In case you were curious, I thought I’d give a run down of the Firefox extensions that I use. Its extension system is quite impressive, keeping bloat away from the main executable, while at the same time letting users have full control over customizations. With IE being so incredibly stagnant, Firefox has stepped in and filled the void. It has also given developers hope that you can code to standards! Though unfortunately, you inevitably have to include some hacks to get IE to work (but that is the reverse of what it was even a year ago). Anyway, enough of the drawl.
Theme
I use Noia (extreme) as my theme. Looks good, simple and very professional. I haven’t found a theme to rival yet.
Extensions
Adblock - Essential! Must have! This basically hides all those annoying adds, and is intelligent enough not to break layouts when hiding them. You can customize filters, but there are a handful of community maintained ones that I would rely on. Occasionally, it will block something that you actually need to click on, however, I think I’ve only run into two sites in two years where that happened. It makes for a sanitized browsing experience. Seriously! You feel cleaner with this running =)
Adblock Filterset.G Updater - Filterset.G is a robust set of filters created by an individual. They are by far the best I’ve used, and he releases updates fairly frequently. This extension periodically updates the Adblock filter with the latest Filterset.G file. Turns Adblock into a no-hassle issue.
IE View - For when its absolutely needed. I’ve only occasionally used this. There are a handful of sites out there that still only really function with IE (usually I find they all revolve around flash, but I’m not positive). Nice to have, just in case.
Bookmarks Synchronizer - If you have multiple computers and a remote host, this is for you. It allows you to store your bookmarks on a remote ftp server, so that you don’t have to individually update the bookmarks for each computer. Also very handy when reformatting your drive, since you don’t have to worry about saving your bookmarks.
BugMeNot - Also essential. Instead of creating accounts for all those newspaper sites (like the New York Times), you can right-click on the form, select BugMeNot, and it automatically retrieves a “community” username and password so you can continue to view the news story.
Download Statusbar - Nice way of hiding downloads and sending them to the background. It has its drawbacks, but I find it useful if you are the type of person that doesn’t monitor your downloads.
Foxylicious - An interface to the del.icio.us bookmark community site. I do use del.icio.us but not as my primary form for bookmarking. This one is nice to have, but far from perfect.
Fasterfox - Tweaks Firefox under the covers to improve your browsing performance. Gives you a few pre-packaged options, and also allows you to customize fully. All these tweaks can be accomplished by going through about:config, but this provides a nice set of options and descriptions about what each parameter is, so you can intelligently set your options. Definitely speeds up browsing!
TargetAlert - Great tweak I just recently found. When you mouseover a link, it puts up a little (very nice) icon next to the link indicating if it is going to open up a new window, download a pdf file, go to a secure site, and much more! I primarily got it for the new window indicator (so I know I should middle click and open it up in a new tab), but it is really wonderful having each link not be a mystery on where it will take you.
With Firefox 1.5 coming out in a few weeks (beginning of December is the latest rumor), you should double check that your favorite extensions have been upgraded to be comparable with 1.5