About sixteen month ago I fired Internet Explorer as my primary browser. Why? Because it crashed on me constantly and all too often took forever to transition from one site to another. I have found the Firefox browser much more user friendly and convenient, especially given the number of add-ons that have been developed for the browser.
The ability to customize Firefox with these extensions is what makes this most widely used of open-source browsers so special. However, there are so many add-ons available, it is hard to tell what is worth installing and what will be a complete waste of time.
There are numerous lists of Firefox add-ons citing the best extensions for web developers or for a better YouTube experience. However, I wanted to create an everyday list of my best choices for the ordinary online business owner and the (semi)professional blogger.
Without further ado, here are the 10 best Firefox add-ons:
1. Adblock Plus
If you have ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on a site that seem to take hours to download, install Adblock Plus and get rid of them. Just right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu, and the banner will not be downloaded again.
2. Colorful Tabs
This simple add-on makes a strong colorful appeal. It sets each tab to a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. After a long day of research when you have tons of browser windows open, this makes online page viewing easier on the eyes.
3. ColorZilla
ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you will get a crosshair cursor. As you run this across a web page, the RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair will be displayed in the status bar, both as three separate values and as a hex value (e.g., R:255, G:255, B:255 // #FFFFFF). I use this all the time when I am trying to match colors - a font color to an the primary background on an image, for example.
4. MeasureIt
After installing this cool add-on, you will have a small ruler icon on the left side of your status bar. When you click on it, your browser window will fade out a little, and you will have a crosshair cursor. Drag the cursor over a section of the screen that you want to measure. Next to the box is its height and width, measured in pixels. I use this all the time when trying to measure the size of images. When you are finished, just hit the Escape key to turn it off and return to normal viewing of the page.
5. GMail Manager
This Gmail notifier is great for anyone who has multiple Gmail accounts. It allows you to receive new mail notifications along with viewing account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.
6. SearchStatus
SearchStatus allows you to see how any web site you visit is performing. When you land on a page, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backlinks from Google, Yahoo and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google and Linkscape), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa and Compete), so providing a balanced view of site effectiveness. I use to determine whether a site has enough traffic to warrant accepting a link or banner exchange.
7. Scrapbook
ScrapBook helps you to save web pages and easily manage your saved collections. Major features are: saving web pages or snippets of a page, saving a web site, organizing the collection in the same way you do bookmarks, full text search and quick filtering search of the collection, and editing of your collected pages.
8. Session Manager
Session Manager helps you manage your Firefox tabs. If you visit the same sites every day, all you need do is open all the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session with a distinct name. Then you simply go to Tools -- > Session Manager, pick your session, and all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them. And, Session Manager tracks your sessions as you surf, and if Firefox (or your system) crashes, you can recover the selection of tabs you had open when it crashed.
9. Tabs Open Relative
Tabs Open Relative makes all new tabs open to the right of the current tab, rather than at the far right of the tab bar (optionally this only applies to links). This reduced a huge annoyance I had with how the Firefox browser worked.
10. XMarks
XMarks (formerly known Foxmarks) provides seamless bookmark synchronization between your computers and browsers via their synchronization server. Your bookmark (and optionally password) data is securely stored and backed up on their servers and is available online, as well. After you install the add-on, click on the notification to set up Xmarks and start backing up and synchronizing your bookmarks. Install Xmarks on each computer you use, and it seamlessly integrates with your web browser and keeps your bookmarks safely backed up and in sync across all of your computers. Secure Password Sync is an optional Xmarks feature.
Note: To locate these add-ons, search for the plug-in extensions here: addons.mozilla.org
If you do not currently use Firefox as your browser, perhaps this list will convince you to give it a try.
Good luck!
Related articles:
Your SEO Toolkit Part 1: Firefox Add-ons
8 Firefox Add-ons to Boost Your Productivity
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