My 5 Favorite Firefox Extensions
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008Probably the best part about Firefox is the extensions. There is an enourmous amount of them out there, some are useful, some are ok, and some just don’t do what they advertise.
These are the five that I use the most often.
1. Foxmarks
Foxmarks is a bookmark synchronizer that keeps your bookmarks synchronized with their server in the background. You can have multiple computers linked to your Foxmarks account, so whenever you add or remove a bookmark from one computer, it’s added or removed from all your other computers. It makes using Firefox on multiple computers a lot easier, as you always have your bookmarks with you.
2. SiteAdvisor
SiteAdvisor verifies the safety of the sites that you’re visiting. If they’re known scam sites or have downloads that have adware in them, it changes the color of it’s icon at the bottom of the screen. It also inserts an icon on all Google search results, so you can verify the safety of a link before clicking on it. It’s not always 100% accurate, but it’s nice to have one more layer of protection.
3. Adblock Plus
If you’re only going to install one extension, it should be Adblock Plus. It removes virtually all the ads from the sites you visit. If one is missed, you can just right click on it, and select adblock, and it’s gone. Webpages look nicer, load faster, and just generally work better.
4. DownThemAll
DownThemAll is the best Download Manager that I’ve used yet. It supports multiple connections to a server so you can download files faster, nice queuing options, and it can rename the files as you download them to whatever convention you specify. It also can mass-download all files that fit a specific criteria. It’s definitely recommended to anyone who downloads a large number of files.
5. PicLens
My final favorite extension doesn’t really do anything useful. But, it does make viewing pictures online much nicer. Whenever you visit a website that has PicLens support, mainly Facebook, MySpace, Picasa, Flickr, and so on, you can click the PicLens button, and have it display all the photos on the page in a 3d wall which you can pan, rotate, and zoom in and out on. It’s quite impressive, and beats viewing the images as thumbnails or one at a time.