21 Firefox Add-ons to enhance your browsing experience

Hey Everyone,

Today, I spent most of the day going through the Firefox Add-ons and found (and installed) a few good ones, so I thought I’d share them with you. For those who don’t know, an add-on is kinda like a mini-program that’s installed to Firefox in order to make your own way of browsing the web even better. Some of the following are directed to web developers but most of them are for anybody. Here’s how my browser looks like now with all the add-ons (click to enlarge):

21 Firefox Add-ons to enhance your browsing experience
The following are organized from left to right, top to bottom on my browser. Each link will lead you to its download page in a new window (or tab). I’m not sure if all of them work with Firefox 3, you’re gonna have to test that yourself.

1. Well Rounded
   Adds a nice ‘finishing touch’ to Firefox by providing aesthetically pleasing, rounded edges to the location bar, search bar, find bar, and all manor of other toolbars on your browser…
2. PHP Lookup (for web developers)
   Quick PHP function lookup.
3. GoogCal
   Creates a (movable) toolbar button that opens Google Calendar in the current tab.
4. StumbleUpon Toolbar
   Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.
   BEWARE: This will make you procrastinate, but if you’ve got time to waste, then it’s pretty cool.
5. Digg This!
   The Digg This! extension speeds up the process of submitting stories to the news website digg.com
6. SQLite Manager (for web developers)
   Manage any SQLite database on your computer. I don’t know if it works with MySQL though.
7. FireFTP (for web developers)
   FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
8. FireBug (essential for web developers)
   Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…
9. Web Developer
   Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
10. Google Browser Sync
    Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
11. Faviconize Tabs
    This extension adds a new “FaviconizeTab” option to the context menu of the tab.
    Look at my first 5 tabs and you’ll understand.
12. Tab Scope
    Preview and navigate tab contents through popup.

Now down at the status bar…

1. Google Notebook
   Add text clippings, images and links to your Google Notebook and share them with friends.
2. ScribeFire (for bloggers)
   ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
   Unfortunately, there’s an error message that pops up whenever I want to post a blog in WordPress, but I’m still keeping it and waiting for them to fix this.
3. Web Personal Cleaner
   Allows to hide parts of website pages (like publicity). So, you can personalize your favorite websites…
   This is a MUST GET. I removed the ads on myspace and facebook, and any other ads I see will be “cleaned”.
4. GMail Checker
   Light-weight Firefox extension to check for new messages in your Google Mail’s Inbox and Labels.
5. Brief
   Brief makes reading RSS feeds as easy as it gets. It is designed to have the right set of features to be both powerful and simple. Brief stores feeds on your disk and presents them on a seamless, interactive page.
   Best one I’ve seen so far.
6. WeatherBug
   Get live, local weather conditions in Firefox with the WeatherBug extension. Featuring forecasts, radar, and severe weather alerts from WeatherBug’s community of neighborhood weather…

And, for the add-ons that are not noticeable on my screenshot…

1. Dictionaries
   These dictionaries work with the spell-checking feature in Firefox, in a lot of different languages.
2. Download Statusbar
   View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar – without the download window getting in the way of your web browsing.
3. Organize Status Bar
   This extension will enable you to organize your status bar icons. You can now rearrange or remove any item (icon or text) in the Firefox status bar. If your status bar is full and cluttered like mine was, give this a try.

There’s just one negative thing that I have to say about those though… With 20 add-ons installed to Firefox, sometimes it will freeze for a second or two… but then again, my computer’s a piece of crap and always had memory problems. Hope those are helpful to you in some way!

Comments are always appreciated, and if you have any other add-ons that you think might interest me, comment away!
Peace :)