Must Try Firefox Addons

Firefox is one of the best web browsers for a reason: It can be infinitely customized with extensions or plugins. Lets take a look at some of the best plugins for firefox shall we ?

AD Block Plus

Every ad-company’s bane but every bandwidth conscious internet surfer’s boon, adblock plus removes advertisements from websites. On installation it asks for a source to download the blocklist from. Easylist is the best. Select it and notice most of the ads on the internet disappear.

Remove It Permanently (RIP)

RIP is a companion addon to adblock plus though it has other uses. When you block an ad, you still load its frame on the web page. RIP removes a frame from the page and makes the page look cleaner. You could, for example remove right and left ad-panels and make the page a lot more broader.

FlashBlock

Have you been irritated by the countless times unwanted flash animations load and waste bandwidth and CPU ? Well, flashblock replaces every flash object with an icon which can be clicked to display that flash object. This way you will only see flash if you WANT to (for example, youtube or another flash based video site).

NOScript

This is an interesting addon. Since most browser vulnerabilities and phishing attempts are through the use of scripts, NOScript blocks all scripts, like javascript. Obviously, this removes a lot of functionality from the browser. But hey, you could re-enable it with a single click.

DTA – DownThemALL

This is the first and only dedicated download manager and accelerator based on firefox engine. It supports pause and resume of downloads and downloading multiple chunks of files at a time to accelerate the download speed. It has support for calculating checksums of files after downloading them if you wish to verify their integrity. For the tiny download it comes in, its an awesome install for anyone.

FlashGot

Don’t like DTA ? Then you can use your favorite download manager right from firefox, using flashgot. Its an addon which helps you to integrate other download managers with firefox. And it supports almost every popular download manager existent, from FlashGet, DAP, etc to even commandline download managers like wget and cURL.

ChatZilla

This is a neat IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client for firefox which makes a great alternative to standalone IRC clients for those who want something with a smaller hard disk footprint. It may be small but its LOADED with features.

FireFTP

This is a MUST-HAVE addon for people who share files over the internet through FTP. Its a full featured FTP client for firefox.

KeepVid

This is not an extension, but a bookmarklet which can be downloaded from keepvid.com by following the on-screen instructions. This service helps you download videos from youtube, etc.

Cache Viewer

This is an addon that presents  a fully graphical interface to view firefox’s cache. You can use this to browse your cache’s contents after, for example a a youtube video has loaded fully, so that you may save it offline for future viewing.

Developer Toolbar

This is an awesome addon for web developers which adds a toolbar to the browser full of advanced controls which can enable and disable several things for those testing and creating websites. Note though, that for everyone else, it might seem to be plain bloat.

Google Toolbar

How could one leave out this addon ? This is the google toolbar for firefox. It has several of google’s search functions integrated into one toolbar.

Extended Statusbar

This useful addon makes your statusbar display lots of useful data like page load time, loading speed, etc. Another must-have for power users.

User Agent Switcher

An addon for advanced users, this can make the browser appear like another browser to the site its visiting. This way if a website checks for IE and refuses to allow firefox visitors for example, you could just disguise yourself as IE and see if the site loads.

WML Browser

This useful addon helps you to browse pages encoded in Wireless Markup Language, in which mobile WAP sites are encoded.
There are a lot more addons than the ones discussed here. So head over to addons.mozilla.org right now to see more !

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