Friday, 22 May 2009 06:04
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This is a list of my favorite Firefox extensions. If you would like to see an extension added to this list, submit a comment below this article and I will see about adding it to the list.
General Extensions
This works with Adblock Plus to hide actual elements of a page besides simply advertisements. It lets you select an element (example: a table or a div) and hide this based on the website's domain name. I used this to permanently remove the horizontal thumbnail bar that appears on Youtube after favoriting or liking a video. Other websites pop up horizontal link bars only when you scroll a page. I find this to be highly annoying. Elements are easy to remove and they never come back! (Requires Adblock Plus)
Sets permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by 40 different advertising networks, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and nearly all other members of the Network Advertising Initiative.
Adds a button to the Firefox toolbar that contains all of the menus (File, Edit, View, etc). Also hides the menu bar. It conserves a lot of space.
Alternative: Personal Menu
Allows you to easily copy the URL and title of the current webpage to your clipboard. This makes it more convenient when sharing links with your friends. To use, right click anywhere on the web page and choose Copy Title.
Allows you to limit the download or upload bandwidth of Firefox globally or on a per ip or website basis. It allows you to limit by a selection of presets or exact kilobyte per second rate. This is great for throttling certain sites such as Youtube which can thrash the entire internet connection which consequently affects everyone on the network.
I use it to throttle youtube to just under my maximum download rate and just under my maximum upload rate. This prevents the internet connection from becoming saturated and affecting my brother who likes to play Call of Duty. In short, I can upload a video to Youtube and slow it down or speed it up at will right from within Firefox.
Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. ...
Logichaos' List of Great Greasemonkey Scripts
An online password manager replacement. Instead of using the insecure Firefox download manager, LastPass will save your passwords online securely. It can automatically fill in username and password boxes or automatically login based on your per website preferences. It can save multiple logins for each site. It even has a useful form filler.
Opera supports most major browsers including Firefox, Oprea, Chrome, Safari, and even the iPhone.
By default, middle clicking on javascript links in Firefox opens a blank tab instead of following the link. This extension fixes that problem and lets middle clicks open simple javascript links in new tabs.
The creator of this extension should rename it to something less specific. QuickJava adds several buttons to your statusbar that enables you to quickly disable Java, Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, Images or CSS styling without having to refresh the webpage or open any additional dialogue windows.
This is great for browsing the web without distractions or for debugging purposes for web development.
A simple extension that adds a restart button to Firefox for easily and quickly restarting Firefox. This extension will save your session (without asking) and restart Firefox immediately. Also, the icon looks cool.
Saves a webpage completely, providing a better alternative to the flawed built-in save functionality of Firefox.
Save Images saves the images from the current tab page, from the cache, to a specified location, with either the images original file name or a file name that you specify. The size and types of images saved may be chosen, with options if...
Creates screenshots of web pages (entirely or just visible part). This is similar to Fireshot, but does not have as many features. It does exactly what you'd expect, but lacks the ability to quickly edit an image from within Firefox. If you want to edit the image, you can use your favorite photo editing software afterwards.
Autosizes the searchbar as you type, cleans the query or reverts to your default search engine after submitting. Supports almost all themes and various search bar related extensions. Useful for saving space on a small screen.
Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager.
The easy way to download and convert Web videos from hundreds of YouTube-like sites. This works also for audio and picture galleries.
WOT, Web of Trust, warns you about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware or send spam. Protect your computer against online threats by using WOT as your front-line layer of protection when browsing or searching in unfamiliar territory. WOT's color-coded icons show you ratings for 21 million websites - green to go, yellow for caution and red to stop helping you avoid the dangerous sites. Surf safer and add WOT to your Firefox now.
Web Development Extensions
Allows you to inspect elements of a webpage and edit the CSS properties in real time.
Extensions for Firebug:
- CSS Usage | Download - Shows you which CSS are being used on the current web page. Great tool for figuring out which CSS properties aren't being used and which are for helping you remove obsolete CSS properties.
- FireFontFamily | Download - Highlights the font-family that is currently being used by the inspected element. Firebug, by default, does not show you which font is being used, it shows you the entire Font Family.
- Firepicker | Download - Lets you pick a color from a gradient pallete when editing CSS properties
- FireRainbow | Download - Highlights Javascript Syntax in Firebug
Tips & Tweaks
Changing the location of the cache folder is useful if you like to make backups of your Firefox profile. The cache folder is unnecessary and can make your backups larger than they need to be
- Create a folder for the cache in a different location than your Firefox profile. You can call this anything you want, but I recommend calling it Cache just to keep things simple.
- Open Firefox and type about:config in your address bar and hit enter. If you get an intermediate screen warning you of a warranty voiding, simply click I'll be careful, I promise.
- In the filter bar, type browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. If you do not have this entry, you need to right click anywhere and choose New > String and paste that as the String Value.
- Modify this value and change that to wherever your Cache folder is located. Mine is D:\_Mozilla Profiles\Cache
- Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.
This tweak is not for everyone. If you actively run Antivirus and you prefer to be on the safe side, then do not attempt this tweak. However, if you don't run Antivirus because you are extremely careful about what goes onto your computer, then virus scanning only serves to annoy because it tacks on an extra couple seconds when downloading files. You can disable virus scanning so that you can access downloaded files faster.
- Open Firefox and type about:config in your address bar and hit enter. If you get an intermediate screen warning you of a warranty voiding, simply click I'll be careful, I promise.
- In the filter bar, type browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone. If you do not have this entry, you need to right click anywhere and choose New > Boolean and paste that as the Boolean Value.
- Set this to False.
- Restart Firefox.
Basically, this tweak decreases how often Firefox saves your browsing session. By default, Firefox saves your session every 10 seconds. This includes tabs and various other things. This can sometimes produce a stutter while viewing videos on Youtube, or flash based websites that require a lot of CPU power. You can decrease the likeliness of this stutter by changing the frequency of browser session saving. The downside is it increases the risk of losing some of your session in the event Firefox crashes. It boils down to whether or not you prefer performance over reliability.
- Open Firefox and type about:config in your address bar and hit enter. If you get an intermediate screen warning you of a warranty voiding, simply click I'll be careful, I promise.
- In the filter bar, type browser.sessionstore.interval. If you do not have this entry, you need to right click anywhere and choose New > Integer and paste that as the Integer Value.
- By default, it's set to 10000 which is 10,000 miliseconds (i.e. 10 seconds). I recommend changing this to 120000 (120 seconds).
- Restart Firefox.
Pipelining is a feature in Firefox that enables the browser to send out multiple requests to a server. This increases the page load speed noticeably. If you're using a broadband connection, you should definitely enable this. If you're using DSL or a dial up connection, do not enable this.
For more information regarding this, read this article: The Truth About the Firefox “Pipelining” Trick
- Open Firefox and type about:config in your address bar and hit enter. If you get an intermediate screen warning you of a warranty voiding, simply click I'll be careful, I promise.
- In the filter bar, type network.http.version. If you do not have this entry, you need to right click anywhere and choose New > String and paste that as the String Value. Set it to 1.1.
- Make sure it's seto to 1.1 If it's less than 1.1, change it to 1.1.
- In the filter bar, type pipelining.
- Change network.http.pipelining to true by double clicking it.
- Change network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 by double clicking it and changing the integer value.
- Change network.http.proxy.pipelining to true by double clicking it. (This enables pipelining if your Firefox is proxied. If Firefox is not proxied or you are unsure, it won't hurt to have it enabled.
- Restart Firefox.
Last Updated (Wednesday, 19 October 2011 19:21)
Comments
Cool, thanks. I will add these to the list.
Also, you might want to read this: egonitron.com/2007/05/25/the-truth-about-the-firefox-pipelining-trick/
It explains why you shouldn't set pipelining max requests greater than 8. It's a somewhat outdated article, but I agree with the notion that setting it any higher than 8 is a bad idea.
New Tab Homepage
about:config:
network.http.pipelining > true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests > 100