Carl’s Blog

Like just about every other Firefox user, I have a set of extensions installed to customize my browsing experience. Not all of these extensions are useful for everyone, so I’ll try to detail what each one is good for.

• ColorZilla - Useful for web developers and anyone who wants check on colors in web pages. It puts a small color window in the status bar that you can access the “eyedropper” and color information.
• DictionarySearch - After selecting a word in a web page, you can right-click to search an online dictionary for the word. It opens up the definition in a new tab in the current window. Uses The Free Dictionary for definitions.
• Download Statusbar - Shows downloads in a little section like a statusbar or task bar at the bottom of the browser. You can see how the downloads are progressing and access the downloads directly from there. The bar disappears when there’s nothing there. I think it’s much better than a separate Downloads window.
• Forecastfox - Most people know of this one. It shows a customizable view of the weather forecast for your area. It can show small radar maps and popups for severe weather alerts. The only thing I don’t like about this one is that is uses Accuweather.com for the weather information.
• Greasemonkey - This is one of the most powerful extensions I’ve seen. It lets you install scripts that can be run on individual sites. There are tons of scripts available here.
• Image Zoom - Adds an entry to the context menu of images to give the ability to zoom in and out the image. It doesn’t sound all that useful but I use it all the time.
• Linky - Gives extra power for handling links on webpages. Lets you open links in tabs or windows.
• Resizeable Textarea - Lets you resize any textarea on webpages. Very useful for many sites that give very smal ll textareas.
• SpellBound - Provides spell checking capabilities inside any form text area, accessible from the right-click context menu. It’s very useful if you do a lot of blog posting.
• User Agent Switcher - Lets you change what the browser tells web servers that it is. These are a dime a dozen. It’s useful for some sites that require IE or an older Netscape, but still work with Firefox. There are less sites like that around anymore, but it can still come in handy.
• Url Link - You can select a URL, even URLs broken by a newline, and right click to open them in a new tab or window. This saves a little bit of time, rather than copy/pasting the URL. It’s more useful when a URL spans a couple lines.
• Web Developer - Adds a menu and a toolbar with a ton of very useful features for web developers. You can determine structure of the HTML document, validate URLs, fetch information about the page, etc. It’s an incredibly useful tool.

That’s the list of extensions that I currently use. Feel free to post any other useful ones below. I’ll try to update this list as I find new and better ones.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 7:54 am and is filed under Firefox, Extensions, My Lists, Greasemonkey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.