In this guide to installing Firefox the author outlines all the extensions he uses. The vast array of extensions is good and bad. It’s good because it allows people to extend the browser to do all sorts of things the original developers never dreamed of, but it also means that if you have multiple machines you can spend quite a bit of time updating all your extensions. It would be nice if they were to ship with a bunch of extensions that you could enable or disable instead of having to download them all.
Anyway, kvetching aside, I’ve looked at a bunch of extensions and made a list of those I’ve found to be most useful.
SpellBound (and SpellBound Linux Components) - Get focus in a text area (like the text area you’re using to write a blog entry), right-click (or left-click if you’re left-handed like me) and select the ‘Check Spelling’ option.
Bandwidth Tester - I like to know how fast my connection is. I previously used this test, but the extension makes it even easier. Just go to Tools > Bandwidth Tester and click the Run Test button.
ForecastFox - This adds three icons on the bottom right of the browser window that display the weather right now, a few hours later, and tomorrow. Mousing over gives more details.
Tabbrowser Preferences - Gives you more control over how the tabs behave.
Session Saver - This is one that I really like and in my opinion should not be an extension, but part of Firefox itself. It stores the URLs of all tabs and opens them up again when you restart the browser. If you have multiple windows open, it only opens a single window and puts all the sites you had open in the tabs of that one window.
Google Pagerank Status (Get it here) - Shows the green Page Rank bar on the bottom right of the browser for the page you’re visiting.
Dictionary Search - I don’t use this much, but you can highlight a word, then right-click on it and do a dictionary search for the word. It can be handy at times.
You can find more extensions at the Mozilla update site, Texturizer.net and MozDev’s extension room.
