Mozilla Firefox is undoubtedly one of the most popular web browser present. Apart from being extremely functional the best part of Firefox is the fact that a lot more features can be implemented and the ease of use increases with the addition of add-ons and extensions. A recent user survey revealed that more than one third of the Firefox users use at least one add-on to enrich their browsing experience. More than two billion add-on has been downloaded since Mozilla started maintaining statistics. There are lot of add-on online, which let you do different things with your browser. Trying to get a hang of the ever increasing world of Firefox add-ons can be extremely difficult and time consuming. I hope to make this task less daunting and listed below are a few must have add-ons to help you be more effective with your workflow.
One has to admit Firefox’s default download window is not very appealing. Firstly its a pop-up, opening up a new window when you begin a download and you always have to keep going back to this window to check the status of your download. But, by using Download statusbar you can now say bye to old and annoying pop-up window. This add-on adds a tiny unobtrusive toolbar at the end of the browser. It shows you percentage completed, time remaining and has a many additional options like pausing, resuming, setting up a post download virus check etc.
We all have a basic set of websites we visit every time we log on to internet. The morning coffee add-on lets Firefox automate the entire process for you and makes sure you don’t have to type in the same site addresses over and over every time you open your browser. Apart from opening a particular set of sites we can even schedule which has to be opened on which particular day. You can schedule weekly cycle and choose to have them pop-up when you open your browser or simply let them appear as individual tabs when you hit the coffee cup button beside your address bar.
Normally you would have to visit every individual site for every mailbox you have to check your email, but with the WebMail Notifier add-on, you can just put in your account information and a tiny little non intrusive button appears located at the corner of your firefox window telling you when you have received any new mail without you having to go to the website. It gives you notification when new mail arrives and you can click the icon to access your email in a new browser window. You can also set notification settings to open in a new tab or window automatically and to play a sound notification whenever a new email is received.
There are so many cool personas out there and you can setup only one to show up until you change it again manually. With Persona Rotator you can let Firefox pull personas from an online set of firefox skins all sorted into a nest of categories and automatically keep changing then at whatever intervals you wanted. But you should note that this add-on only works with the Persona Plus add-on.
Bookmarks almost always get a little messy unless you are very organised with your bookmarks. Using Read It Later, webpages can be marked for reading later with a single click. It also lets you read the items offline. Another cool feature is that it lets you read the items offline and also lets you synchronise across multiple devices and workplaces from your browser itself. You can categorise your pages among different listing, mark pages as read after reading them and also download them for future offline reading.
Yoono is one of the best social media extensions you will find for an internet browser. It’s a must have if you are an active user of multiple social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or if you use multiple IM applications to interact with people. Yoono is a one stop solution for most of your basic socializing needs. Yoono integrates with most of the popular chat clients like Gtalk, Myspace, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Messenger and even with Social networks like LinkedIn, Flickr and Friendfeed. It supports using multiple accounts with the same service. If you are using Yoono, Firefox will give you a pop up at the bottom of the screen for every update you receive through these services.
FireFTP is a simple browser plugin that lets you get most of the features offered by a basic FTP client software right inside your browser. FireFTP includes many advanced features like directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search and filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag&drop facilities and file hashing. The best part though is that you can do all this directly inside your browser and it doesn’t even slow your browser.
SEOQuake is a very useful extension for developers who need help with search engine optimisation. This particular extension obtains and gives you an analysis of a lot of important SEO parameters of the internet project under study. One can note and save the particular parameters for future reference and compare the results obtained with other competitive sites to see which modifications are faring better and what change need to be made to the parameters.
With the increase of your social media presence, we are starting to share and exchange an immense amount of information and inks through multiple channels. Shareaholic is a Firefox add-on which helps you do the same in faster way and through multiple social channels. It is a customisable, light weight method to share any web page you might be visiting.
Many a time, you end up typing into a long form; enter text, comments, with a lot of content and suddenly your browser or sometimes even your system crashes. In certain cases the data might not get submitted after you hit the submit button and the fields are reset; In these situations you are faced with the problem of re-entering all the information all over again. With the Lazarus add-on, you can prevent this from happening. Lazarus lets you recover all the text that you were typing in any webpage. It automatically saves all the content that you are typing into forms. Even better is the fact that all of these information are stored in a encrypted data-base locally for your security.
11. Faster Fox-Increase the Firefox browsing speed!
The Faster Fox plugin generally tends to increase the overall speed of surfing on the internet. It makes custom changes like tweaking the Wikipedia page to show only the related articles, auto loads, next pages, suggestions from Google, enhances Google’s search results and many more, thus speeding up the normal process of surfing online.
Firebug is probably the most fundamental, useful and must have add-on for all web developers. Firebug is a firefox add-on which is a web development tool which aids developers in viewing the CSS, HTML and JavaScript of any page, and let you open the hood and code in which allows you to get an insight of the inner workings of a webpage. It is definitely a must have for those of who have slightest inclination towards web development, testing sites or debugging them.
Remainder Fox is a special plugin for people to schedule and plan out their future plans. It brings all the basic calendar and organiser functions to the browser. Since the browser is one of the most used applications on a computer, setting reminders in your browser is the most effective way of maintaining your To-Do list. Remainder Fox integrates with ease into firefox and gives the user power to manage To Do lists, set remainders, notifications alerts and alarm right from your browser.
RSS is a very good source of information and is a common communication standard for many blogs and news sites. The RSS ticker add-on in Firefox shows all the live bookmarks in a scrolling fashion across the user’s screen and the updates are visible to the user while browsing itself. So the user doesn’t have to specifically log into any feed reader like Google Reader for accessing the RSS feeds of their choice.
Scrapbook Plus is a great Firefox add-on for people who want to organise their web pages or even full web sites. The add-on lets you define filters which can be defined to exclude related links or any unwanted web pages. It is way better than making a list of cluttered bookmarks and not knowing what the bookmark is about at a later date.
Greasemonkey is one of the oldest and the most popular add-ons used in Firefox which is primarily employed to run custom scripts on web pages. It changes the way a web page works or is displayed and how it interacts with a customer using small bits of JavaScript. You can write your own custom code to make changes to how your browser interacts with a particular web site a particular web site and automate many manual processes and get more done faster.
Just try these 16 cool Firefox Add-Ons and let me know about your experience. In case i forgot to add your favourite Add-Ons, Feel free to share it!
This add ons are amazingly helpful and I’m sure anyone using it will not be able to work. I’ll look forward to find out more about the add ons I haven’t tried till now.
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