Make Your Online Life Faster and Easier
If you use Firefox (like I do most of the time), you are no doubt aware that there are many add-ons that can improve your browsing experience. Many of these can make your online life a whole lot easier and more enjoyable - and save you time. Following are some that I have found particularly useful. Which do you like? Tell me.
1. Add to Search Bar
The Add to Search Bar add-on is unbelievably useful if you do a lot of searching day in, day out. Instead of having only the few default search engines to choose from, you can right click on any search box on the web and add that to the list of search engines in your search bar.
2. Drag & DropZones
The Drag & DropZones add-on makes the previous add-on even more useful. With this, you can highlight any text on a page and simply drag it to bring up a series of windows - one for each search engine from your search bar. This one is also fully customizable. It can be more convenient than going up to the search bar, finding the correct search engine from the pull-down menu, and then searching.
3. Fire Gestures
The Fire Gestures add-on allows you to perform different Firefox operations with a simple gesture of the mouse. For instance, you can open a new tab by holding a right click and moving left and right from anywhere in the window.
You can perform a lot of functions with different gestures, which are completely customizable via the options of this neat add-on. You can choose which gestures you want to perform each operation.
The add-on is very similar to other mouse gestures add-ons, but this one is compatible with Firefox 3.5 and up.
4. IE Tab
The IE tab function allows you to convert the web page you are on to Internet Explorer view. This can be helpful for checking pages to make sure they look alright in both browsers.
Also, when you happen to come across a page with some issues, you can switch over to IE with the click of a button, and see if it works better there.
5. Shareaholic
The Shareaholic button is a cool and convenient add-on for those among you who like to share a lot of content. Basically, it allows you to send any page to any social network of your choosing by right clicking and selecting the one you want to use from the menu. There is also a button that is added to the top of your browser. It is customizable so you can choose your preferred networks.
6. Smart Bookmarks Bar
The Smart Bookmarks Bar is one of my current favorites. It eliminates the text from the bookmarks in your bookmarks bar, and leaves only the favicons. This means it frees up a whole lot of space, and you can fit a lot more bookmarks on that bar.
This way, all of the sites you visit most frequently can always be no more than a single click away. Just make sure you know your favicons.
7. TooManyTabs
The TooManyTabs add-on allows you to create multiple rows of tabs. If you frequently have a lot of tabs open, and would prefer to be able to see what they all are, this add-on will be of particular use to you. You can always send specific tabs to different rows, which can also be useful.
8. Workaround Bug 489729
Ever since I installed version 3.5 of Firefox, I have encountered an extremely annoying issue where something or other I was doing was somehow taking the tab I was in and sending it to a different window. The problem was, I could not figure out what I was doing to cause this.
Eventually, I happened across this Workaround Bug add-on, which took care of the problem. It turned out to be that clicking a tab once and then moving your mouse in a downward motion caused a new window to open - something I seem to do a lot.
This add-on allows you to disable this not so useful function.
Conclusion
There are countless add-ons available to the Firefox user, and I am sure I have barely scratched the surface of ones that can contribute to your productivity. Please read my other articles on Firefox add-ons.
What are your favorite add-ons? Share them here.
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