We love Firefox for its extensibility, but sometimes we run into an extension or two that dons the "Experimental" label on the Firefox add-ons site. We prefer highlighting extensions once they've been approved by Mozilla—both so we know they've been vetted and so we can save you the effort of registering with Mozilla to install something—so we generally pass them by. When enough of them pile up in our watch list, we highlight them in one big post (see our two previous posts) in an effort to give the extensions the extra push of popularity that can expedite the approval process. So without further ado, read on for a closer look at seven awesome Firefox extensions we're into.


FireStatus


FireStatus lets you send simultaneous updates to multiple social networks—namely Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. That's not a bad start, but it goes the extra mile by also displaying your friends' updates through notification pop-ups (uses Growl in OS X). It also integrates with the most popular URL shrinking site, TinyURL.

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Tabgroups-Plus allows you to organize your Firefox tabs in even more tabs. An update to previously mentioned Tab Groups, Tabgroups-Plus does the same drag and drop organization of tabs within user-defined parent tabs, but this version supports Firefox 3 where the old version did not.

GCal Popup


GCal Popup opens Google Calendar in an overlay over any web page, giving you quick access to your agenda without leaving the page you're already visiting. To toggle the calendar, simply click the Google Calendar icon in the corner of your status bar. [via]

Noise


Noise adds user-defined sounds to browser events in Firefox. For example, you can set a sound to play every time you click a link, open a new tab, start a download, and so on. To be honest, the last thing we think Firefox needs is the irritating click-click that IE conditioned us with at one point, but sounds can come in handy when used properly—for example, to give you an audio heads-up that your download has completed. [via]

Fasterfox Lite


Fasterfox Lite is the exact same extension as the popular Fasterfox extension with one small difference: It removes the controversial link prefetching built into Fasterfox. Prefetching automated retrieves pages linked to on the current page so that they'll load more quickly if and when you do click them, but it's generally considered poor form because it wastes server bandwidth and adds to the server load. Fasterfox Lite does everything else Fasterfox does, and incidentally, it supports Firefox while Fasterfox does not. [via]

Open in Browser


Open in Browser adds an option to the Firefox download/save/open menu that allows you to redirect the download to open the file directly in Firefox. If you've ever clicked on an image or plain text script, for example, that forced a download when you just wanted to check it out in Firefox, Open in Browser lets you open it back in Firefox where you wanted it to begin with.