Your Favorite Firefox Extensions.

One of the best reasons to use Firefox is because there are so many damned good extensions you can add on after the download to enhance your experience. These extensions can provde anything from a few more context menu entries to a complete redo of a fundamental aspect of the browser’s interface. You can do damned near anything with a combination of XUL, JavaScript, and Java, and the extensions show it.

The extension at the top of my list right now is Tabbar Extensions. Adding Tabbar Extensions to FF is nearly as big of a jump as moving from MSIE to FF and discovering tabs for the first time. It groups tabs into natural arrangements based on which tabs were opened from which links, and it not only keeps them together on the bar but color-codes them and allows you to bookmark all of them in a group, to be restored at will. In fact, you can save and restore whole tab sessions. It expands and scrolls the tab bar, too, so each tab keeps a constant size while allowing you to manage ungodly amounts of them at once. (I have had three rows of eight tabs open at once. I’m an addict, I tell you!) You can enable and disable JavaScript, plugins, images, reloading, and frames on a tab-by-tab basis. It also gives you a sorted list of tabs in a simple drop-down menu on your main browser taskbar.

Pure tab addict heaven. :smiley:

Interestingly, the same guy has a Tabkiller extension. It removes tabs from FF entirely, something I consider bizarre and unholy but also a cool use of FF’s extensibility.

The final extension I’ll outline in this post is mnenhy, an extension that provides interesting text-manipulation widgets for the context menu. You can rot13 text, uuencode/uudecode it, base64 en- and de-code, even convert it to leet and Kenny. Oh, and you can reverse it, too, and evaluate mathematical expressions. The effect, when applied to normal text, can be surreal.

If you want to dip your toes into the wide world of making Firefox a bloated, overfeatured mess, check out Mozdev.org.

Popup Alt attribute. Having surfed the boards in IE, the one thing I miss most about IE is the mouseover preview, and FF seems to chop it off at about 20 characters or so. Popup Alt attribute expands this, but it’s a bit screwy sometimes, with odd shaped or sized popups. It’s good enough, though.

Now, if only I could find a safe ActiveX extension so that I can play them MSN games / upload my photos without using IE…

Tabbar Extensions sounds genius to me - as soon as I get back to my computer I’m downloading it!!

Tabby_Cat, I noticed the cutoff thing too - didn’t realize there was a way to fix it! Another download added to my list.

This, I just don’t understand at all. And that’s o-kay.

Mouse Gestures.

And keywords on bookmarks. Not really an extension, but a really cool feature. I’ve posted this before, so I’ll try not to ramble(I can’t find the original post).

Go to google and do a search on, say, “foobar” (without the quotes).
bookmark the results.
on the firefox menubar go to bookmark->manage bookmarks, and find your new google bookmark, rightclick it and select properties.
Edit the URL to remove the “foobar” and replace with “%s” (no quotes) and edit the keyword to be simply “g” (or whatever, again no quotes), click the “OK” button.

From now on all you have to do is type (yet again no quotes) “g anime” to do a google search for anime, or type “g your search terms” to get googles’ results on “your search terms.” All google logical operators still apply.

I know it’s the same procedure to do it for googlenews, dictionary.com, wikipedia.com, slashdot, and a bunch of others. Just bookmark a search, replace the search terms in the bookmark with %s, and give it a keyword.

But really, without the character subs, keywords still rock. All I have to do is type an “s” into the location bar, and I get the boards. A “w” takes me to the weather.com site for my area code, “c” is cnn.com, etc.

Guess i did ramble, ah well.

I only have a couple. Let’s see,
[ul]
[li]Adblock: blanks out banner ads[/li][li]ForecastFox: puts weather info from weather.com on one of your menu or tool bars[/li][li]DownTHEMall: allows you to download all the images or files linked to a particular page[/li][li]Dictionary Search: highlight and right click a word and you can search for the meaning on the web[/li][li]Linkification: converts text links into clickable links[/li][li]Web Developer: adds menu and toolbar containing various web development tools[/li][li]Bandwidth Tester: what it sounds like[/li][li]Disable Targets for Downloads: prevents a blank page opening up with download links[/li][li]Launchy: open links and pages in external programs like IE, Outlook, Opera (handy when visiting those stupid sites that are IE only)[/li][li]I Must Not Fear!: in the tool menu at the top of your browser whenever you need it.[/li][li]Firesomething: Changes the browser name to a random combination, Firepanda, Powerbadger, etc., every time you open it. Very customizable. no longer works in 1.0 :frowning: [/li][/ul]

Maybe I’m missing something but I type anything I want into the address bar and it comes up with what I want. If, for example, I want to see the IMDb listing for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I’ll just type “imdb eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” into my address bar and Firefox takes me there directly. Or if I want to google mad cow disease, I type “google mad cow disease” and the search pops up for me.

Works for Netflix, Wikipedia, and, I assume, plenty of other sites I haven’t tried it out on yet and I didn’t install any extensions for it or muck around in preferences for it either.

You are correct. This must be a feature in the newer (closer to 1.0) firefoxes, as I don’t remember this in earlier versions.

On further inspection, it’s not totally accurate. Typing “googlenews iraq” takes me to a site in Qatar, while just “googlenews” goes to news.google.com. “google hate” takes me to a blog on blogspace called google, while “google love” yeilds http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googleblogs.htm which I don’t see an immediate connection.

Looks like Firefox’s using predictive text(I’m guessing).

Yeah, it’s not failsafe. I’ve found some interesting things on livejournal by experimenting with “livejournal + username” or “livejournal + interest” and I assume the same is true for other sites as well. Still, it’s pretty neat and if it doesn’t work like you think it should, just typing google will take you to an engine that will do the search more accurately.

Ok I’m giong to ask a stupid question here because i’m sure it’s easy to do but I can’t figure it out. How do I get a firefox icon in my taskbar? I bought a new computer last week, one that actually works.

Thanks (I’ll be over here feeling pitifully inadequate)

Foxymusic (Liked Foxamp when they were still keeping up with Firefox) and the Gmail announcer.

Hey, I’ve got good news for you. There is a repackaged version available (made by r0ver r0lls 0ver) that works in FF 1.0. You can download it from here!

It works fine in my Mozilla Superpigeon 1.0 :smiley: running on Debian Woody, and my Mozilla Spacepig 1.0 :smiley: running on Windows XP Professional (with SP2).

This is another one I love that I didn’t mention. I used to use Guidescope, but Adblock has replaced it due to its amazing configurability.

Another one I love and use. Being able to see a ten-day forecast at a glance is very useful.

And three more I enjoy having around. :slight_smile:

A bunch of the sites that say they are IE-only will run just fine under Firefox if you trick them. This involves mucking about with the about:config ‘page’, if you want to go the whole nine yards, but it can open up pages that are blatantly shilling for MSIE.

(Note that the SDMB software inserts an underscore (_) in the text ‘about:config’. Never, under any circumstances, type the underscore, unless you wish to look foolish.)

First, download the User Agent Switcher extension. This goes 50% of the way, by giving you control over what information about itself your browser gives to websites. You’ll need to switch it to ‘Internet Explorer 6 (Windows XP)’ for each site that demands it, after you’ve placed the button on one of your browser’s toolbars.

However, this won’t fool all websites. This is because the JavaScript interpreter in your browser will also tell the website what kind of a browser it is. To fix this, you need to enter ‘about:config’ (without the quotes or underscore) into your location bar. Then, in the main listbox, right-click and select ‘New -> String’. In the text box, enter ‘general.useragent.override’ (again, no quotes). In the next text box to pop up, enter a string like ‘Mozilla/5.0 Ave Bill ! Let me do my net banking’ (no quotes). You need to begin the string with ‘Mozilla/5.0’ but after that it’s up to you.

I make no guarantees about what will actually happen on any given page, but I have had good experiences with the one MSIE shill website I have to visit.

I must be the only person here who tried mouse gestures and had to uninstall them to be able to use my browser comfortably again. I really can’t get used to them.

Well, a lot of people would say that ‘safe ActiveX’ is an oxymoron. But if you really want it, and are willing to take the risk, there is ActiveX for Firefox 1.0.

Thanks, glad to have it back. :slight_smile:

Derleth, I am not that worried about it. I use IE for a few things anyway, and it is not like I can get rid of it. So using the Launchy extension is easier. I just wish people would realize that creating sites viewable by everyone is not that difficult.

Lok

If you post on forums a lot (and you probably do) you need BB Code.

It adds a bunch of options to your right-click menus that will automatically format highlighted text with BB Code and HTML.

It’ll even make a link from your clipboard, and can even paste your clipboard contents within [ quote ] tags.

I think it was an option during installation, but it’s easy to do manually: if you have an icon on the desktop, just right-drag it (drag using right mouse button) to the taskbar and choose “copy”. If you don’t have an icon on the desktop, you can do the same with the item in Start Menu.

You’re not alone. I hated them.

[QUOTE=Lok]
[ul]
[li]I Must Not Fear!: in the tool menu at the top of your browser whenever you need it.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]

Argh, for some reason it’s not working for me, it won’t download! Effing computer!! :breathes deeply: Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration… Ahhh.

It only works with versions 0.8 to 0.93.

That would have been useful too.

BBCode 0.3.7 works for anyone using 1.0 though.

I don’t get it.