I have been using Firefox, for the longest time now, that I cannot even remember when I first started using it. Firefox standalone is powerful, but when you start exploring with the add-ons and extensions, Firefox just becomes quite simply the best browser out there.
Here are some of the extensions, in no particular order that I find useful, keep in mind there a ton more useful Firefox extensions out there.
Adblock Plus
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This add-on blocks just about every advertisement out there. If you still want to see adds for a particular website, you can enable it on the individual pages. I run this to protect myself from accidently clicking on my own ads on my websites. A very hand Firefox extension for every user. |
Answers
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Whenever you are reading an article, and you are unsure what the word means, then all you simply to do is hold down the alt button on your keyboard, and click the word, and automatically a box will appear with the answer to the definition of the word! It saves you time. |
ColorZilla
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A tool that webmasters, graphic designers, and others can use to select colors on websites. Basically, it is an eyedropper tool that can be used on any website!
It comes very handy to me as a webmaster, with the eyedropper tool; I can use it to get the hexadecimal number of any particular spot of an image that I want! The neat thing about this tool is that it gives the full details, Hex number, and RGB numbers, everything you can possibly need to utilize the color you wanted! |
DownThemAll
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This was the first ever Firefox extension that I used. It has been out for the longest time, and has only improved over time. It is a download manager program for Firefox. But the biggest thing that it does is, it lets you easily download all the files on any given websites, in just a few seconds.
Let’s say that a website contains 100 links to zip files, for you to download. Imagine how much time that would take for you to individually select every link to download. That’s painstaking! Imagine if there are 100 images on the website, and you want to download them all to your hard drive, that’s pain staking too! But with DownThemAll, all you do is just set some simple options, or ‘filters’. So in your case we would filter to only .zip or images, and with one magical click, DownThemAll will download it all for you automatically! |
HTML Validator
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Html Validator validates websites as you visit them. A super useful tool for webmasters who need to know whether there are any errors in their code. It also provides a feature that suggests how to automatically clean up the page to match the html coding standards. |
MeasureIT
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A tool that will let you draw out and measure the width and height of whatever you want on a website! If you want to measure how big a banner is on a website, or how much space to allocate for coding, you can do it in a simple snap of the ruler!
It is powerful, because you will save time from having to guess in the code, how much space to allocate for a website element. |
Search Status
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A simple tool, that takes up very little space. It displays the PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more. |
SnapLinks
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A tool that allows you to highlight the links that you want to be opened in a new tab. This saves you the time from having to open individual links by themselves. So you can easily highlight as many links as you want to have opened! I have even used it top open 100 links once, but off course the load on that is pretty heavy, hehe. |
SeoQuake
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Seoquake is an extension mainly designed for webmasters, who work with search engine optimization. Seoquake provides relevant information such as Alexa Ranking, Page Rank, Who is, and countless other information that webmasters looking to improve their website traffic need to know. My only gripe with the SeoQuake is that with the recent update, there is a new feature called AdSpy. Basically AdSpy crawls websites looking at their Google Adsense ID. AdSpy gathers the information and then collects data regarding that Id. So in essence…. if you visit a website, and that website as Google adsense ads, you can find out what other websites has the same Google adsense ID. So there could be some hidden invasion of privacy going on….. I will likely be moving away from SeoQuake as soon as I find a better alternative. |
View Source Chart
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Draws A Color-Coded Chart of a Web Page’s Source Code. A very useful tool that will turn unorganized source codes, into easy to read blocks of colored code! |
Web Developer
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Web Developer is a toolbar that is filled with various web developer tools.
Examples of useful tools, Window Resizing, css tools, form tools, and countless others! I am sure there is at least one useful feature that every webmaster will enjoy. The only downside to the tool is that it takes up another “toolbar” space in your Firefox browser. |
I’ve outlined the extensions, that I am using, now its your turn! I want some feedback, to create an even better list, that future readers of this post will find useful to them. So my question, what are some of your favorite Firefox extensions, and why?
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Firefox just kicks the Internet Explorer’s tail when it comes to addons. My favorite addon for the Firefox is “StumbleUpon!”. I think Microsoft still has a long way to go with its browser to match the quality Mozilla has been bringing along. Still, Internet Explorer also sometimes has its advantages simply because of its overwhelming presence on the market and compatibility. It’ll be interesting to see what IE 8 will bring us.
Gotta agree with you here. Even though I’ve grown so attached to IE its hard not to drift away when Firefox is so blogger friendly. The only thing really keeping me with IE is how the CTRL+N feature saves the page you’re on even if its secure. I need that for database stuff I do. Even so, its hard to stick with IE when Firefox is swinging for the fences.
Yes, I agree that firefox beats IE when it comes to addons or plugins. Besides, firefox is much easier and user friendly. I’m using it for about 10 years now
I might try the SEO Quake and Web Developer. Is the web developer add on something similar with firebug?
Yes it is very similar to Firebug, with few minor differences.
Wow, great post! I’m a new user to firefox and recently use it occasionally as my stumbleupon toolbar is unstable on IE and my alexa toolbar also can’t work on IE. I find that it is more stable and currently use it occasionally.
Will definately try out some of the tools mentioned. In particular, search status and view source chart looks interesting to me.
what a great idea for a post i use firefox my self and the plugins can help a lot. some you might want to look in to is ones to keep track of ads so you dont have to go the sites them selfs to see how much money you have made. but its a nice list you have at the moment i will pop back some time to see your latest post’s
sorry I could not drop a card on you I have hit the limit for today.
I’ve been using Firefox until Safari came out. Safari is still unstable but I like the font rendering, easier to my eyes. These are some good extensions for Firefox!
AdblockPlus: I used to love this, but after blogging, I found out that extension like this, actually bad for bloggers/webmasters since no ads will be displayed on the site (hence no more sponsors or $$ to cover hosting expenses)
WebDeveloper: I’ve been using this and it’s a MUST for designers/developers of websites! It’s so useful that tracking bugs or CSS errors are so much easier
I don’t like the idea of the ad block add on because I have a few people on my forum who use it and if everyone used it then hardly anyone would make any money with adsense and other ad company’s.
The snap links add on sounds good.
I might add it as it takes ages to click on all the links I want to open.
Download them all add on looks like a good idea.
Thats something I will also download.
Lots of useful information
I know I will probably get alot of heat for supporting ad-block plus. Believe me, I have plenty of websites that also have Google ads, Kontera ads, etc, on them. I don’t really fear adblock plus. To be honest with you, I think if they are smart enough to install adblock plus, they will likely be smart enough not to click on the ads.
Besides… its not only adblock plus that blocks ads, nowadays, some of the anti-virus programs already block ads, including Google adsense.
Thank you for your reply
Thanks for sharing, this looks very useful, keep up the good work!
I never liked IE even in the past when firefox was not available I used netscape.Your list is pretty cool I have never seen seoquake and snaplinks(Btw is this one usefull for entrecard?).
Curently Im only using the answers plugin and since english is not my first language it proved very helpfull espesially when Im reading more complexed articles about the stock market.
You might want to try the developers plugin for firefox for me its the perfect way to edit your blog without knowing much about css.
Thanks for this useful tips.
Tools that I like
SnapLinks: Imagine without it we have to click it one by one… 0.o
HTML Validator: could help us find any error on our own sites.
Adblock Plus: It made us browse sites faster when we don’t have much time.
I prefer Opera to firefox but sadly opera does not have all these cool extension.Apart from Adblock I mainly use stumbleupon and Opera still does not have a suitable substitute.
I used to have answers.com extension too but now I feel firefox is hogging huge amounts of memory so I have cut down on the no of extension enabled.
Like Micheal Aulia said I stopped using Adblock after I started blogging.
I like the post.There are some extension up there which I have never tried before.I cant wait to use Measure IT view source chart and web developer.
You can simply disable adsspy block in seoquake by using SeoQuake>preferences>plugins>adsspy
Yeah you can disable adspy by doing that in Seoquake, but I am still weary that adspy may be privately monitoring activities.
Hi all.
I remind you that our extension is Open-Source project. You can download it source from mozilla and test it yourself.
It has been tested by Mozilla.org at least for 31 time.
Also it awarded the SOFTPEDIA “100% CLEAN” AWARD.
http://www.softpedia.com/progClean/SeoQuake-Clean-75907.html
In each adsspy message there is an “icon” wich brings you to http://blog.seoquake.com/?p=164 where you can read more about service.
We just download a lot of websites (about 5 millions from seodigger index) and have checked it for adv codes and etc. (and we do this by little portions 3 or 4 times a week)
We DO NOT collect ANY data about our users. You can read about this situation here: http://blog.seoquake.com/?p=173
our pivacy policy available here: http://www.seoquake.com/policy.html
If you have any questions - contact me please.
Gleb Suvorov
seoquake@gmail.com
Thanks for clearing that up, I guess I will continue to stick with SeoQuake
very helpful post. i’ll try one of this on my site.
thanks
The more articles I read about firefx the more I want to switch. Perhaps you could add the best facebook toolbar you can find. Any tool bar related to blogging would also e nice. Nice list, keep up the good work.
LOL. Great list. I love the seoquake plugin
I use it often
What a great list of Mozilla Firefox extensions!
Nice!
Great list! I love Firefox!
I do a lot of research and web design and I’ve used FireFox almost exclusively for the past few years, although I’m exploring Flock these days, I still use FF 90% of the time.
A few add-ons that I use are; Session Manager and Google Notebook. The Session Manager is great. In an example, I have a session named ‘research’. Basically I open all my research resources in tabs, ie: Yahoo Answers, GTrends, WordTracker, Google trends, Ebay Pulse, ect: then save the session. When I go to research again all I have to do is recall the sessions and all the pages are loaded at once.
What can I say about Google Notebook: taking snippets of content that I find on the web for reference purpose and the ability to recall at will has really spoiled pen and paper for me
Great list Jean.
I think i found MeasureIT from your site a long long time ago! It’s a life saver… i now know exactly how much space in have in a particular area, without having to copy/paste into photoshop, then see.
Thanks a bunch!
I use many of the add-on mentioned above but Measure-IT was a new one for me.This is gonna save me a lot of time
Color Zilla sounds neat. This is a nice list of interesting and useful tools. I love Firefox!
Alexa is a very powerful tool used to http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=www.fortunehotels.in rank web site traffic. We can find out how our web site traffic stacks up against all our competitors.