Up until recently, I never really thought that I had very extensive browser needs, but I’ve now loaded most of a dozen Firefox extensions into my browser. The reason is pretty simple, I didn’t know what I was missing till I tried them.
My current four favourites are BugMeNot, User agent switcher, Super Drag&Go and of course Adblock. All of which are available at the official extension site and all are totally free.
I’m not going to get into this in too much detail, you can browse the links if you are that interested, but I’ll do a tiny pitch on each one to give you an idea.
BugMeNot is an extension designed to allow you into over a thousand sites that normally require user registration before you can read anything useful. If you wish to remain anonymous when reading news and other such sites, it’s indispensable.
User agent switcher Is a little module that allows you to change the user agent of your browser via the tools menu. I generally leave mine as Linux/Firefox, but when installing some plugins (like flash), I have found it is very handy to use the Netscape4 user agent as not all plugins understand the Firefox agent yet.
Super Drag&go I was a bit dubious about this one at first, it seemed allot like mouse gestures, but I’ve since become an addict. To open a link on a page in a new tab, just drag the link to a blank area of the page and let go. To search Google for a string of text in a page, just highlight the text in question, and drag it to a blank spot on the page, and a new tab opens up with Google looking for those words. A great time saver once you are used to it.
Adblock Adblock is fantastic, I get really sick of looking at big flash ads when I’m reading a news story, with Adblock I can just right click on the ad, and block it, even better, you can use a wildcard * to block any ads from the site that supplied the one you are blocking. It can also block images and nearly anything else.
If you haven’t already seen them, I’ve done a couple of other little stories on Firefox extensions like In form spell checking and Web developer extensions.
The idea of a system where a browser can have extra functionality added with the click of a couple of buttons is fantastic, I suspect that this will become something of a standard for all browsers someday, and rightly so too.
Regards
Franki
