Enhance my browsing experience.

Factual Questions
1

Call me unadventurous, but I’ve been using Firefox for a year now and I have never bothered installing any add-ons. Any suggestions for features I might be missing out on?

2

Here’s what I have installed for FF:

  • Adblock Plus (blocks ads)

  • All-in-One Gestures (executes common commands using mouse gestures and scroll wheel navigation)

  • NoScript (allows JavaScript and other plugins only for trusted domains of your choice)

  • Paste and Go (paste text/URL and search/load immediately)

  • Flashgot (enables single and massive downloading using the download manager of your choice)

3

Here are some of the basic add-ons I use. I highly recommend the first three

adblock
a cookie manager (there are several)
no script (controls javascript)
fasterfox
flashblock
go up (adds a up button to navigate up the domain)
clearURLbutton (adds a button to clear the address bar so you can type in an address), image zoom
menu editor
remove it permanently (removes anything from a webpage)
tab mix plus (controls the looks and behavior of tabs)

4

Here is my list of FF addons:

  • Adblock Plus
  • Customize Google - Enhances Google searches and removes ads and spam. Also enhances other Google Services
  • DownloadHelper - Helps you download media from sites like YouTube etc.
  • DownThemAll! - A mass download manager
  • Gmail Manager - Notifies me of incoming email to my Gmail account
  • IE Tab - Lets you use the embedded IE engine within FF. Great if a page won’t render correctly in FF.
  • Linkification - Converts text links into genuine clickable links.
  • NoScript - Allows you to determine which sites are allowed to run scripting automatically
  • Redirect Remover - Removes redirects from links and images
  • Tab Mix Plus. - Enhanced FF Tab management.
5

flashblock is the most important because if you have multiple tabs open, all the ones with flash content steal a bit of your CPU to keep updating, whether the tab is active or not. flashblock stops the content loading until you tell it to load. It is surprising just how much automated flash content is out there.

6

Does anybody know a way to add tab minimization to FF? The tab managers I have looked at don’t do this.

This is by far the biggest reason I don’t use FF and stick with Opera. (Which has turned off tab minimization buttons by default in the lastest versions. Yikes.)

7

There’s a tab thingie called tab faviconize or something which makes inactive tabs as wide as/marked by the favicons-- is that close? Otherwise I’ve gone into about:config and just made all inactive tabs pretty narrow to begin with.

Other add-ons I use:
Morning Coffee: opens up your usual morning sites or usual obsessively checked ones with a menu bar button.
Fission: makes the address bar shift color as the page loads, like in Safari. I don’t know if this is the same add-on that makes it so that when I mouse over a link the address shows up in the address bar as preview.
Leechblock: I can set particular hours of the day where I can’t access the straightdope, say, and attempts to do so redirect me to the hypnotoad.
TinyURLcreator: what it says.
Colorful Tabs: lets me differentiate tabs easier. I’m simple that way.

A couple of nerdy ones for research:
Researchword: a control/right click on a word gives a drop down menu set of options like “look up word in google”/dictionary/etc.
Unofficial Google Translate Firefox Extension: same thing, but for translating selected text from/into a number of languages. It is my friend.
SplitBrowser: takes two or more tabs and splits the window side by side for, say, simultaneous comparison.