Software Reviews

Top 10 Must Have Firefox Extensions

Posted on November 15, 2007 by admin

Why choose Firefox? Well, it’s stable, it’s powerful, user friendly and it’s got many important features, useful to any PC user from all around the world. One of it’s most powerful components are the Add-ons, small softwares that will tweak and customize your browser, the way it works, looks and interact with the user. Here, we will try to make a list of ten extensions that we will recommend as “must have”.

Stumble Upon

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular social networking web applications, a way to find new useful web sites and to promote yours to the community. For bloggers, this extension is one of the tops.

In fact, StumbleUpon installs a new toolbar in your Firefox browser, a toolbar which provides all the tools SU may have. The bar is fully customizable, and once you’ve got an account, it will log in automatically. After finishing the installation and getting the account, you don’t have to be bothered anymore. Just click on the icon “I Like It!” and the site you’ve just visited will get it’s vote on StumbleUpon.

Gmail Manager & Yahoo Mail Notifier

The Yahoo Mail Notifier is one basic extension that puts a small mail icon on your status bar. If you want, it can display a small popup message. When you click it, it redirects you directly to your yahoo mail account.

The Gmail Manager is similar to YM Notifier but has more features. If you want to see your messages you just have to hover your mouse over it. There’s also a list of your most recent 10 messages, showing From, Subject and first line of the body of the mail. It supports multiple Gmail accounts.

IE Tab

There are lots of websites that require or work better only within Internet Explorer. IE Tab will place a small icon on the status bar that, once installed, it will swap between IE and Firefox rendering engines. It comes preconfigured with filters for the MS Update site.

Download Statusbar

You’re probably used with the pop up windows that appears every time you download something with Firefox. It can be suppressed by installing this tiny extension that will show all downloads in status bar. If you roll your mouse over the downloads, you will get a tool tip with information.

Forecastfox

One of the best add-ons we are using constantly is Forecastfox, an up-to-date weather forecast in Firefox’s status bar provided by AccuWeather.com.

There is a wide range of options that will give you control over how much information you want to be displayed, and the set up is very handy. Forecast Fox supports also multiple profiles, everyone with its own set of options.

It updates frequently and it supports any location you might need, just fill in the code of your area and the forecasts are now on your browser.

Answers

This add-on is simple but very useful. You just have to hold down the Alt key and click on a word, and a window will pop up with information about that word from Answers.com. It works even with phrases but in this case you have to highlight the phrase, right click and choose “Look up on Answers.com” to get all the results you might need.

Web Developer

One very useful extension not only for developers is the web Developer add-on that has to do with many powerful features: you can modify cookies on the fly, examining, deleting and even manually adding them, you can tweak form settings, clear private data and disable the cache, you can turn off background images etc.

MeasureIt

One of the simpliest but most useful extensions for developers is MeasureIT, a small ruler that appears in the status bar and when it is activated it can measure different areas of your page.

CollorZilla

ColorZilla puts an eyedropper icon in your status bar. Click it and you’ll get a crosshair cursor that will display in the status bar the colors you are pointing with the mouse. It reads RGB values of the pixel under the crosshair, html values and the style that is using them. It can be used as color picker.