Here’s another post in the guise of informing readers of something that is really for my own edification.
I’ve got a handful of Firefox extensions installed that I find useful. I tend to try out an extension and then not like it and disable it. But this short list has stuck with me, and when I consider upgrading Firefox the availability of these plugins are essentially what times my upgrade.
Here we go:
DOM Inspector - This one comes with Firefox. In fact, I don’t use it that often because there are other tools in my bag that do things better. But still, it’s not un-useful, so I leave it activated.
Adsense Notifier - It puts your Adsense earnings in the status bar. It’s handy for generally keeping quick track of site hits, too, since it displays how many ads it has served. Plus, right-clicking on it takes me directly to the Adsense reporting page - without having to fill out a login form. Handy.
Tabbrowser Extensions - I can’t recall exactly why I use this extension, but I know that it fixes one of the first things to annoy me in a fresh Firefox install. I have certain patterns of behavior with my tabs that I need to keep enabled.
Web Developer - You can’t even claim to be a web developer if you don’t have this extension installed. It is, after all, the “Web Developer” extension! This one adds a new toolbar to Firefox with too many useful features to list all of them. The best ones, though, are the ability to edit a page’s CSS live, hover the mouse over an element to view its CSS selector in the status bar, and send the current page to the W3C validation tool. Awesome! Other extensions I can work without – this one, I cannot.
Download Statusbar - Ok, maybe you think this one is a little odd. But I can’t stand that stupid built-in download manager window. This extension is much more elegant. Each new download appears as a little button in a new bar at the bottom of the Firefox window. As the download completes, a bar shows how much is downloaded. Context menus and clicking allow for easy management of downloaded files. This is another one that I won’t use Firefox without.
User Agent Switcher - Why the developer of the Web Developer extension didn’t include this functionality in that great extension, I don’t know. But sometimes, you need Firefox to pretend to be IE to trick a bad site into giving the info that you want. This extension lets you do that.
Javascript Debugger - This one isn’t working with Firefox 1.5, but I don’t use it so often, so that’s alright for now. This extension lets you set breakpoints in javascript that runs on a page to debug it. If you’re used to good GUI development IDEs, you’ll appreciate this, which is the only attempt at such an animal that I know of on Firefox.
Customize Google - Why do I have this installed? It removes ads. That’s basically it. It also blocks reporting to Google Analytics, which has an “verify evil-ness” checkmark next to it in my mental to-do list.
Live HTTP Headers - I have a Windows application that does a better job of this, but in a pinch or if I just need something simple, this extension is very useful. It reports the request and response headers used to view a page. This is handy in development to get clues for why a server sent a particular error.
Bookmarks Synchronizer - This plugin doesn’t work as well as I would like, but when it does, it allows me to upload my bookmarks to a remote server while I’m on one computer, then download them when on another. And since they all do both uploading and downloading, my bookmarks are relatively synchronized. Like I said, it doesn’t always work.
Console2 - This extension is a new one for Firefox 1.5 that I can’t do without. When you’re looking at the javascript error window in Firefox 1.5, it now shows CSS errors and warnings in addition to the javascript errors. This extension lets you filter the errors by type, so you can ignore the CSS stuff when you’re trying to concentrate on javascript. You can also filter by domain, so that if you have more than one tab open (like, one to the site you’re debugging, and one to a reference site) it only shows the errors from the domain you’re debugging. Essential.
Search Status - Among other things, this extension puts the Google PageRank and Alexa Rating into the status bar as little gauges. When you visit a site, it queries the site for its rankings. It’s useful for learning the authority/popularity of a site that you’ve never visited before, and can also do things that are interesting for SEO, like show keyword density or whois information.
And that’s it. A few of these might not be so essential, but I like having a standard set of extensions to use consistently on all of my systems. This is a good start for me. Do you have any favorites that I missed?
