Teach42

After doing a brief writeup of the new Safari 3 for Windows, I realized how many little add-ons I’ve installed into Firefox that make it so incredibly useful as a browser, and so hard to migrate away from.

Here are my own personal fav’s.

1) Gmail notifier - When new email comes in, I must know about it right away. Well, that and I love the fact that I always am one click away from Gmail, without tying up any space in my browser bar.
2) FasterFox - If I’m sitting there waiting for a page to load up for what feels like 3 hours, I want to know how long its really taking. It really comes in handy for testing out new pages or sites. Oh yeah, and it has some decent speed tweaks for Firefox as well. Great all around plugin
3) MeasureIt - A virtual tape measure for web pages! It lets you measure things out in pixels, so you can figure out how wide a banner is, or column is, or just how big of an alley is being displayed without even leaving the page.
4) WootWatcher - The must have plugin for Woot-Offs. It remembers to check Woot on days that I forget.
5) Tab Mix Plus - While Firefox’s tabs are pretty decent right out of the box, this gives them an added boost.
6) Del.icio.us Bookmarks - Does a solid job of integrating del.icio.us into FireFox. Very intuitive, has a great tagging screen and searches quickly. Best integration I’ve seen yet, even better than Flock.
7) Greasemonkey - The interesting thing about Greasemonkey is that I know I need it, I know I love it, but I can’t think of anything in particular that I have installed for it right now! Suffice to say though, it enables all kinds of extra geeky goodness to occur within the browser. A few examples are a script that allows you to grab the URL for images in Flickr (instead of that blasted spaceball.gif) and a script to let you mouseover TinyURL’s to see where they go to. Here’s a couple of script directories to help get you started.
CoComment - Very handy for keeping track of your blog conversations, but does irritate me sometimes by trying to get in between me and text windows that have nothing to do with comments. Can be invasive.

Plugins that are installed but should probably be removed.
1) Google Toolbar for Firefox - The only reason I installed it was to check out some PageRanks. Now I know. Takes up far too much real estate to keep.
2) ChromaTabs - Supposed to tint tabs to different colors. Doesn’t seem to work with my chosen theme.
3) FireFox Showcase - Lays out your open tabs so you can browse them graphically. Cute, but I never use it.
4) StumbleUpon - Once again, another Toolbar that I just don’t need. However, it does add in some functionality on general searches, so it might be kept, just with the toolbar left off.

That’s about it. Let me know if there’s an incredibly amazingly stupendously terrific plugin that I’ve missed and should add to the list!

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