Friday, November 12, 2010

Addons/Extensions Must Have for Firefox

  • ColorfulTabs – Having too many tabs open can lead to a lot of confusion. Still, this extension will assign your tabs different colors so you can tell them apart easier.
  • Adblock Plus – The popular, yet controversial extension has been updated to work with the latest version of the browser, and it’s still doing what it does best: blocking ads.
  • ChatZilla – Add an IRC client to your browser so you can chat in it directly without having to open any other applications.
  • ColorZilla – An extremely handy tool for Web developers to let them see the RGB and Hex values of any color on a Web page.
  • Del.icio.us Toolbar – Quickly add bookmarks to your Del.icio.us account, edit tags and access your account.
  • Digg – Lets you know if the page you are viewing has been dugg, how many it has received, recent comments and more.
  • DownThemAll – A popular extension that assists you in downloading multiple files from a page with just a few clicks.
  • Facebook Toolbar – Gives you notifications of new mail and pokes on your Facebook account.
  • Firebug – A mainstay of the developer community, Firebug strips down Web pages quickly. It lets you work on JAVA, HTML, CSS and more, directly inside the browser.
  • FireGestures – Use five different mouse gestures to control various functions of Firefox.
  • Flagfox – See a flag in the status bar that tells you what country the server is in for the website you are on. You can then look up more detailed information on the server, giving you some extra security in case the site is a fake.
  • FlashBlock – Annoyed with Flash animations that play on sites when you launch them? FlashBlock will stop them from playing.
  • Foxmarks – Have more than one computer? Then you have to have Foxmarks. It synchronizes your bookmarks across multiple computers and gives you access to them via their website.
  • FoxyTunes – Gives you control over multiple media players directly from your browsers to save you the effort of changing windows.
  • Forecastfox – Weather forecasts brought to you by the people at AccuWeather.com.
  • Google Toolbar – Gives you the ability to search Google from a toolbar, access to your mail, auto fill forms and several other features.
  • Greasemonkey – Greasemonkey is the necessary extension to run the ceaseless stream of Greasmonkey scripts that allow you to customize sites from Facebook to Gmail.
  • GSpace – Gmail gives you nearly 7 GB of free storage. With Gspace, you can turn some or all of that into free online storage of files that you can access from anywhere.
  • IETab – Sometimes you just have to look at some things in Internet Explorer due to coding issues. Well, using a tab inside of Firefox is a far sight better than having to open up IE itself.
  • MeasureIt – An extension perfect for designers that allows you to measure the dimensions of any section of a page to figure out how much real-estate it is occupying.
  • Meebo – Gives you a sidebar with all of your buddies from the various instant messenger services that Meebo supports such as AIM and MSN.
  • NoScript is an essential extension in your security arsenal. It prevents scripts from running in the background of a website without your express permission.
  • QuickRestart – One of the most annoying things about adding a new extenstion to Firefox is the down time while it restarts the browser to work properly. This extension speeds up the process.
  • Reload Every – Allows you to set your tabs to reload every few seconds or minutes, handy for sites like Twitter.
  • Sage-Too – A lightweight RSS reader you can integrate into your browser.
  • StumbleUpon Toolbar – Allows you to stumble pages from a convenient toolbar, add comments, view what has been said and more.
  • TwitterFox – A Twitter client that resides down in your status bar.
  • Update Notifier – You’ve been adding all these extensions. Still, it’s easy to forget to check to see when they’ve been updated. This puts the notifications out front where it’s easy to keep track of them.
  • Video DownloadHelper – Assists you in finding and downloading videos from over 500 websites all over the world.
  • WebMail Notifier – Get notifications of new email in your status bar for services such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and more.
Each Top 10 entrant is linked to the page where Firefox users can install them from. See if you can't find something new for your browsing routine below.

10. AutoCopy

We like it because we're bloggers, having to quote and copy links and code every day. Still, anyone who does a fair amount of copying to and from the web will dig AutoCopy. The primary use: It copies any text you select on the web as soon as you choose it—no Ctrl+C necessary. For pasting into text forms, you simply hit the middle mouse button rather than Control+V. If that's all it did, hey, we'd recommend it to anyone who writes, copies or pastes a lot. Still, we also have to point out that it fixes really long, wrap-broken URLs automatically. Three cheers for fewer pinky-finger stretches!

9. Google Gears

It's a bit more technical than most browser extensions. Still, for all intents and purposes, Gear is an easy-to-install add-on that unlocks an entirely new world to the internet. Primarily, it takes Google apps offline—Gmail, Google Reader, Docs, and Calendar—but a handful of other apps make good use of its mini-database powers, including Remember the Milk and PassPack. Still, given the kind of special implementation Offline Gmail received, we've only scratched the surface of the potential in them their gears.

8. Personal Menu

Personal Menu is kind of a next-generation version of the much-loved Tiny Menu, accomplishing the same basic but totally significant effect: Giving the web content you're actually looking at more space to breathe. It does this by stripping the screen-wide menu bar at the top of Firefox's windows and converting it into a single drop-down menu, then lets you choose which of those menus show up in it. Keyboard shortcut ninjas can enable an option to temporarily bring back the menu bar when Alt is pressed, and the extension auto-adds a history and bookmarks button to the main toolbar to compensate for the two most active menus.

7. Better Gmail 2

It's not a revelation that Gmail functionality is one of our pet obsessions. Better Gmail 2 fixes or answers a lot of our Gmail complaints and wishes in one neat package. You can individually enable or kill any of Better Gmail's more than a dozen fixes and improvements. Whenever a tremendous new Gmail user script hits the Greasemonkey realm, you can count on seeing it added to Better Gmail by our own Gina Trapani.

6. DownThemAll!

Not a tool you need every day, but really useful when you want it; DownThemAll is a selective, powerful download manager. It makes short work of snatching all the images on a page (including those links to the "bigger" or "zoom" versions), all the MP3s off a music blog, or any other kind of filter you can set up. Gina showed us how to do some intelligent tune-grabbing and Flickr downloading with her guide to supercharging your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll, but her walkthrough should work for any type of file on any page. Incidentally, DownThemAll isn't just one of our favorites—it's also the most popular download manager among Lifehacker readers.

5. Tab Mix Plus

Remember browsing before tabs? We kind of recall a faint smell of kerosene and words like "doubloon" still in use. In all seriousness, browser tabs are the key ingredient to how many of us multi-task on the web every day, and Tab Mix Plus is a master key for everything you like or loathe about tabs. It controls which links open in a new tab, new window, or the same window to an OCD-friendly level, adds critical features like italicizing the text on tabs you haven't viewed yet, and super-powers Firefox's undo closed tab feature. Of course, it gets way, way more intricate than that, but even for just the bare basics, it's totally worth the install.

4. Automatic Save Folder

This one is technically an experimental, non-Mozilla-approved download. Still, with the positive reaction received in our experimental extensions round-up and experimental extensions no longer requiring a sign-up and log-in, it's more than worth stepping out on the ledge. It's the smart-downloading companion to DownThemAll, placing the files you download in a specific folder on your system based on the file extension or the site you grab it from. So if you always want the .xls spreadsheets, you grab them from Gmail to go into your Reports folder. Still, a .xls you hold from anywhere else to show up on your Desktop like everything else, you set the rules. JPG files from your friends' Flickr page versus photo downloads of the rest of the net? Tell them where they should go. It keeps your folders and desktops clean and sets up rules you shouldn't have to tweak much after one go—indeed, an extension after our own geeky hearts.

3. Adblock Plus

You knew this would be here, didn't you? Ad-blocking can make the internet a more tolerable place to look around, and AdBlock Plus does this with a robust ad-blocking feed subscription you can pick at start-up. Alternately, any ads you find particularly distracting ("ONE RULE TO A FLAT STOMACH: OBEY") can be right-clicked on and killed in perpetuity with "Adblock Image." Ads can be brought back if you're feeling curious. Still, as many a commenter (and AdBlock-loving editor) has said: After getting used to AdBlock Plus, you forget what the internet indeed looks like until you turn this extension off. Lifehacker is, of course, an advertising-supported site, so we'd love it if you kept our ads displaying, opting instead to individually kill only the ones that make your eyeballs itch.

2. Greasemonkey

There are extensions for Firefox changes that require deep browser integration (like adding a new button to the browser's chrome). For everything else, there's Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is a complex extension for the uninitiated to wrap their heads around, but once they do, it's a breeze. In essence, Greasemonkey is a meta-extension of sorts. When first installed, it does nothing by default; the power lies in Greasemonkey user scripts developed by JavaScript-wielding geeks fed up with under-performing sites or interested in bringing more power to the places they already love. If you don't like seeing labels on your Gmail messages but wouldn't mind seeing them when your pointer hovers over them, there's a fix. Want YouTube to acknowledge your bandwidth and load high-quality clips by default? Same deal. Those are just a few recent examples, but the list continues, and the fixes keep getting better. You can find Greasemonkey scripts all over the web. Still, if you're just getting started, you may also want to check out Userscripts.org—sort of like Mozilla's add-ons site but for Greasemonkey scripts.

1. Foxmarks/Xmarks

Foxmarks is gradually rebranding as Xmarks, but what we really like about Fox/Xmarks remains the same as the last time it claimed the Must-Have crown: It's nearly seamless at keeping your bookmarks and passwords synchronized between browsers on any platform and stores them on a site you can visit from any browser where you can't install an extension. If you're not down with the cloud, you can even tell this extension to store your stuff on your own server. Foxmarks is also available on IE and Safari. You can separate your work bookmarking from ooh-cool life stuff with selective bookmark profiles. It's the tool that lets you keep fleeting thoughts, IM links, and other temporary web stuff altogether, so of course, we dig on it. The transition to Xmarks adds a few semi-nifty, social-y features to your searching and bookmarking. Still, if you're not keen on those changes, you can easily disable them in the Xmarks preferences.
10 Addons Must-Have Of Firefox for Web Designers

Among all web browsers, Firefox is an innovative and user-friendly browser. Because it is flexible and much and more quality compares to other browsers. Among web designers, the Firefox browser is popular because of its user-friendly interface and its various features. Add-ons make Firefox especially valuable to web designers. Here is a list of the top 10 must-have add-ons you’ll want to use if you’re a 
web designer. That's why it is so much popular.

1. Firebug - This addon will allow you to watch the script of the webpage and also to modify it as u want at the client side.

2. Pixel Perfect – Pixel Perfect is a Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers
 to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML.

3. Web Developer –  With the help of this addon, you can add various tools menus toolbars to the multiple pages, and you can also customize each and everything. So this addon will also help the web developers
 for easy and fast web designing.

4. IE Tab – This addon is for those who use the INTERNET EXPLORER. For the persons who are using internet explorer, this addon is very helpful. This addon will show the web content of the page displayed by the IE. You can also make changes and adjustments as you want.

5. FireShot – This addon will take a snapshot of the web page. Here you can add graphical annotations to each and every part of the web content where you want to add that for the reminder. So that if anyone will see this snapshot can be easily understood by them.

(Image Taken From Official Mozilla Website)

6. Palette Grabber – This addon will help those persons who use Photoshop,paint.net and other image editing tools. This ad-don will create custom color patterns and much more functionality.

7. Firecookie – This is typically the firebug extension. It will manage all the cookies and also let you allow to manage and modify the cookie.

8. GridFox – This addon will help web developers to overlay or make or put the grid on the website.web developers also extract and create grids.

9. YSlow – Based on yahoo performance rules or the policy, if any website has some faults or is down or slow. Then you can report it here by this ad-don. It will see the survey and contact the official that website for this problem's solution.

10. Aardvark – Usually web developer cleans the pages by removing. For that persons, this tool will help them.


If you are looking for Firebug. You are too late: it is no more. However, we have other JavaScript debugging tools for you to try. Check the link here.

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