bland, Sage also provides a way for you to customize it. The other benefits Sage delivers are very minor, but collectively they build an overall better experience. Sage offers a Check Feeds button, a Discover Feeds button, and a Manage Feeds window. It imports and exports OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files. OPML lets you create a list of RSS feeds and pass it to someone else, and if their RSS reader supports OPML importation, they'll be able to import all those feeds into their reader. Something else I really like is a built-in search field that directly accesses Feedster, a search engine dedicated to blogs and RSS feeds. Sage could use more features, more oomph, but what's there is very well done. The longer you use it, the more you'll like it. Bonus 10: Honorable Mentions FirefoxView (www.iosart.com/firefox/firefoxview) Foxylicious (dietrich.ganx4.com/foxylicious) Googlebar (googlebar.mozdev.org) IE View (ieview.mozdev.org) Image Zoom (www.yellowgorilla.net/imagezoom) JustBlogIt (blog.warmbrain.com/justblogit) Linkification (www.beggarchooser.com/firefox) McSearchPreview (docs.g-blog.net/code/mozilla_extensions) Nuke Anything (ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla) SyncMarks (www.heddway.com/firefox) by Scot Finnie |
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