I love Firefox, the free, open-source alternative to Internet Explorer. If you use Firefox, you know why I love it. Tabbed browsing, a straightforward search bar, a smart location bar (you can do an "I'm feeling lucky" Google search by just typing a query in the location bar and hitting enter - awesome), inline spell-check, standards compliance, ease of use... the list goes on. Firefox 3 was released yesterday, and unlike the bloated Internet Explorer, it's incredibly fast and uses very little memory.
Despite all this awesomeness, the greatest advantage to Firefox is its "add-ons." If there's anything at all you want to change about your browsing experience, chances are someone has created a Firefox add-on to do just that. So here is the real reason for this post: my...
Top 10 Firefox Add-Ons
- Tab Mix Plus (not yet compatible with FF3) - I use this guy for "undo close tab," opening results from the search bar in a new tab, and its killer session features (you can save all the tabs you have open for later).
- Customize Google - No more Google ads (Gmail is completely different without them).
- Download Status Bar - See current downloads in the Status Bar. No annoying "download window" popups.
- FireFTP - A full-featured FTP client in a Firefox tab.
- Web Developer Toolbar - If you do any amount of web design, this is a must-have.
- Copy Plain Text (not yet compatible with FF3) - If you've ever copied anything into Word, you know how painful it can be to remove all the formatting. This extension does that for you.
- Searchbar Autosizer - Increases the size of the search bar as you type.
- Qute Theme - The default Firefox theme is pretty ugly. This one isn't.
- UI Tweaker - I use this to put tabs on the bottom, which increases efficiency when you're switching between other applications and your browser.
- DisableBackspaceNavigation - Pretty straightforward.