I just downloaded Firefox (was waiting till I could once again afford broadband.) and have hooked up the adblocker extension, and the gmail notifier. But as I read through the other extensions, many of them sound buggy, but the reviews sometimes conflict with each other. For example I am intrigued by the mouse gestures idea, but do I get “mouse gestures” or “all in one mouse gestures”. They both seem buggy as hell from reading the reviews, are mouse gestures even worth it?
Same thing with the tabbrowser preferences. Some people say it is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel, others say it broke their computer.
Beyond that, are there any less high profile extensions that are really worth looking into?
I did a search, but didn’t really come up with anything other than people saying to do a search. (that and a ringing endorsement for greasemonkey, but I am not sure that I would ever use that)
Forecastfox is simply wonderful. Down in the bottom right corner you get the weather for your city now, plus short and extended forecasts.
I also have one called Tweak Network that’s supposed to improve performance, but I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference here at work. Yet to try it at home.
And there’s one that opens new tabs on your homepage instead of blank which I like a lot.
I use Mozilla. I tried the tabbrowser and it was wonderful, except for one glitch (that I no longer remember) that was enough to make me uninstall it. I’ll have to try the most recent version to see if I still have issues with it…
A simple one that I love is “Paste Quote”. It adds a “Paste Quote” option to your right click menu that pastes in your clipboard contents with quote tags already around it.
stumbleupon – sends you to random websites based on themes/preferences you select
auto copy – removes a step or two from cutting & pasting
bbcode – adds bbcode, html, etc to your context menu (very handy if you are a frequent board user)
foxy tunes – imbeds media player of your choice into the browser
sessionsaver – opens browser to last page(s) active on closing.
there are many more, but these are the ones i make use of most often. i’ve had no buggy problems with any of them, except for the occassional page opening thanks to sessionsaver that i would rather backseat surfers not see. lesson: always close your porn tabs before you exit the session with that extention.
First, I disable plugins. If I want a .pdf file (often) or mpeg (less often), I download it, then double click it. Less muss, less fuss, less stalls, less crashes.
Flash ads are irritating. I don’t have a Flash plugin. If there’s a flash thingy I want to view, I view it in Internet Explorer. Which brings us to my first extension:
ieview: Open pages in Internet Explorer
Speaking of ads, sometimes the ad-mavens send me a moving image gif. Sorry, guys, I don’t like those either:
Nuke Anything, another great extension.
Finally, if I want to do a mass-download,
MagPie Tools, is sometime useful.
I like linky for browsing thumbnailed art galleries & stuff like elfwood, it lets you open all links, or all image links, in either new windows or new tabs
[ul]
[li]Greasemonkey will either rock your world or make your head explode. It is an extension that allows you to install dozens and dozens of other extensions, many of which do neat things.[/li][li]Useragent Switcher will make more sites willing to play ball with Firefox. (That is, sites that demand MSIE don’t always require MSIE.)[/li][li]Customize Google removes ads, adds links to other search engines, and generally makes Google a more useful place.[/li][li]Sage integrates RSS into Firefox in a really simple way. This site describes RSS if you’ve no clue about what I just said.[/li][li]The Mozilla Archive Format is a great way to save webpages with images and other clutter into a single compressed file. (I’ve been using this so long I almost think it’s a native part of Firefox. It damned well should be.)[/li][li]Session Saver remembers tab contents, positions, and even the scroll positions within tabs across browser shutdowns.[/li][li]BugMeNot allows you to bypass compulsory website registrations. Read the New York Times and the Washington Post without having to make shit up! ;)[/li][/ul]That should get you started.
I still use Tabbrowser Extensions, but it seems to have fallen out of disfavor with many people. Perhaps someone could come along and explain this.
I still use Nuke Anything, but it stopped working properly after Firefox 1.0 was released. What’s annoying is that there’s an unofficial fixed version floating around the net that I’m leery of downloading, and the “fix” has yet to show up on the official Mozilla site, which still has the broken version all this time after 1.0’s release.
Hmmm. Guess I don’t have any useful suggestions, after all.
I agree, Flash ads are irritating. But IE is worse. Use Flashblock. Flashblock takes Flash elements and replaces them with a frame and a button. If you want to view the flash, click the button. If you don’t, the flash won’t even load. Easy peasy.
And I also recommend AdBlock to block other annoying ads. Especially when the rest of the page refuses to render because it’s trying to pull an ad from another server, or it disrupts the layout of the page.
On another note, I also use ImageZoom. To zoom in on images.
Yep, that’s the one I came in to recommend (link). But so everyone else knows, you’re not stuck with it in the bottom right corner: you can put it anywhere in the browser’s “frame” that you want. The info that you see is highly customizable, too.
I can only tell you my story: I used Tabbrowser Extensions until v1.14, which broke Firefox’s ability to run Javascript (on some machines). Options included reverting to v1.13 or (eventually) installing v1.15, but once I uninstalled TBE I didn’t feel like installing it again. So I did a little poking around, and Tab Mix seems to have the features that I liked most from TBE – and it also seems to have the blessing of Mozilla developers (meaning, I guess, that it’s more stable).
miniT - allows you to re-order the tabs using drag-and-drop.
Scrollbar Anywhere - hold down the right mouse button anywhere on a page and it’s like you’re holding the scroll bar. It also has a drag mode. That’s very convenient because Firefox uses the mouse wheel click to open a link in a new tab, instead of bringing up IE’s scroll thingy.
I also use Tabbrowser Preferences. This is supposed to be an updated, less buggy version of Tabbrowser Extensions. The most recent versions of Firefox are supposed to have most of the capabilities of both of them, although this is something I haven’t checked. Something I really like about this extension is that it will even load javascript popup windows (such as comments on some blogs) in a new tab.
Other extensions I use: Flashblock, Enhanced History Manager (makes it Netscape-like), and Popup ALT Attribute.
An extension I would like to see is one that makes all links and bookmarks default to opening in new tabs.
Oh yeah, I meant to mention this (it isn’t an extension, but it’s one of my favorite things about Firefox so I figure I’ll share): say you want to do a Google search on “SDMB.” You can set up a shortcut that will let you perform the search by typing “g SDMB” in the address bar. Here’s how:[ol][li]Go to Google, do a search on something memorable (say, foobar), and bookmark the results.[/li][li]Go to manage bookmarks, select that new bookmark, and hit the properties button. In its location you will see something like:[/li]
[li]Edit the URL and replace “foobar” with “%s”.[/li]
[li]In the keyword field, type the letter(s) you want to use to run this particular search (like a “g”), then hit OK.[/ol][/li]Now you can type “g xxx” into the address bar, and it will run a Google search on xxx. This works with any site that does searches, btw: I have shortcuts to Google, a dictionary, a thesaurus, Google Images, and Google Scholar.
I learned about this right here on the SDMB, and it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t give complete credit to Etherman – especially since I copied his post nearly word for word.
Along with Greasemonkey, I use Platypus, which is a nice gui frontend. It lets you do things like delete ad frames and move other elements around on the page and then save the appearance as a Greasemonkey script.
