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My Top 10 Firefox Extensions

One of the best things I like about Firefox and hate about Internet Explorer (pre 7) was that it is a very simple browse, offers the bare minimum functionality needed to browser the Web. The recently released Internet Explorer 7 also has a very clean interface which resembles that of Firefox a great deal.

However sometimes I wish that they have included a certain feature into the browser, these wishes are mostly answered by the Firefox extensions. Designing Firefox around an extensible plug and play architecture was the best design decision in my opinion ever taken. The ease with which you can extend the browsers capabilities by just installing extensions which are normally tens of KBs big, allows Firefox to be ahead of its rivals.

Thousands of extensions have been developed, and it is time consuming to browse to the repository and find a 'must have' extension. That's why I've written this post to help you out, by highlighting those extension which have had a positive impact in my 'Firefox experience'.

The list is not numbered according to usefulness or any other measure.

1. Google Toolbar

Although a Google search box in included in Firefox by default, the Google Toolbar allows you to do more, a lot more, it gives information about the current page, spell checking for posts, allows searches in different categories ie. Maps, Froogle, etc.. And it allows a Gmail mail to be composed by a single click! It basically acts as a one-stop portal to most of Google's services.
2. SessionSaver

The SessionSaver extension allows the user to close the browser and automatically open at the same state next time. Extremely useful in many cases. I could run into blogs with interesting content, start reading them, and when I have some work todo I simply close the browser, and restart my exploration of the blogs when next time I launch Firefox; and in case you dont want people to know what you were last surfing, you can always disable it!

3. Viamatic foXpose

Often if you have too many tabs open, it gets difficult to navigate around to a required tab. foXpose is very use-full extension where a button on the status bar is clicked and thumbnail views views of current opened sites appear. Just like shown in the following image:

4. Permatabs

Another useful extension, which saves a lot of time. There are basically some sites, which I always visit, like webbased mail services, news sites, some blogs, slashdot, digg etc.. With permatabs I open all the required websites in tabs, and make them a 'permatab' which means that they will be there forever afterwards, even when Firefox or the machine is restarted.

5. FlashGot

Numerous popular download managers in Windows don't support Firefox yet, FlashGot has the answer. It allows the interoperability of Firefox with numerous external download managers. Firefox's own download mechanism is not at all suitable for downloading massive files, thus this extension provides a remedy.
6. Clusty Toolbar

This cool Firefox extension allows me to find information really quickly. When browsing a page, I may encounter something about which I'm not aware of, clusty toolbar allows me to perform a search, and cluster results from multiple search engines, and make a

7. ScrapBook

ScrapBook as the name implies allows you to have a scrap book, where you can collect clippings of snippets from websites, and categorise them and store them to the disk.

8. Del.icio.us Toolbar

Del.icio.us is perhaps the largest repository of user contributed bookmarks. When looking up a subject I nowadays increasingly go to del.icio.us and perform a tag search, and find related content immediately. The toolbar also allows me to tag websites while I'm surfing them.

9. SwitchProxy

SwitchProxy allows me to switch between normal Internet surfing and anonymous proxy surfing, or switch from proxy to proxy, this extension is esp. helpful to me because as of early this year the Pakistan government has banned the entire BlogSpot/Blogger domain, and if I come across a cool post via Slashdot or Digg, I switch proxy so that I can read it.

10. Performancing

Performancing is a blogger's extension! It allows a blogger to immediately blog from firefox without going to any specific URL, Popular blog services such as Wordpress, Blogger and others are supported.

So I hope that you discovered some new Firefox extension, and will install them to spice up your Firefox experience. I would like to here from you of other cool Firefox extensions