Here are the Firefox extensions I recommend and have installed right now and a short description of each. All the links link to the mozilla addons page except siteadvisor.



Gmail Notifier: Gmail notifier displays a small mail icon in the status bar. The icon has to its side the number of unread email messages to your Gmail account. You make it play a sound every time you get mail. Its a very lighweight extension that simply works. I couldn't live without it.

ChatZilla: ChatZilla is by no means a challenger to mainstream IRC clients such as mIRC. ChatZilla is however my IRC client of choice. This is in part due because I can set an IRC channel as one of my homepage tabs and I will be connected to the channel when I start Firefox. ChatZilla does not rival mIRC's nook and cranny customization, but its just perfect enough for me unlike other bloated IRC clients.

Adblock: Thanks to adblock, my most visited websites are virtually rid of advertisements unless they are flash. With adblock you can right click an image to filter it and refresh the page.

GooglePreview: GooglePreview is a short and sweet extension that uses Alexa's database to generate a screenshot of each result of a Google search. At first I thought it would just waste time but I have gotten extremely used to it.

StumbleUpon: One of my primary sources of entertainment when I have nothing productive to do. Stumbleupon asks you for your interests and then you can go to random websites which are related to your interests. I bookmark interesting sites and visit them later, many of the things I post on my blog are finds from stumbleupon.

CustomizeGoogle: CustomizeGoogle provides you with many ways in which you can customize small little details of your Google searches. CustomizeGoogle is capable of slight but useful customization.

IE tab: I have heard many IE users complain about Firefox's compatibility with some websites. While the websites that are messed up when viewwed with Firefox are few indeed, it is undeniable that they exist. With IEtab all these troubles are gone; if a page is messed up, simply click on the IE symbol in the status bar and the page will automatically be refreshed with IE although still within Firefox.

SiteAdvisor: SiteAdvisor is extremely useful to determine if a website is malicious or not. SiteAdvisor rates a website green, yellow, or red to determine their safety. You can click on the site report and it contains a plethora of useful information about how the site's rating was determined.

Performancing: Definetely the most useful extension on the list. This very post was written using this extension and for very good reasons. Out of all the blog posting software I have looked into, Performancing definitely comes out on top. Performancing is not the one with the most features or the most amazing features, but it is simply the best because of reasons that deserve their own post separate from this one.

ImageBot: Not a very popular extension but I use it for my blog because I don't have a lot of pictures hosted. With this extension you can drag and drop or just plain upload images from your computer or the web to Imageshack or Photobucket. One of the benefits is that you can upload multiple images to my hosting website of choice, Imageshack.

Flashblock: Flash is my least favorite extension at the moment. Although it does whats its supposed to, it blocks all flash elements and so it is extremely hard to use websites with a significant amount designed with flash. Not many of my heavily visited websites use flash at all, except for advertisements, so it isn't a big problem. Ad blocking is the main reason a use Flashblock.

DownThemAll: DTA is a download manager for Firefox which also has the ability to download all the elements of a webpage. The download manager is very nice and it certainly is a great improvement over the default. The ability to download all the elements of a page has only been useful about twice but maybe I will find some use for this.

FoxyTunes: FoxyTunes is the music player of choice for Firefox users. It sits on the status bar and has all the controls an average miniplayer has. FoxyTunes is able to interact with Winamp, iTunes, and many more.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector: I don't have much to say on this one as the name is self explenatory. I use this one in order to catch duplicates that form because of my hundreds of bookmakrs in Firefox.

Sage: Sage and FeedReader are the RSS readers I've been using and I think they are here to stay. Sage's simplicity and the fact that it is integrated in firefox is definitely its strong point. Besides this there isn't anything new or innovative.

View Source Chart: I saw this recently in Digg and I thought I would give it a chance. I don't look at html source code often but when I do this little extension is extremely helpful to understand hierarchies within the page and such.