Firstly, let me certify that not even a single word of this post is copied from somewhere else. Screenshots are authentic and is written with pure personal experience.

What are Firefox Extensions? (for Dummies)

Firefox as we all know is one of the most prominently used web browsers these days. being completely open source, it allows users and third party corporations to create really sweet modifications or add-ons also termed extensions. These extensions are really small in size (10-200kb) and can usually substitute a fully featured application itself. These are distributed through .xpi files towards which firefox is sensible enough to recognise and autorun the extension installation. Its as easy as a click to install extensions and here are some of my favorites with the links to install them.

FasterFox: This tool is highly necessary to keep track of the consistency of your Internet speed. It not only speeds up your browsing time by pipelining probable links, but also concentrating the network bandwidth to firefox and thus elevating its priority. Also features a timer that shows how long it took to load a particular page so that you know when to hurl abuses to your ISP. Do try this one out over here. Answers: This one is for people like me, with vocabulary as low as Microsoft’s affinity with open source, I’d really have a hard time in cyberspace if not for this extension. Just Alt+Click on the word that appears to be Greek and Latin in a seemingly English site is enough to give comprehensive explanation to what the word actually means. With the thesaurus function enabled, answers also gives usage examples of the words asked about. This one MUST be tried from here. DownThemAll! (DTA): Extremely cool if you have a big list of web-server based downloads(non-p2p ones). It speeds up you download by concentrating each and every drop of available bandwidth to your download. It is a pretty robust download manager as well, supporting multiple downloads at once with the pause/resume option. Although it totally reminds you of those dial-up days while downloading, as it doesn’t spare much bandwidth to surf, it is still a great extension to use. This one can be installed from here. ForecastFox: Are you a weather freak or someone like my dad, who is a meteorologist (did I get the spelling right?) or over sensitive to changes in temperature, humidity and wind direction/speed like me? Then this one has to be for you. Sitting conveniently in your status bar, it provides current weather conditions of virtually every city on the planet constantly updated by AccuWeather. Quite a handy tool.. install this from here. Performancing: Although I am supposed to use it very often, I always forget using it before writing any blog post. Performancing is a full featured blog editor that sits right inside your browser. Quite convenient to use, you can straight away start writing your post without bothering to wait for the Post writing app to load in wordpress and many other stuff. Why haven’t I used it yet even after such a long time of installing even I don’t know. But guys, discover this new way of writing to blogs over here. Video Downloader: In one word, brilliant. This extension simply takes the cake. For visual reference to almost every topic that hits my head, I refer to You Tube. I like certain videos so much that I cant help but downloading it. You have anyway cached it in your hard drive while streaming, why not make that into a permanent download? Atleast there should be some sense in streaming quality videos, right? Moreover, there is no provision in You Tube or Google videos to download videos. But there is a catch here, this thing doesn’t work with Yahoo! Videos, not atleast in my PC. But works great on Google and You Tube which probably has to be enough. This one can be downloaded from here. ColorZilla: Really cool tool especially for artists and webdevs. Quite handy if you like the color of a particular font or picture and want to use that very shade on your site, then you can have a crosshair accurately telling you the # color code as well as The RGB numbers for the color of the pixel on which your cursor is standing. Along with that it features coordinate mapping of the cursor as well as image zoom, eyedropper, color picker and many other goodies. And all this is done on your status bar. Download this from here. MeasureIt! : Another really handy tool for bloggers and website editors, to get the exact size of a banner, a button or any other graphical object seen somewhere in cyberspace to be used on your own site. A pretty neat tool, download this from here.

Well these were just some of my favorites. There are many more about which I am just too lazy to blog on. But just so that you guys check it out, I would provide the names and the links of those extensions as well.

Any other cool extensions..?? Suggestions to heat up the already flamy Firefox? Views on extensions and browser wars? Fire up thy comments! 😀

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