Inspired somewhat by this thread, was wondering what Firefox users’ favorite extensions/plugins are? I basically use IE at work and Firefox at home, but am switching more and more to Firefox at work (you’ll see why in a second). But I’m also kinda new to the whole extension thing…so am looking for other cool add-ons.
The two I have are:
Googlebar: may sound silly, but this was the main reason I kept on using IE. The Googlebar is my favorite plugin thingy of all time, but Google hasn’t built one for Firefox. Lo and behold I found that someone had done one anyway. It doesn’t have all of the capabilities of the IE one, but it’s good enough for me.
Tabbed Browser Extensions: Got this for one reason - so that external links open in a new tab, rather than a new window (not sure why Mozilla doesn’t have this as a built-in option).
The BugMeNot one is really useful. You can go to a site like the NYTimes where you don’t have a registration, choose BugMeNot off the context menu, and it will give you a username/password to use.
OTOH, I don’t rely on extensions much because they seem to get screwed up every time I upgrade the browser and it’s a bit of work to fix it. So I just make do with the base browser.
Right click a page, select ‘Linky’, and you can open all linked images in tabs with a single click. Useful for, uh, well, you see, ‘educational’ sites sometimes have lots of thumbnails and pics. Very nice extension.
I’m a newbie to Firefox but I downloaded bugMeNot as a result of this post, and from what I understand, this is how it works: You go to a site like NYTimes and it asks for a name and password to view content. Right click on the log-in page (with BugMeNot installed) and a pop-up box appears with a username and password. You can then copy and paste the username and password into the log-in form, and view the webpage contenet without registering for the site yourself.
What I want to know is there any way to resize or move the toolbars in Firefox? Especially the bookmarks toolbar. With IE I could drag and move all my toolbars so I onkly had two small lines taking up pixels on the top of my screen. The address bar doesn’t need to be 3/4 the length of my browser width, can I shorten it?
People give them to a central BugMeNot database. You can, for instance, go sign up at NYTimes or Washington Post, then go to BugMeNot and give them that one.
BugMeNot only deals with free registration sites, so it’s not like they’re cheating pay registration sites.
And then the Googlebar, which I’ve added ebay and Dictionary.com to. You can add tons of engines like yahoo, imdb, amazon, wikipedia, and a bunch more.
And Tab X, which puts an X on the right hand corner of each tab to close them easily.
I think the newest version already has that feature built in.
Wow- thanks! They even have a Straight Dope archive engine. Cool. Is there any way to get those engines on the Googlebar? Right now they are in the little Google bar in the corner, the one that comes standard with Firefox. I added the Google toolbar add on because I was so used to using it with IE.
Thank you! I didn’t even see the SD archive. I added it!
I don’t know if there is a way to use it with the Google toolbar add on.
I was used to the Google toolbar as well, but when I made the switch I found I didn’t miss the other features much, with the exception of the news button.
I just added a totally useless but pretty fun one that changes the name of your browser every time you open it, and you can customize the naming database.
Well, I stand corrected, as it’s not an option on the Googlebar add on, but on the Google bar that comes standard with Firefox, the one in the left hand corner.
There’s a drop down arrow in the box, click it and you should see an option that says ‘add engines’, that’ll load mozdev.org, where you can pick from literally hundreds of different engines to add. Once added, it’s just a matter of selecting which engine you want to use the box to search, via a drop down selection.
Very handy.
I was having a grand old time testing out extensions last night, as I was a tad bit bored.
I uninstalled Firesomething, since I never look at the browser name anyway, but the kiddies got a kick out of it.
I installed one called FoxAmp, that puts a few tiny buttons in the browser’s status bar to control Winamp. I think I like it. It makes it easy to skip to the next track, etc. while browsing without pulling up Winamp.
No, I don’t think so, I dled 8-something a few months ago and the Google bar came with that one (and that was my first experience with Firefox, so, I can’t say if it was on previous releases.) I do have 9 now, and when I first dled, I’d wished I’d stuck with 8, it was a little wonky, but I’ve installed a patch or update since and it seems fine now.
It’s not as flexible as IE, but with View/Toolbars/Customize… you can drag toolbar items around to your heart’s content. I have the address bar on the same row as the menu, for example, and if my monitor was wide enough I could have everything on the same row.
A couple of nice extensions not mentioned so far:
Session Saver, which provides the Opera-like feature of remembering what tabs you had open. Useful if you have a crash or power cut while browsing, or if you just want to carry on where you left off.
RSS reader - for, um, reading RSS news feeds. You just create a bookmark for each feed. Nice and simple, I find it more convenient than running a separate RSS reader alongside the browser.
