18 Must have browser plugins / extensions for SysAdmins

By David Mytton,

CEO & Founder of Server Density.

Published on the 17th February, 2015.

Oh how far we’ve come since IE6, and how happy we all are to say that. Developers are building some incredibly handy browser plugins for Chrome, Firefox, and dare we say it Opera. This week we added ourselves to the long list of developers by building something a little fun called Fluffify.

It’d be fair to say that sysadmins do unusual jobs in a rather niche industry, so it’s surprising how many plugins exist to make your time on the web more productive / safe / enjoyable..?

On that note, we’ve identified 18 plugins / extensions for your reference. Here’s how we’ve categorised them:

Productivity

Privacy

Novelty

Productivity Plugins / Add-ons / Extensions

This very nifty plugin converts downloaded links/cookies/php into wget/curl commands. This emulates requests as though they’re coming from your browser allowing you to download protected files directly to a separate machine (e.g. server). If you’re looking for something similar on Chrome then keep looking – though in the ‘Network’ tab of dev tools, you can right-click on any request and ‘copy as curl command’ which is also helpful.

If you’re often copying strings from a terminal and searching for them, then this Firefox extension allows you to middle click on the new-tab button and opens a search for the text in the clipboard buffer.

If you don’t mind being tracked on the web, this won’t be for you. It does still make the list though. Wappalyzer is a browser extension that uncovers the technologies used on websites. Detecting the most common CMS & eCommerce platforms, web servers and many more.

4. Lazarus form recovery for Firefox and Chrome

One of those plugins that you’re annoyed you didn’t have when it happens. Have you ever filled out the ticket tool form, submitted it, and then got a timeout? Forcing you to enter all of the same information all over again? Yeah that… well Lazarus will stop that from happening. One of the all time greatest rage reducing plugins.

Start saving pre-defined text snippets and enter them easily with a right-click or even via shortcuts.

6. REST Client for Firefox and Chrome

If you work with APIs a lot, then this is a must have plugin / extension. In short they’ll make you a whole lot more efficient when working with APIs.

This is a status bar indicator of the events from the network monitoring system Nagios. Information is parsed from the web interface.

Mosh provides a remote terminal session similar to ssh. The difference being that it’s tolerant of network issues… If you know what Mosh is – then Mosh for Chrome is exactly what it sounds like.

HttpFox is an addon that monitors and analyzes all incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic between the browser and the web server. Pretty handy huh!

A Mozilla Firefox add-on that provides a easy way to reload the browser DNS cache. It’s commonly used by developers that uses the Hosts File to force a domain name resolution to a specific IP.

IPvFoo is a Chrome extension that adds an icon to your location bar, indicating whether the current page was fetched using IPv4 or IPv6. When you click the icon, a pop-up appears, listing the IP address for each domain that served the page elements.

Is It Cached extends developer tools and gives an overview of the browser cache, all cache-relevant response headers and also detects if a CDN / Cache servers are being used.

Privacy Plugins / Add-ons / Extensions

First thing’s first, use DuckDuckGo and use it everywhere. They have all the things, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

If you don’t like being tracked you’re probably already using DuckDuckGo… If that’s the case, have you seen the rather specialist sysadmin ‘bangs’? They’re great at speeding up your searches.

P.s. If changing your search engine seems a little extreme, Google search link fix is a good addon for firefox that prevents Google, Yahoo and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them.

The Better Privacy plugin blocks flash cookies. Which makes you safe against websites written in flash.

This free service is available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

This plugin is brilliant by blocking all plain HTTP web traffic by default. If you’re on Chrome then there’s an equivalent – it’s not HTTP nowhere, but it’s still HTTPS everywhere.

Novelty Plugins / Add-ons / Extensions

17. Cloud to Butt for Firefox and Chrome.

This plugin is built to replace the text “cloud” with “butt” on any web page. Careful when applying for ‘cloud’ jobs / copy and pasting. Come to think of it, if you’ve already got it installed – this section wont make much sense. Butt to butt much?

Introducing our very own sysadmin plugin. It’s called Fluffify for Chrome. Inspired by the ‘cloud-to-butt’ extension and XKCD #1288. It’s about replacing enterprise and marketing fluff with… well… humour.

We spent a fun filled hour dreaming up some brilliant examples, but the fun had to stop and work had to continue. So far this is our list:

If you have 5 minutes, why don’t you have a look through our list and submit a pull request to add a few of your own to the fluffy mix.

N.B. Be careful when copying and pasting!

What if you’ve got Opera?

It’s far from an ideal situation at this point, but don’t panic. Download all the Chrome extensions to Opera with this nifty little plugin.

That’s all from us for the moment. Have we missed any?