Though I'd write a little article on the Firefox extensions I use. I find Firefox a brilliant web browser, that does everything I want it to, and more. I do however find it's even better with a few extensions. I'm not a complete extension whore and I don't have my Firefox loaded down with hundreds of little things. Just stuff that makes day-to-day usage pleasant.

Personal Menu

Personal Menu is probably the simplest addon I have that doesn’t extend the functionality of Firefox. It’s my concession to aesthetics :). It just gets rid of the top menu (File/Edit/Bookmarks etc), and places them onto little buttons to the right of the search bar. Or at least, that’s where I put mine. This is great for widescreen users, because the classic menu takes up vertical space, but Personal Menu takes up horizontal space, something one has plenty of on a wide screen. It’s also more customisable than the classic menu. The normal menu can be brought back just by pressing ALT, so you don’t even miss out. Great stuff :)

Aging Tabs

I suppose Aging Tabs is something of an aesthetic addon as well. But it does have a function - it lets you see how old a tab is. As in, when you last looked at the tab. It's not exactly the most amazing or useful function, true, but I installed it on a whim and I really like it. Tabs fade to a darker shade of grey the longer they're left. It really helps isolate which tab you were just looking at if you have lots open, as it sublty fades out the less used tabs. Great stuff, and it looks cool. Colours etc are fully customisable, and it works with Minefield (nightly)

Firesomething

A completely pointless plugin, as all it does is create confusion. Firesomething is an olllllld Firefox plugin that most people probably first saw on Digg. It's simple and awesome. Firesome randomises the browser's name on startup, selecting a Vendor, Prefix and Name. I'm currently using that rather excellent Adobe Waterchipmunk browser. I don't like the name of Minefield (the Nightly release of Firefox), so I go with this. Between the lack of the Mozilla Logo (minefield has a blue bomb icon), and a lack of 'Mozilla Firefox' in the title, people seeing screenshots are often left with a taste of wtf in their mouth. Firesomething is of course customisable, allowing you to put your own inventions in as Vendor, Prefix and Name. And to really confuse people, it can leave its name in user-agent strings.

Ctrl-Tab

I'll admit - I was a bit of a retard when it came to getting Ctrl-Tab. I was browsing for another Firefox extension at the time, and I found this. I installed it, thought it was awesome. As the name might suggest, it's very very similar in functionality to Alt-Tab on Windows - it shows a visual preview of open tabs. What is cooler though, is that it will show ALL tabs across all instances of firefox - you can have tabs 1-3 in one instance of Fx, and 4-9 in another instance, and this will show, and flip between all 9 tabs. And now to explain why I'm a retard - I downloaded and installed this addon the DAY before this functionality got added to the Firefox 3.1 release, and pushed to the Minefield version. Fail. There are a couple of advantages to using this over the built-in native ctrl-tab functionality - Ctrl-Tab extension can display a grid view of all open tabs, which would be useful if you're a tabwhore. I know my sister is. You can also filter by tab names, again, equally if you have lots and lots of tabs. Very useful addon :)

   

For me, this is probably the most useful addon I have installed. I say for me, because FxIF's function is simple and specific - when you right click an image and view the image properties, underneath the normally available information, FxIF shows full EXIF information (obviously where available). This is extremely useful, for example working out how somebody achieved a certain effect in an image, why an image may potentially be overexposed/underexposed, blurred, a 'bad' photo and so on. FxIF is extremely simple - no configuration options, it just works and shows everything it can. It's extremely useful for at-a-glance in-browser view without having to download the image and check it in a program that reads exif. And it can copy EXIF data to clipboard. Great if you're a photographer, otherwise I can't see this being the most relevant addon.

IETab

IETab is one of those highly specialised but extremely useful addons to have. Despite Mozilla's efforts, Internet Explorer is still one of the most widely used browsers on the planet. And there are alot of old websites out there. This results in stuff being written very deliberately to only work on Internet Explorer. Sometimes its bad development, sometimes its just because, but for whatever reason, it is an issue. IETab is a very elegant method of solving this from within Firefox - it can switch rendering engine between Firefox and Internet Explorer on a per-tab basis. Now you don't need to fire up IE to visit that site, you can do it within Firefox. You're still using IE, so all security and flaws apply, but at least the environment is nicer. And IETab has a site filter set up - so it will always load certain pages in IE if you tell it to. Extremely useful for me, as I use it to access the web-based Xcerion XIOS 3, which is an internet based operating system. It's under development, but it's extremely cool, and doesn't support Firefox...yet. IETab solves that nicely for me :)

User Agent Switcher

User Agent Switcher has a similar purpose to IETab above, and is equally niche, but is slightly simpler than just throwing another rendering engine around. Usage Agent Switcher switches the User Agent strings that Firefox sends to the server. These are relied very heavily upon, and are pretty much the de-facto standard of establishing what browser the user is viewing the site from. Some sites will send you to specific pages based on your user agent string, so they can implement browser specific code. And some websites will turn you down because of your user-agent string. Unfortunately, my bank is one of those; Natwest Online Banking. In fairness to Natwest, they're considerably more on the ball than most online banking services, some of which I believe only support IE6/7. Natest support Firefox 1.5/2.0, Opera, Safari as well as IE, and a few others. However, they do not support Firefox 3, and they most certainly don't like the user-agent strings that 3.1a1pre Minefield sends out. So I just send Firefox 2 strings. Or IE7 strings. Or whatever mask I feel like wearing. I also use this to download addons from addons.mozilla.org - the download button is blocked unless your browser's version matches that addon's compatibility. Amusingly enough, it's not blocked if you're using IE7. I use User Agent Switcher for when I need to pretend I'm using IE7 without actually using IE7 - I'm still using Firefox so all the security and speed benefits still apply.

 

Nighty Tester Tools

Last but not at all least, Nightly Tester Tools is the singular most important addon I have installed. Because without it, most of the rest simply wouldn't run. NTT can override an addon's version information and force install regardless. Sure, it's not the best idea because addons are probably going to have problems with Minefield. However, its the only way to realisitcally get stuff running, because very few addons are designed to run on Minefield. Minefield is still Firefox at its heart, so its not that much of a change. Simple, small, but oh so immensely useful.